SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Year B : 19 February 2012
After his journeying through Galilee Jesus returns
home to Capernaum and Peter’s house, where he
had a ‘living room’. Crowds gather, blocking
all access.
An archaeologist described such houses: the
walls were built of basalt stones in their natural
state without true foundations to a height of
about 3 metres with a floor of crushed stone.
The roofs were of wooden beams, thatched with
beaten earth mixed with chaff and straw, reached
from the courtyard outside by a flight of stone
steps. Social life was divided strictly by gender
so that part of the house was that of the women
only. Maintaining privacy by gender separation
was deemed very important since extended families
lived off the common courtyard. The woman’s
domain was the common oven (outside), the kitchen
and the roof where they dried clothes and food
or stored dried fodder and wood. In villages,
where houses were close together, the women
socialised on the roofs and used rooftops to
travel between houses. In the dry season people
slept on the roof. As Denis McBride comments:
“The stretcher-bearers seem to be blessed with
lateral thinking”, when they could not get through
the crowd. This also heightens the drama. In
making an opening in the roof the four bearers
must have showered everyone in the room below
with dried mud and straw, but Mark keeps our
focus on Jesus and on forgiveness. Paralysis,
like many illnesses, was thought at the time
to be the result of sin: both sin and illness
are contrary to God’s creation.
Note that Jesus was preaching the word to
a large audience, but he can also read the heart
(like God). He responds to their determination,
faith and trust. The result is the first episode
of conflict in Mark’s gospel. Jesus rejects
the claim of the scribes that only God can forgive
sin. The community for which Mark wrote were
familiar with ‘the forgiving and retaining of
sin’. We are expected to imitate that and practise
it ourselves. The scribes are confronted with
what would seem a simple choice: if this man
can heal a paralytic, maybe his views on sin
and forgiveness are worth thinking about. This
would also mean examining again what they thought
God was like and what God’s attitude to sin
might be.
• Jesus gave the scribes
an opportunity to open their minds and reconsider
what God is like. Is He the ultimate authority,
loving but distant, weighing things up, a Being
of whose attitudes one could not be certain,
keen on the letter of the Law of Moses, One
who had to be mollified and kept right by sacrifice
offered? The scribes felt so strongly about
sin as an offense against the Almighty that
in a way they could not bring forgiveness down
to earth. By the healing Jesus underlines that
he has come from God. The unstated question
behind today’s gospel: “Who is this man?” is
put to me too.
• “To prove to you that the Son of Man has
authority on earth to forgive sins.” This
means a new creation: that God sends his Son,
welcomed by people of faith, who discover
through him how to escape from guilt and distress,
that there lies the way to a sense of purpose,
peace and salvation. “I bless you, Father
. . . for hiding these things from the learned
and the clever, and revealing them to little
ones (mere children).” [Matthew 11,25]
• God has been there a long time and has
surely seen it all. Why should my sin be of
any great concern to Him?
• “Seeing their faith”. The healing results
from the combined determination to get in
contact with Jesus of ‘some people who came’,
plus the four men who carried the stretcher,
so it is not just the faith of the ill person,
as is the case with most of miracles of Jesus.
Are there ways in which I could act with others
in faith and determination?
• “Forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those . . .”
