Father Vassilios Argyriadis
Second Sunday of Great Lent today and in the gospel reading, we heard the excerpt of the healing of the paralytic of Capernaum.
Christ teaches in a house and the people who have gathered are too many. Four people bring to the Lord a paralytic, lying on a stretcher, but they cannot approach. They decide to climb to the roof of the building, make an opening there and lower the helpless man with ropes. The Lord admires their perseverance and effort - "seeing their faith", the text says - and says to the paralyzed "child, your sins are forgiven". Among the listeners of Christ there are also some scribes, who think "But who is this blasphemer, who says that he forgives sins? Only God can do such a thing...". Jesus, who understands what the scribes have in mind, asks them: “What is easier for me? Should I say 'your sins are forgiven' or should I say 'get up, take up your bed and move on?'" And without waiting for an answer, he says to the paralytic: "Get up, take up your bed and go to your house."
Two worlds loom imperceptibly in the background of today's evangelical episode. One world is the people who carry the paralytic. The other, the world of secretaries. The first is a world without any words, within the narration. Four people who put their heads down, pick up the bed of the helpless man and go to meet Jesus. And when they see a lot of people, they don't get discouraged — they come up with an idea to overcome the problem; an outlandish, somewhat absurd idea. But their devotion is such that they put it into practice. They go up to the roof and make a hole and lower their man down with ropes. And we can all imagine how much effort, how much struggle and sweat this case must have cost them. In their effort, Christ saw faith — "he saw their faith"...
The second world, the world of secretaries, is a world of theory. We all know what secretaries were. They were the "theorists" of the Law. They knew the complex legal provisions of the Jewish faith and the theological issues of their time. This is what they were fighting about and this is what they were discussing. In the gospel passage, they appear to live within their minds. All the others are in front of a paradoxical sight and an image of pain: four people lower a bed from the roof; a helpless man, fixed on a stretcher, in front of Jesus. And yet the scribes are dealing with theories in their minds—so who is entitled and who is not to speak and forgive sins? A theorizing is their own response to the teacher and the reality of the moment itself. And Christ, in their theoretical questions, also asks them a theoretical question. Except that the answer to the question is not given in words. It leaves the question almost up in the air. He gives the answer on the body of the paralytic, on the flesh of the moment itself.
All this is important for us today. Because for us too, perhaps more than ever, faith seems to be a matter of the mind, of theory, of reasoning. This is not a paradox. Thinkers who study the course of human civilization tell us that especially from the time when printing was invented and since then, human civilization has become more "theoretical", more intellectual. Theoretical systems, ideologies, mental elaborations of things acquired greater displacement in human societies. As Christians, we often separate daily life and its struggle (the anxieties, the sweat, the labor of living, the needs of the neighbors) from our Christian faith. We consider for faith various shapes and images in our minds, shapes shaped by "assumptions", "beliefs" and embellishments, and we struggle to fit our lives into these shapes. But today's passage perhaps reminds us that faith, as a dynamic encounter with Christ, is a case of action, a case that has its place where daily life flows. One meets Christ where one serves one's neighbor, in the flesh of everyday life and action itself.
Once a young father, pious and well-intentioned, approached a priest, holding his two-year-old child in his arms. "How nice that you told us in the sermon!", he said to him, "but how difficult the spiritual life is for us, with all that we go through every day with our children, our jobs, our routine and our anxieties...". The priest understood that that young father understood the "spiritual life" as a corner of his life, which should have as its image a prayer book, with a lit candle and incense, quietness and dim lighting, and the same kneeling praying... He tried to explain to him that such an image pertains to prayer perhaps (although it is also idealized), but not necessarily to our encounter with Christ. Because we do not meet Christ in preconceived images of our minds. "How you will meet with Christ, He will certainly decide," he told him, "but you are rather looking elsewhere if you are focused on such decorations. The arteries of the spiritual life bleed when you are awakened at three in the morning by your crying child, and you are seized with despair from fatigue; when you are "congealed" at work and yet make an effort not to be abrupt with your wife—when you struggle to give time for your wife, time that you don't have and that you have to invent from your backlog, to listen to her anxieties or even unnecessary conversations (for you unnecessary, for her beneficial); when you are loaded with bags and can't find the keys to you open the door, and instead of cursing the time and the moment, you say a 'Lord have mercy' or even keep your mouth shut... Spiritual life is to welcome all the toil and struggle of everyday life — toil and struggle to minister to your everyday life , your everyday life, your loved ones, even strangers. Everything else is probably theories. Theories like the ones that the scribes and the Pharisees fancied in their minds alone...", he said at the end and smiled.
After all, what we call 'spiritual life' probably does not exist. There is only life. In the hard daily life of this one life is hidden the encounter with Christ... Because as a wise man has said, "Christ called our effort and struggle for the brothers faith". And this effort is not a theory of the mind; it is an action, in the middle of the daily routine.
Image source: https://bit.ly/3CTYkjA
