In this week's gospel, Christ goes to Capernaum and stays at a home there. He is soon besieged by an intense crowd, a crowd not yet Christian enough to allow a paralysed man, carried by four men in a litter, access to Christ. The four men lift the paralytic onto the roof, cut a hole in the roof and lower the man into the room where Christ is teaching. The effort impresses Christ and he forgives him his sins.
The scribes in attendance are horrified; only God can forgive sins and this sounds lie blasphemy. But not just the scribes were shocked. One can only wonder what the paralytic and his laboring, roof-breaking bra zeros thought. We did all this so he could be just forgiven?
Then Christ delivers the zinger: What is easier, to cure a paralysed man or forgive sins? Who is he talking to? The fretting scribes? The roof-breaking friends and their burden? The amorphous crowd?
Then Christ cures him, almost as an afterthought, as if He were distracted from our world for the moment. Forgiveness stands long before physical health in Christ's mental hierarchy. Indeed, forgiveness is the practical point and the physical almost an abstraction.
The cured man walks out through the crowd. They are in wonderment. Never have they ever seen anything like this, they say. One might wonder just what "this" they mean.
Years ago Aristotle said that he could cut anything in half if he had the right tools. The search for the basic stuff of creation was on. Air, wind, fire and water. Phlogiston. Ether. Atoms. Electrons. Photons. Mesons. Baryons. All have been reduced. Some day in the future we men will stand in a room with a huge, complex machine to divide the penultimate structure to the basic essence. And, when we do, we might get laughter.
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