[1] Preaching Metaphors
Good evening St Marks. This is the third in a series on Mark’s gospel, we reach the healing of the paralytic. As ever I preach to myself and about myself and this is a sermon about spiritual paralysis, and is an especially draft-y sermon, i’m fumbling for a jigsaw piece to make it click into place. A sermon about helplessness through helplessness.
Steve’s preached the last couple of weeks, setting us in a pacey narrative illustrating the dynamic of following Jesus. Here, the opening credits having barely faded, Jesus faces opposition - and the next few week will take us through a series of encounters with the establishment resisting Jesus' ministry.
Steve invited us to put ourselves into the boots of the fishermen in the story. Here. I can relate to the paralytic. I can relate to the Pharisees. I can see my need for Jesus’s healing forgiveness and the need for stretcher bearers to carry such invalids to a hole in the roof.
Last time I was preaching was Joshua back in February, and it was also about impediments to movement - the river Thames as a body of water keeping us from the promised land of life after Covid. This time again, topological peculiarity, broaching boundaries, getting God’s people from A to B requires architectural transgression. I preach to myself, the call to courage, to motive to move, over against the stuckness, unfreedom, and paralysis.
I preach to myself as paralytic. The compound tragedies of the last few years curdled in the ventless slow cooker of lockdown’s tyranny of breathless days and sorrow without purpose. I have felt paralysed, a dilute inaccessible immobilised version of myself. What would it look like to be healed? What would it look like to experience freedom and forgiveness as antidote to paralysis?
I read this episode as a small layered theatre - it is a story about healing, set within a story about carrying, set within a portrait of opposition. At each of those levels we could apply a question:
What paralysed you?
Who carries who to Jesus?
Where do I oppose healing/forgiveness?
Now, Jesus actually healed a medically paralysed man here, but I am most interested to take this idea for a walk. As we do with episodes in the gospels featuring blindness and leprosy and huge hauls of fish.. we speak almost automatically of Jesus metaphorically opening the eyes of our heart, reaching out to touch the proverbially unclean and in affecting those conditions in which we likewise would be fishers of men - almost to the exclusion of literal fish.
Sightwise as analogy. Christianity is a true truth aimed at the restoration of the real real over against untruth and unreality - access is via restored sight. This is often framed in terms - thinking of John Carpenter’s film They Live - wherein alien creatures move amongst us as destructive agents, but only with a special pair of glasses is the protagonist Nada able to see the unseen - to see what is really there. So road to Emmaus their eyes were opened, so Paul’s conversion is a blindness to sight etc.
So mobility, it’s not merely unfortunate that the paralytic is paralysed, but emblematic. I am interested in the nature of true movement as a spiritual condition.
Conscious that paralysis is also a nervous conditions affecting a loss of sensitivity, as well as moving. Partly that’s not always the case, partly it’s not the salient impediment in view in the suffer’s reaching Jesus, and partly those themes are scratched so much more often in the blindness/deadness qua sensitivity.
[2] This Metaphor of Paralysis
What is going on in paralysis? In the simplest sense, in breaking your back or neck you sever the connection from head to body via the spine. It’s a communication or coordination issue - like the broadband being cut off. So in a stroke, the brain is damaged in its ability to speak to the body. So too in polio, the virus attacks the motor nerves as they come out from the spine rendering the sufferer immobilised. So too motor neurone disease - the degeneration of those cells which control movement. Who can say
The presenting issue is a lack of movement, the diagnosis is that internally there has been a breakdown in the communication and coordination organ system. Things not working as they should is bad, but why? People should move.
There is a practical imperative to it - for the avoidance of hazards, for the moving of food from plate to mouth.
There is an aesthetic imperative the goodness of movement, celebrated in dwelling balletically, but also in all ways the loves of a sensate and personal universe magnetise and propel us through space from and towards, attractionally and vitally.
There is a moral imperative to it, the bible makes much in its critique of the sluggard - as a door on it’s hinges, as one quivering indoors at an imaginary lion in the street, as the buried talent, as Gideon hiding in the winepress etc. Contrasted with leaping for joy with a God who makes my feet like the deer etc etc.
But more than that, there is a reality function and truth imperative. With velocity equal to distance divided by time - access to God’s reality of a good physical and temporal reality is addled by immobility.
This seems obscure, but our technological efforts to extend life and diminish distance through hypersonic travel have had a deleterious effect on the environment and on our grasp of reality.
Whilst likewise, the working-from-home Zoom-based ontology that has us immobilised but spread over distances have similarly wrecked out health and relationships.
Godspeed, has a peculiarly pedestrian velocity, but more on that story later.
Movement is crucial for our access to the real. It is through movement that we access temporality and consequence. We do not live in an occasionalist universe, of random snapshots and disconnected instances beamed in through a zero-gravity tilt-a-whirl. Life is not uncaused and causeless, history is going somewhere, over distance, through time. But it can happen in all sorts of ways that we become paralysed. We drop out of activity into a stiffening dysfunction, but perhaps more profoundly we drop out of time.
Last year I read Time Lived Without its Flow - I commend this book unreservedly, a poetic account of loss by Denise Riley. I resonated with its account of the paralysis of grief - I’ll see if I can quote from it at greater length later - so Riley lost a son and reflects in the months and years after on the experience of this. “a child’s time is “quietly uncoiling inside your own”, so when the child’s life stops, “the purely cognitive violence of it” freezes the parent’s time, too. She cannot “move on” because “there is no medium through which to move any more”.
She cannot “move on” because “there is no medium through which to move any more”.
This happens personally, and has also happened collectively through Covid. Not simply that time slowed or stopped, but that we drift temporally, unanchored individually, unsynchronised collectively.
I’m interested in paralysis as experienced in this way of atemporality. I observe my own paralyses and consider some of that is just a blip, some of that and Enneagram 5 would do, retreat to a cave to escape overwhelm, step out of the flow of time because of all things time is short and Type 5s fear scarcity. Some of this experience of paralysis may be more universal, and in which case, perhaps we could explore healing together.
[3] What Paralysed You?
[3.1] Personal Paralysis
As I say, I found a searing resonance in Time Lived without Its Flow. Resonant precisely in the way that it decentres melancholy or pathology of trauma per se and gave attention to the experience of time, inside of which was a set of complex emotions, I’ll quote Riley at length, and then touch of sorrow, fear and fatigue as agents of the paralyses I have known.
I’ll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life. The experience that not only preoccupied but occupied me was of living in suddenly arrested time. That acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow…
While hoping not to lapse into melodrama or self-regarding memoir, I’ll try to convey that extraordinary feeling of a-temporality. But how could such a striking condition ever be voiced? It runs wildly counter to everything that I’d thought we could safely assume about lived time. So this ‘arrested time’ is also a questions about what is describable; about the linguistic limits of what can be conveyed. I’m not keen on conceding to any such limits. Yet it seems that the possibilities for describing and the kinds of temporality that you inhabit, may be intimately allied. For there do turn out to be ‘kinds’ in the plural.
The prospect of recounting it in a written form stayed, for me,, bother repugnant and implausible for well over two and a half years after the death. You can’t, it seems take the slightest interested in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity. The act of describing would involve some notion of the passage of time. Narrating would imply ata least a hint of ‘and then’ and ‘after that’. Any written or spoken sentence would naturally lean forwards towards its development and conclusion, unlike my own paralysed time.
so intricate and singular a living thing can’t just vanish from the surface of life: that would run counter to all your accumulated experience. The day after his death, studiously wiping away what you realise are the last tangible traces: tiniest bits of his hair from the edge of the washbasin. This solid persistence of things. So then, the puzzle of what ‘animation’ is; of exactly what it is that’s been crushed.
...a sudden death, for the one left behind, does such violence to the experienced ‘flow’ of time that it stops, and then slowly wells up into a large pool. Instead of the old line of forward time, now something like a globe holds you. You live inside a great circle with no rim. In the past, the future lay in front of mean as if I could lean into it gently like a finger of land, a promontory feelings its way into the sea. But now I’ve no sense of any onward temporal opening, but stay lodged in the present, wandering over some vast saucer-like incline of land, some dreary wide plain like the blanks of the river lethe, I suppose.
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before
But sequence ravelled out of sound
like balls upon a floor~ sequence ravelled out of sound - indeed, one note no longer implies another’s coming. You watch water cascading from the tap to splash into the basin. Yet noting small events and their effects doesn’t revive your former impression of moving inside time. The tap turns, water pours. You can observe sequence. Nothing, though, follows from this observation to propel you, too, onward into the old world of consequences. Not that your sense of time is ‘distorted’. what’s changed is more radical than that. Simply, you are no longer in time. Only from your freshly removed perspective can you fully understand how our habitual intuition of time are not without their limits, and can falter. To tell someone in grief, ‘You should move on,’ is doubly thoughtless, because there’s no medium left through which to move anywhere. We were drifting though our former time like underwater creatures furnished with gills that they didn’t notice they had, until they were fished up out of their element and their breathing apparatus failed.
Sorrow
The bible has said, hope deferred makes the heart sick. Have you known this? When waiting on the Lord becomes just waiting for the heartaches to come. When bleak calls to bleak. When you get what you want but not what you need. Have you known such paralytics? It is not the mere psychochemical addlement of negative emotions, but the accurate apprehension of the end of a thing - the cartoon koala bear quivering on a tree stump. I return periodically to Gideon Koppel’s film Sleep Furiously which is an elegiac portrait of a Welsh village fading. "It is only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak. The courage, but not the words." I often fumble for words, and I am often without courage. Therein is a paralysis I would be healed of.
Sorrow is so widely impermissible in church contexts. Struggle needs to be spoken in the pluperfect tense, my messy life needs to be aestheticised for tumblr - we have all had our moments, but now, we. are. ok. Real paralysing sorrow is known to be contagious and so euphemised. It is still paralysis if bedaubed with the faux religious drapery of charismatic enthusiasm - sorrow gagged by sorrow is still sorrow. I consider people I have known, externally effusive, but internally static and emotionally opaque, leading their meat robot through the motions of a puppeteer faith - paralysed from making actual choices and taking actual risk because, as Riley, they have fallen outside of time.
Fear
I have known a paralysis born of fear. Faced with danger one’s animal instinct is to fight flight or freeze - petrified as rabbit in headlights. And. Petrified long after the car has driven off, the gecko drops from the wall, the body keeps the score, holds a reverberating past trauma long after the danger has passed. Have you known this paralysis? Latent, resurgent. Who broke your heart that it is now so defended? How came I by this armour now rusting stolid and far too heavy. See David demurs Saul’s armour when facing Goliath - as lacking agility to fight the fight, to do the doing of doing undefended.
Fatigue
I think of the Londoners I have known - the long term long haul ministers of any form of creditialled of prosaic lay ministry, and I think of compassion fatigue. Different slightly from burnout, slower perhaps, and less the calamitous rupture, but a rising self-pity, gradually more desensitised, a hardened heart calloused by friends drifting away in an unrelenting bleed. Baz Luhrmann offers in his 1999 Sunscreen that you should live in New York City once but leave before it makes hard. And they have, and it has. And I am no longer the supple social butterfly, but a conservative nimby cliqued with a nostalgic remnant ruing the change, holding the new in suspicion. Because it hurts, the churn of London hurts, and so I retreat from the lively snick-a-snack into a protectionist paralysis.
Dickens observed the same trajectory towards paralysis as the London condition in his 1836 Sketches by Boz
It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London. He awakens no sympathy in the breast of any single person; his existence is a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive. There is a numerous class of people in this great metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for. Urged by imperative necessity in the first instance, they have resorted to London in search of employment, and the means of subsistence. It is hard, we know, to break the ties which bind us to our homes and friends, and harder still to efface the thousand recollections of happy days and old times, which have been slumbering in our bosoms for years, and only rush upon the mind, to bring before it associations connected with the friends we have left, the scenes we have beheld too probably for the last time, and the hopes we once cherished, but may entertain no more. These men, however, happily for themselves, have long forgotten such thoughts. Old country friends have died or emigrated; former correspondents have become lost, like themselves, in the crowd and turmoil of some busy city; and they have gradually settled down into mere passive creatures of habit and endurance.
So, sorrow, fear and fatigue. Paralyses I have known. Paralyses which stall time and render me impotent for the task of well-loving. Paralyses which need healing, and which need for God’s superabundant, prevenient grace. Sin is a complex thing, and doubtless I am capable of conspiring with my own victimhood in these tragedies visid on my, but prevailingly, these are domains for healing.
I consider there are also paralyses in my life which are not born of ignorance or weakness, but for which my own deliberate fault is culpable. I consider those paralyses in my life of shame, guilt, addiction and immaturity.
In reading around for this I stumbled upon one of CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters which adroitly diagnoses “spiritual paralysis” in a format which, by lampooning active evil, makes it the more salient. An older demon speaks to a younger demon about how to tempt exactly such as me.
I offer this (chapter 12) to you wholesale, as it captured for me exactly the way that Hell is a form of paralysis - a banal escape from a more authentic life.
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
Obviously you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position. For you and I, who see that position as it really is, must never forget how totally different it ought to appear to him. We know that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around the Enemy (the Devil’s name for God); but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have effected this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.
For this reason I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realise the break it has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately.
This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake him up and spoil the whole game. On the other hand, if you suppress it entirely — which, by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to do — we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient's reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold. They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book. In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties. He will think about them as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as possible when they are over. A few weeks ago you had to tempt him to unreality and inattention in his prayers: but now you will find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy. His aim will be to let sleeping worms lie.
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in 26 conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.
All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
What paralysed you. What paralysed me? Guilt, Addiction and Immaturity. There is a complex web of causality, intention and sin, but I have been an agent in these.
Guilt and Shame.
I’m not going to dissect a taxonomy of the difference between guilt and shame. I see this functional bundle in myself, I see this in others. When I briefly helped with CAP, there was a trope, that debt provokes a shut-in architecture , defensive against the bailiffs, and behind which door there is a stack of red-printed unopened letters. Life is complex and debt happens for any number of reasons beyond one’s control. But, nevertheless, that architectural vignette it is such a vivid picture of me and Sarah, when I’ve sinned against her, I know my emotional debt, I lock myself in, the proverbial letters pile up. I drown a graceless death of interest accrued in the midst of her available grace. When God comes into the garden after the fall, he asks Adam, where are you? He was locked in. Why did I not call, why did i not persevere with the Zoom calls, the hard conversations, the 1-to-1s. A paralysing shame which gives a fragility of venture. I am so ashamed of failures to complete, failures to achieve, failures to deliver commensurate ROI for those who have invested in me. And so I live paralysed, in suspended animation. This needs forgiveness, this paralysis needs healing.
Addiction.
Paul talks in Rm7 that “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Those pesky parts, wandering eyes prone to wander, they are a law unto themselves. Twitchy, like the devil makes work for idle hands, a restless Tourette's of juggernaut carnality, an unstoppable cacophony of wriggly mischief, a sickly tic tangled in habituated entitled slothful bravado, all waging smutty war against my better self, holding me to ransom. Wretched man that I am, damned in my body, but damned if I disembody. Danger is everywhere. Would that I were addicted to porn as a paralysis, but no. Rather the riskless numbing ennui of anything but, - the idle lofi dopamine of twitter spats captured perfectly in CS Lewis’ “watching a dead fire in a cold room.” Paralysis as immobility - what is it that keeps Paul from doing the good that he wants to do? I want to do the good that I want to do. Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Immaturity.
There is everywhere a normalisation of extended adolescence, and the paralysis of that is hard to mitigate - it is different from helicopter parented snowflakes (who may or may not exist as a statistical group), but rather the widespread and christianised ambiguation of rites of passage into the doing of adulthood. Paralysis surfaces as perfectionism, a hesitance and uncommitment, a one foot in sea and one on shore dilettantism. There are all about me stunted ones, trapped by the housing crisis, living provisionally, subsisting in the gig economy, but all as excuses for a fundamental risk-aversity. There is a paralysis that never made escape velocity into adulthood - and it goes unchallenged, unassisted and so unforgiven.
[3.2] Community of Paralysis
To press this paralysis analogy further, I consider that we are a body. We are a body, a vine etc. Other sermons I’ve attempted here, During lockdown 1 on John15 extrapolating love-one-anothering in the organic unity of being one vine. And some time previous to that on Ephesians as a whole I have been trying to externalise some thinking on being-a-church with some form of collective responsibility for the strengthening and shielding of the whole. If an individual can be spiritually paralysed, by extension, we could speak of a body’s dysfunction through the lens of paralysis.
Collective inaction as a church.
We as a body are paralysed - dysfunctional systems create a failure of communication that has the effect of disabling the whole. Paralysis is a nervous condition, the disjunction of head from body, the disconnect of feeling from doing, a failure of internal communication leading to the immobility of the whole. How did something like Zaccarias or Fletcher or Smythe happen? Bad actors, yes. But glaringly and perhaps more troublingly, sclerotic governance. A stale top-heavy cargo-cult conservative ecclesiology that is constitutionally formed of talking heads appended to a wasting body - the nervous pathways that would transmit such have been wasted away by a tawdry augmented theology and degenerative bitterness cauterised by apathy and unprocessed unhealed grief. When Jesus speaks of the religious leaders, he compares them to white washed tombs - a paralytic immobile and static emblem - inertia so monumental he choses an inert monument to symbolise it. This too needs healing in the church at large. Could you lower a church body through a hole in the roof? What would need to be forgiven?
Heritable paralysis in a family.
I consider ways particularly in families and the ways a generation passes on their peculiar misery to its offspring. And ways that manifests particularly in not-doing-the-good-you-want-to-do qua paralysis. And also in the existing atemporally being an exacerbating factor in not grasping the consequentiality of your paralysis.
This is a bit of a half-finished metaphor - there is something in paralysis which is not just awkward low EQ. But something jammed in time, like a stuck brake impeding the continuum and functional exchange of meanings between members.
And I mean this as not special criticism of my own family, rather that, if we had a notion of healing corporate paralyses, we might press into this.
So, paralyses in a range of inherited cannots. Fragile children of divorce who cannot commit. Aloof children of privilege who cannot care less. Disembodied children of evangelicalism who cannot express desire. You lay a seed in someone, and the sins of the forefathers visited onto the third and fourth generation - and this happens in our community house to, spill over of influence casting a shadow of inaction. Spiritual paralysis passes on its passivity unless it is healed. The answer is not reactive hyperactivity, it is healing.
[3.3] Culture of Paralysis
To zoom out further, from the relational community that might manifest paralysis as a body, to a wider zeitgeist and the notion of paralysis within that.
I consider we live paralysed. To the extent that we live these strange augmented lives through tiny black boxes, we live paralysed. This is not so much a commentary on the sedentary nature of our work. But of the atemporality and unreality of the image and simulation - consumption is consuming. You are the product. Somewhat as Heidegger says the ever increasing speed of technology does not bring real nearness. So the ever more high resolution zoetrope we’re gazing into has the effect of destroying the distance and the time that would constitute movement.
Narcissus wasted away by the pool. Instagram as an ossuary of the ossified as static as the eggs they froze to purchase perpetual maidenhood in the privileged echelons of the new managerial bourgeois. So too Vauxhall Nine Elms is paralytic, whose gigantic stasis is built with a Piranesian eye to its future existence as ruins - it is protospective nostalgia, it is not possessed of any feeling of futurity that you might write the story of our journey towards - in Denise Riley’s sense of this - there is no movement through time by which we arrive at that future, there is nothing generative or perpetual that accrues life it is a frozen slowly tarnishing lacquer of urbanism. Our culture’s paralysis is seen in this atemporal stasis - the total disenchantment of a materialist universe as Icy as White Witch’s menagerie in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
[4] Against Paralysis
So, we have asked what paralysed you? We’ve considered various ways Phil experiences himself as paralysed by sorrow, fear and fatigue, by guilt, addiction and immaturity. And within scales of collective paralysis.
What then?
What is the opposite of paralysis?
Getting up, going home, and in Luke’s extended account “glorifying God”. So Worship? Animation? Like s spring coiled - so the equal and opposite reaction is not-not moving.
Faith leads to movement. I consider all the imperatives to go in the Bible ~ Go forth and multiply, Go make disciples of all men baptising them. And running as a response: When the two disciples on the road to emmaus see Jesus break bread - what do they do? When the prodigal son’s father spies him from the rooftop what does he do? When the Mary Magdelen discovers the empty what does she do? When she tells Peter, what does he do? Eric Liddle feels God pleasure when he.. A church planting movement by a move of the spirit to move you by the spirit moves with a centrifugal force from jerusalem, judea, the ends of the earth
And so we should move. But I don’t think that is the point, or even a point.
There is a danger of falling into a peculiar preening ~ a look at how not-paralysed I am, which then indirectly spreads a perverse theology of action-for-its-own-sake and action-in-my-own-strength, competitive hyperactivity, the metricisation of practical achievement. Jesus-is-coming-look-busy.
Once you can move, it is a self-evident good. A more appropriate use of the gift that recognises it as an underserved gift is to seek to give it away, to reach those without it, who may not even know they lack it.
How? I think about this at 41, what regulating principle would allow us to intervene in love in the lives of those who had normatised a pathological paralysis, without inculcating a culture of judgement?
Even in this sermon, how does one diagnose the ill of paralysis, individually and in culture, without by default, creating over-realised expectations of not-yet realities. Without creating shame around those ways we still live unhealed this side of heaven?
I consider two activities that can be undertaken, in response to the identification of spiritual paralysis and the prospect of its possible healing.
[4.1] Collective action - Carriers
The paralytic was carried by four men - evidently, on this point ones unparalysed and ones acquainted with Jesus power to heal. Prayer, here, is shown to be a cooperative endeavour. I wonder about this group of four. There is something precisely in their multi-personal collective that offers a plausibility structure. What was their group dynamic? Who instigated, who led, who was the first follower? How did they discuss it? Who convinced whom that this bonkers idea was legit? 1Tm2v8 wants men everywhere to raise up holy hands, and this is prayer, but it is practical and demands coordination if we’re going to crowd surf the afflicted to Jesus..
Who is carrying you? Who are your people? Who takes a corner of your stretcher? Would you let them?
Who are you carrying? Are you a stretcher bearer? Do you ever see the mountain rescue teams rehearsing with a mannequin? Do you? Who are your fellow stretcher bearers? How is it balanced? How is the load spread?
Reflecting back to the fatigued paralytics of London’s rat race. What would it be for St Marks to operate a mercy mission for those. People come to London for the same two archetypal reasons we have ever sought Jerusalem or Babel - as a refuge from terror or as a springboard to wealth - in both cases London is a means and not an ends. Then there are a handful who come by accident of birth and fewer still who come on a mission to minister to London’s broken humans.Friends of ours have ambitions to form a community based on a picture of groynes - those barrier walls that go out from the coastline to prevent erosion, that create the secure basis of settled stability. It will take superhuman strength to endure without bitterness.
[4.2] Collective action - Creative destruction
The second application is Creative destruction. So, as well as gathering to move the paralytic, you also need to address barriers. You might need to smash the reliquary that entombs your faith. You might need to change something.
Barriers, hurdles, obfustications, churchianity, christianese, the inertia of the liturgical status quo, the strongholds of well-intended inflexible Christian culture which present such impermeable container to the gospel within. Permeate it. Perforate it, go in to our Oval Office, right now, and turn what ever ain't tied down, upside down :P The person of Jesus is a summons to architectural transgression, flying in the face of Secure by Design, we leave the side door open, we let the rain come in, we set about re-roofing and spacemaxising like the palsy depends on it, switch enclosure for disclosure, - disclosure that the world's illness is to be actively resisted, and disclosure that Jesus heals. Take a corner of my friend’s mat for me this morning.
[5] [Forgiveness > Healing] = Opposition
Finally, it’s interesting to set this up for the following weeks of this series. Jesus taunts the Pharisees - Which is easier healing or forgiveness? The Pharisee (in me) ponders Jesus’ rhetorical question literally. Which is easier for those angels balancing on the heads of pins juggling the rocks God made too heavy for him to lift? Jesus' question mocks my theorising, in the hope of doubly freeing me, both from my original sins and from my subsequent self-justifying. Which is easier, healing or forgiveness? Silly. Jesus has no difficulty marking my papers, I have sinned and Rm3v23 fallen short of the pass mark of 1, my failure is total and terminal, there are no shades of ease in the remedy. Yet. Offensively, Jesus does remedy it. Making a mockery on my accountancy. Jesus gives us all the same blank cheque of grace to cover it all, regardless of how long I think I've worked Mt20v12 or how far they think I've fallen Lk15v30.
It is interesting to consider in what ways Healing and Forgiveness are organically connected. Both in the sense of the role of forgiveness and forgiveness in your holistic health. But also in the sense Jesus’ healing miracles as sacraments of forgiveness.
More interesting still is Jesus ministry to the Pharisees and through the Pharisees. I say interesting. This sort of baiting in a culture war was fraught for Jesus ~ he could have done this in a less public, less aggressive way. There is a sense in which Jesus’ ministry of healing is part of his provocation.
"Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there, [having] come from every village.." The boa constrictor tightens its grip. Jesus is the pawn sacrifice, he sacrifices himself, it is his initiative, his will, his glory Jn10v18 "No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord." And this message of the cross is foolishness 1Co1v18?
And we should do likewise? A similar holy madness, battling an unseen enemy, trusting in unseen help, losing our life to gain it Mt10v39, laying down our life for another Jn15v13, offering our bodies as living sacrifices Rm12v1.
I’ll leave that to the subsequent weeks to answer how we should live to provoke Pharisees like Jesus.
To end, consider. What has Paralysed you?
🎙️ Mark 2v1-12 - Spiritual Paralyses