You may have noticed that the most controversial ad on the Super Bowl this year wasn’t, as everyone was expecting, some incredibly gross ad from an internet company. The ad that shocked everybody was one involving a sort of miracle. The actor Christopher Reeve appeared in an ad where, through the miracles that they can work with computer graphics, they made it appear that he could stand up from the wheelchair in which he has been almost completely paralyzed for the past ten years. Some people thought it was creepy, partly, I think, because the ad was for a stockbroker, but also because they knew it wasn’t true, and couldn’t be true, and therefore we shouldn’t be seeing it. Someone we know can’t move who can suddenly walk like all the rest of us is still, apparently, one of the most controversial things we can see on television.
The miracles that Jesus worked when he healed people are all spectacular in some way, and people were surely all talking about it the next day. That must have frustrated him. Because Jesus always has some other point he’s really trying to make that, like today, he thinks is even more spectacular than the healing.
We all know about the stories where he healed the blind, and there, the blindness is there to highlight that there are people there in the story, the scribes, the Pharisees, the critics, the unbelievers, who think that they see just fine, but of course, they don’t. That, to Jesus, would be the real miracle, if they could see. The same with healing the deaf, the deaf are given their hearing, but Jesus will be criticized by those who think they are able to hear, but of course, they can’t hear, either the word of God or the needs of the deaf person. Blindness, deafness, and today, paralysis.
Paralysis is probably the one problem we doubt we have. You can read just about any writer who has tried to describe what 21st-century people like us suffer from, and it’ll be the opposite of paralysis. Chronic restlessness, maybe, an inability to find stillness and quiet, moving from one place to another, one task to another, one job to another, always wondering about the next step and the one after that, anything but paralysis.
If we think we are far from paralyzed, then maybe like all those other people who saw Jesus heal the paralytic, we miss the real nature of what paralysis is. Just as the blindness Jesus refers to can’t be demonstrated with an eye chart, paralysis has not much to do with being able to move from place to place. Paralysis is being mired in the same condition, stuck doing the same things over and over, dependent on circumstances, not moving, the condition of saying no. Not us, we probably think, we may be restless, fragmented, always headed somewhere, and yet despite all that the result we feel somehow is not liberation and freedom. We try to do everything on our own terms, turn in on ourselves and our needs as the things that occupy our thoughts, and the ironic result is that our ability to truly move in a new direction, to move at all, to give in to some real prompting of the Spirit, is gradually cut off. We find less and less that we can get anywhere new, in response to a need, or to a person, even in response to our own hopes for ourselves and God’s hope for us. Sorry, we say, I simply can’t. I can’t solve that. I can’t do that. Lives with a great deal of movement, and yet of the movement that God looks for, none at all.
The apostle Paul that we hear from in today’s second reading, apparently struck some people as being a little too flexible and adaptable. He says elsewhere in this second letter to the Corinthians that some people accused him of talking tough when he wrote, but waffling in person. Humans, he says, are like that, vacillating between yes and no. But then he writes one of the most unambiguous sentences he ever wrote, as remarkable as the gospel of John’s claim that God is love. He says that God is yes. He says that despite the way we all blow hot and cold, give up, settle for less and less, do the right thing one day and nothing for years, Jesus is the embodiment of the idea of yes. Of every promise of God, that promise we heard in Isaiah that even in exile God will do a new thing — can you not see it? — not a single one of these promises will ever end in “sorry,” or “I tried,” or “I can’t.” God delivers, God moves, God says yes.
Don’t be misled into some greeting-card version of reality by this. God does not answer every prayer with a yes, or do everything that we want. But what God does do is keep the promises that he has made. What promises? He has put his seal on us, Paul says, he will wipe out our offenses, he will make everything new. The physical healing that Jesus gives to people he himself seems to say in this reading, that’s kind of a showy thing, even, he says, relatively easy, what’s much more amazing is to forgive someone’s sins, remove the burden from someone’s back, give them the ability to move, to put the past aside and get on to a new place. There is an end to paralysis, realizing that whatever is weighing us down and locking us into one place, God can remove that burden from us and let us move.
We cannot solve our paralysis by our own actions, but like the four friends of the paralytic who lowered their pal in through the roof, we can ask and ask again. They wouldn’t take no for an answer, and when it comes to being able to move on to where God needs us to be, neither should we.