7th Sunday of Ordinary - February 19, 2012

Traducir al Español

It was an early morning in late September. Ross Prather, an 18 year old in Indianapolis, miscalculated a curve on the road. His car went up a telephone pole cable and flipped over in mid-air crashing to the ground. He suffered crushed and fractured vertebrae and a spinal cord injury. The accident left him without feeling in the lower half of his body making him like the paralytic in today’s Gospel. Many were the challenges ahead of this young man.

As word came out, the vigils began; prayer lines were called and family, friends and community members gathered to pray and wait for the results of two lengthy surgeries that ensued. These people figuratively took Ross to Jesus. They took Jesus to him in the form of communion and their presence. In faith they believed the healing needed would be given.

In a letter to his friends, his Mom wrote: “My son is doing as well as can be expected. Actually he is doing much better than we would have anticipated, and the nurses have all talked about how different he is than most teenage boys who come – how polite and nice he is. They say most of them are so angry from the very beginning that they are very difficult to deal with, and he is just the opposite – so pleasant. This is the way I see all the prayers working every day. We are feeling the prayers daily and are amazed at how well he is taking this and how calm he is right now. That can only be the work of the Lord and the prayers that everyone is sending.”

I guess it was 3 or 6 years ago when we had this Gospel last that I first thought about the courage, perseverance and witness of the four who didn’t let the obstacle of the crowd or the stereotyping of the paralytic being a sinner keep them from their commitment to bring him to Jesus for care and love and mercy and healing.

We too can be carriers of those in need to our Lord through our prayers and loving deeds of kindness. When we truly love someone, we want more for them than we are able to give them. Prayer of intercession is one way of loving others. Pick someone each week, each day, and pray for them. It can be a friend, an enemy, a public person, a neighbor, someone suffering in some way. Through love, sometimes even tough love including finding healthy ways to love people with addictions, we carry them to Christ and Christ to them. No act of kindness is too big or too small for us to do. No one can do everything needed to alleviate suffering and injustice, but everyone can do something.

And sometimes we can be barriers like those who blocked the paralyzed man from getting near Jesus. We can block Jesus through our selfishness or indifference. Or maybe we are holding on to wounds and hurts that make us harshly judge ourselves or others. Jesus wants us to know his healing forgiveness as much as he did the paralytic in today’s Gospel.

Remember God’s love and mercy and how it makes all things new for us. I loved that scene in The Passion of Christ when Mary, John and the other women find their way through a back alley to get to Jesus just as he falls another time under the weight of his cross. He is bloodied, beaten and broken. He looks up to Mary and says, “See I make all things new.” Remember how we are called to share what we have received from our God. Miracles of physical healings and graces of new jobs and the like are all good, but they remain secondary to God’s most important gifts: forgiving our sins and giving us eternal life.