Solidarity

2nd Week of Advent - Monday (10 December 2018)

Isaiah 35:1-10. Psalm 85:9-14. Luke 5:17-26 (See also Mark 2:1-12).

“Seeing their faith Jesus said, ‘My friend, your sins are forgiven you.’”

In the above gospel story from Luke, we see that Jesus was teaching in a packed house. A larger group of men and women were standing in front of the entrance to the house. When some persons came with their paralyzed friend on a stretcher they couldn’t enter. Nobody gave way. Nobody was willing to give up their place. It wasn’t even fair to expect that they would. The newcomers climbed on the roof and managed to push and pull the roofing aside and make a hole big enough to lower the stretcher through and down into the house just in front of Jesus.

If their act is marvellous and beautiful, more beautiful is Jesus' response, summarised in the following verse: “Seeing their faith he said: ‘My friend, your sins are forgiven you.’” There’s that little word “their” in this gospel story. Jesus forgave and healed the crippled man because he saw their faith. He saw the faith of the paralyzed man together with the faith of his friends who brought him and who were so insistent on having something done for their disabled friend that they didn’t hesitate to break through the roof above Jesus’ head.

Jesus must have been amazed at what he saw. It must have been another sign of hope to him. He saw signs of a greater justice, a growing human solidarity everywhere. He often healed persons who were brought by others. Even more often, he healed persons who were introduced to him by others. In today’s text he explicitly forgives and heals because of the faith of those who brought him the paralyzed man. To Jesus it was a sign that conversion is possible, that differences can be overcome, that forgiveness can be granted. It was their togetherness, their solidarity, that prompted Jesus to forgive and heal.

The faith of the community is central to our individual lives. Many of us are kept in track because of the faith of the church and the believing community. Yet at the same time we need to talk of structural sin, not just individual sin. We need conversion, even structural conversion. As a church we need to repent of our structural sins, and be converted as a church. St John Paul II asked pardon for the many sins and atrocities committed by the Catholic Church. During his long reign as Pope, he apologized to Jews, Galileo, women, people convicted by the Inquisition, Muslims killed by the Crusaders and almost everyone who had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church over the years.

As a family we need conversion; as a religious community or congregation we need conversion; as a nation we need to be converted from our biases and prejudices; as a cultural group or a linguistic or a tribal group we need to be converted from our group egoisms and elitist mentalities. Our structural conversion may be equally or even more important than our individual conversion. It is possible that as individuals we are good, but we may be participating in something that on the whole and as a system is evil. Perhaps as Christians we've too long neglected to establish a link between individual and structural sin. We have been busy the whole time condemning individual sin. But it's the institutionalized sin that's chiefly responsible for the world's injustice.

And the good news is that even group transformations begin with individuals. All conversions begin with me. When I am able to access the deepest and the most intimate place within me, then I am touching the place that is the most universal and global in scope. Here I am able confront and carefront not just my individual soul, but the whole of reality itself. Let me be the change that I want to see in the world!