The love and concern that we have for our loved ones quite naturally includes a desire to provide for them all the love and security that we can.  We don’t want them to suffer and experience pain and confusion, and sometimes we go to great lengths to try to stave off these experiences.  We feel this as teachers, parents, friends, families, communities, and nations.  Our attempts to do this can often come from our own experience of insecurity and fear and that serves to enhance our striving to ensure that our loved ones do not have to suffer the same.  In trying to do this, it can be easy to get carried away with this task, especially in the face of the widespread and constant reporting by the media of just how the waywardness of our world plays out on a daily basis across the globe – famine, war, pandemics, genocide, terrorism, and the destruction of life in all its forms.  One question that we sometimes fail to ask ourselves is the following:  “At what point do our efforts toward protection begin to build up barriers that can effectively exclude others and ironically even ourselves?  When can our search and need for security become so overwhelming that we actually create an environment where, paradoxically, our measures toward security actually contribute to insecurity and fear?”

In today’s first reading, 1 SM 8: 4-7, 10-22A, we hear how, as the wise Samuel, who has facilitated the Jewish people’s relationship with God declines with age, they now ask that a “king” be appointed to lead them.  The description of how God “responds” is remarkable.  It is almost as if God is offended at this request – hurt by their desire to be like other “nations” and have a king that will lead, protect and judge them.  In a way, they are rejecting the intimacy of the relationship of faith and trust that God offers them in their everyday lives, in place of a “structure of protection” that will seemingly ensure security and prosperity.  Samuel’s description of what this will entail is nothing short of self-willed “slavery.”

“The rights of the king who will rule you will be as follows: He will take your sons and assign them to his chariots and horses, and they will run before his chariot…
He will use your daughters as ointment makers, as cooks, and as bakers. He will take the best of your fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials…
 He will tithe your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves…”

 And in Mark’s Gospel, MK 2: 1-12, we hear how this will ultimately play out.  In the crowded house of a people hungry for the “Good News” of Jesus, even though they apparently don’t fully understand it, it takes someone literally coming through the roof, for the recognition of pain and suffering to take place!  Not able to come through the doors, the comrades of the paralytic lower the infirmed down from the roof into the midst of the crowd gathering around Jesus.  And Jesus’ response was, as his Father’s, one of compassion and great love.  In seeing the pain and suffering of this person (symbolizing the pain of everyone in the crowded house), Jesus says, “Child, your sins are forgiven!”  We could perhaps translate this as, “Child, receive my love and let my love touch you so that nothing else can you touch you as deeply!”

But how do the scribes hear this?  As blasphemy!  Only God can forgive sins!  Immediately blind to the presence of compassion and caring, they are perhaps experiencing the very unfortunate result of trying to live in a world where “kings” and laws and regulations frame the experience of human life and in the process create “blinders” to the very presence of Relationship.  It’s all right there – the relationship, the compassion, the God of Love that cannot do anything but offer It’s SELF!  But we don’t see, and many times we can’t see, because it seems to disrupt the very things that we rely upon for protection and security.  Have we become slaves to our own best intentions of security and protection?

So, Jesus decides that he will make it “simple” for everyone…”I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home.”   And this is exactly what the paralytic does to everyone’s amazement!  If it’s a matter of how it sounds in our ears, Jesus will say it another way so that we can have another chance to grasp this “Good News!”  Just…. “Go Home!”  Or, in the embracing welcome of the loving Father in the Prodigal Son parable, “Come Home!”

We can look at “Home” as relationship, stripped down to the bareness of our need for love and care that we all share!  Home is not necessarily a house, or a fence, or a gun, or anything that feeds into a potentially false sense of protection.  It can be welcome, embrace, compassion, forgiveness, trust, and faith – but these are not always easy to see!  And even once they are “seen” they are not easy to engage in.  But we have each other to help figure that out.

I believe these things are TRUE security.  And they are here!  Waiting for us to try…to listen and really hear Jesus.

…to Go Home!

Peace,

Thomas