St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached by the Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr, Cape Town, on the Seventh Sunday of the Year , 22 February 2009

Jesus is many things to many people, but all four the gospels agree on two facts about Jesus: that he announced the beginning of God's reign, inaugurating a new way of being human in the world, and that he was a healer. Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God and Jesus healed people. As I reflected on these two dimensions of Jesus' ministry, I was struck by how much they are related to each other, and then I remembered a movie that I laughed and cried all the way through. Do you remember Patch Adams, the movie in which Robin Williams played the title role? It was released in 1998 and told the true story of a remarkable American doctor with a radically different perspective on health and healing, health care and medicine.

The movie was classified as a comedy, but it was much more that. It told the story of Hunter Adams – the Patch Adams of the movie. Adams was a troubled man who voluntarily committed himself into a mental institution. Once there, he found that helping his fellow inmates gave him a purpose in life. He left the asylum inspired, determined to become a doctor. However, what he found at medical school was a sickeningly callous philosophy that advocates an arms-length attitude towards patients that does not address their emotional needs and is unconcerned about the quality of their lives. Patch Adams resolves to find a better way of helping sick people, although the consequences of his defiance of the rules and the authorities were severe. We are given an important clue to who Patch Adams is and what he is about when he says, “You treat a disease, you win, you loose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you'll win, no matter what the outcome.”

This modern-day story provides a window into the ministry of Jesus. Jesus proclaimed a new way of being in the world, a way of life that had meaning, in which potential was fulfilled. He inaugurated a way of living that accepts reality for what it is but engages it in a way that is empowered by God's unconditional and enduring love. Jesus preached a way of life empowered by grace to triumph over its trials and tribulations. Becoming healthy and whole was an integral and essential dimension of the new life Jesus offered.

In the world of Jesus and the Gospel writers illness or injury represented a temporary and abnormal interruption of the natural and good order of society. Illness or injury disturbed the accepted way of the world. It was at least an embarrassment and an inconvenience and at worst a gross denial of worth and dignity. We are not much different from those ancients. We too are inconvenienced and embarrassed by our ailments, or terrified and humiliated by serious illness. For us, as for them, illness and injury are aberrations of the normal and deviations from what is expected and acceptable.

Health care the world of Jesus and of the gospel writers depended on economic status. If one were wealthy, one could hire a personal 'physician' who knew the latest and best 'science' about the human body, illness, and health. If one were less wealthy, but still fairly well-integrated into the economic and social order, one would probably go to one of the healing centres dedicated to various gods. The poor had no such options. The disabled or chronically ill would usually have had to subsist by begging, becoming sicker and sicker, until they died by the roadside. Families whose bread was earned by day labourers had hardly enough for their survival; there would be nothing left over for medical expenses. These poor people would have had to wait until an itinerant healer came through town. So it was that four men brought a paralytic to the house where Jesus was, broke open the roof and set him down before Jesus.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines paralysis as the inability to act or function, the complete loss of muscle function.

Around Jesus at the heart of this healing story are bystanders, those who bring the paralysed man to Jesus and the paralytic himself. When the friends of the paralysed man heard that Jesus the miracle worker was in town, they resolved to get their friend to him, so that Jesus might heal him. Nothing was going to stop them, no hurdle would prevent them.

Would that we could pick up our society and carry it to the source of healing and new life. It seems that we have lost the collective ability to stand up straight, the moral fibre that holds us up and together. Selfishness and greed have leeched away our integrity and virtue. Easy money, position gained without effort and power exercised without accountability have made us flaccid and flabby. Crime and corruption have shrivelled our collective muscles and we have been thrown down, unable to stand, or walk or act. A creeping paralysis holds us in its grip, you and me individually, and all of us together. Around us the dark night gathers, the shadows loom, and we do not have the strength to bring a flickering light into the gloom.

Some of us are standing. Some of us still have the power and the inner resources to act. Would that we could pick up our paralysed society, and with determination and resourcefulness carry it to the places of healing and wholeness. Words of truth and reconciliation, deeds of integrity and acts of honesty, can we call for them when they are absent, recognise and respond to them where they occur, and dare to perform ourselves when they are necessary?

Or are we just indifferent bystanders, drawn by an apathetic curiosity to stand among those who look on, ridiculing, dismissing, condemning . This paralytic is responsible for his own tragedy, we say. It is no affair of ours, we say. This society is sick to the core; it has nothing to do with us, we say.

Jesus recognises the faith of those who have laboured to carry the paralytic to him, dared to break open the roof and demanded his attention. Jesus understands that it is their faith in a power greater than themselves that has brought them to him. He recognises that it is hope in a better world of health and justice, freedom and peace that has impelled them. He knows that it is love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things that has brought them to him.

You are forgiven,' Jesus says to the paralysed man. 'You are forgiven.' Not, 'You are healed.' Not, 'You are cured.' But rather Jesus tells him that the past is wiped out, what has gone before is forgotten, remitted, redeemed. The slate is clean, the future is clear, the way to new and abundant life lies open before you, Jesus says. You are forgiven. Washed and cleansed. Justified and renewed.

Whenever we give way to paralysis – each of us in our spiritual life, in response to the moral imperatives that challenge us, in the relationships that command our commitments – whenever we allow our strength to be stripped and our courage to be sapped, may Christ speak the words of forgiveness that will renew and restore us, embolden and encourage us, that we may walk tall as brave witnesses of Christ's gospel.

Whenever our paralysis is beyond our coping – in our life as a community and a nation – may God raise up among us willing and dedicated women and men to carry us to the places of healing and restoration, where the lights of faith and hope pierce the darkness of our despair, and where the beacon of integrity lights the way to renewal.

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