“Then behold, they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, ‘Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.’” – Matthew 9:2
In the gospel reading for this past Sunday, quoted from above, there is an often easily overlooked detail.
On account of whose faith are the paralytic’s sins forgiven and his infirmity healed? Not simply his faith, but their faith. It is on account of the faith of the paralyzed man’s friends, along with his own, that Our Lord grants forgiveness of sins and healing of life.
“No man is an island,” John Donne tells us. “A solitary Christian is not a Christian,” says Tertullian. To be a human person is to be a thread in the vast fabric of human nature; and to be a Christian is to be a member of Christ’s body, of which He is the head.
When our Lord, the eternal Son of God, took on flesh, He united human nature to divine nature in His Person. He raised humanity up into union with divinity, and He showed us what it is to be a true human person: to be united with God and to live a life of self-sacrificial love towards God and all mankind.
In our Lord’s Incarnation, He took all of humanity into Himself, and He raised it up to the heights of heaven. He opened a pathway wherein all human persons could participate in deified human nature by uniting themselves to the Person of Jesus Christ through becoming a member of His Body in His Church and participating in His Divine-Human Life.
Following this path leads to the never-ending perfection of our own personhood. True personhood is not the path of finding our own individual identity in contrast to others but rather becoming authentic expressions of human nature in union with and in service to others. We become real persons through relationship, and the true person is the one who takes all humanity into his or her heart and offers it with heartfelt love and prayer to God. This is the self-emptying path of the Cross. This is the path of Christ. And this is the path of the Christian who seeks to follow Christ and become a true person.
One fruit of this is that our faith is not for us alone. It didn’t begin with us, and it doesn’t end with us. Just as Christ’s Life, Death, and Resurrection means the possibility of restoration for every human person, so our own faith is effective toward the healing of all mankind and ultimately the whole universe.
As we face struggle, strife, and brokenness in our world, the first and best thing we can do is to unite ourselves to Christ in faith (which means living in faithfulness). In doing so, we unite ourselves to His Divinity and His perfect humanity. We unite ourselves to God through submitting our will to His way of life, and we unite ourselves to others through self-emptying love. We cooperate with Christ, as He works the mystery of His healing for the world, the contours of which we do not always see obviously and clearly. We become like the friends of the paralytic, letting our faith work for the good of all persons.
To be sure, each person must also receive the benefit of the Lord’s call, just as the paralytic had to follow Christ’s command to rise and walk; but it was through the faithful acts of his friends that the paralyzed man was able to hear the call. It is through our faithful living that we bring all in our heart before God, doing for them what they cannot presently do for themselves — in prayer, in way of life, and in concrete acts of service. And, for us, as we come to follow Christ, it is through the faith of our friends — the Holy Angels, the Saints, and all lovers of Christ — that we ourselves received the call to rise and walk the path of the Lord’s ways from the True Friend, Christ Himself.
May the All-Good Lord strengthen our faith, and grant us the joy of participating in His healing work for the world.
• Maxim Gibson is the rector at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Juneau. “Living & Growing” is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders. It appears every Saturday on the Juneau Empire’s Faith page.
