Main news for 17 January 2022

To pay attention to form and fail to see the substance is a characteristic feature of the Pharisees. But this is not a corporate description of ancient Jewish religious figures; it is a type of human consciousness, a type of personality, as a psychologist would say.

In the healing about which Mark the Evangelist tells us today, this personality type appears in all its glory. The scribes who witnessed the healing do not care that Christ raised up the paralytic. What matters is only that, from their point of view, He is blaspheming. That God heard Jesus of Nazareth and gave the paralytic new life is not important. What matters is that the scribes think it is wrong to speak this way. Even the principle that winners are not put on trial is repugnant to them. They condemn Christ all the same.

Choosing between ideas and a living human being, the scribes choose ideas. Alas, they are not the only ones...

People often ask: may we pray for the unbaptized, for those who died by suicide? After all, even for the Church, the question of funeral rites for such people is one of the most difficult. But let us think about today's reading. We know that for a miracle to happen, faith is needed. But what should be done if there is no faith? If it was absent to such a degree that a person decided to take his own life? Is this truly inevitable destruction?

And this is what the Gospel tells us today: faith alone is not enough; love is also needed. Where one's own faith is absent, the love of one's neighbors saves. The faith of some and their love for others work a miracle even over those who have no faith, who show no signs of spiritual life, as if they were paralyzed or already dead. Love becomes a conductor of faith from one person to another, and that person receives a saving charge.

We must always remember this and pray without ceasing for those who, for one reason or another, of which there is a great multitude in the world, cannot pray for themselves.

Four people bring a paralytic to Jesus. This was not easy; they had to dig through the roof of the house and lower the sick man's bed on ropes to Jesus' feet. It is clear that this person is dear to them; such labors are not undertaken for those to whom we are indifferent. It is clear that they want Christ to heal him, and their love for this person and their inability to cure him by their own strength give birth in them to hope in Jesus and trust in Him. And Christ sees their faith.

Here also sit "some of the scribes," who do not trust Him, because everything He does or says calls into question their relationship with God, in which they consider themselves experts. We perhaps cannot even realize what a "bombshell" the words Jesus spoke were. The evangelist Mark tells us of the scribes' perplexity and irritation: they cannot accept the truth of these words, and then this is blasphemy, the arrogation to oneself of divine prerogatives. But the friends of the paralytic also must have been perplexed: after all, this was not why they brought him! What Jesus does after this answers both perplexities: faith is not proved vain, and distrust of the truth is put to shame.

In His ministry Jesus is always unexpected, shockingly unexpected. This unexpectedness overturns people's habitual ideas and makes them able to receive something new and thereby change. Have we lost this sense of His unexpectedness, have we grown used to Him, have we made Jesus understandable and one-dimensional for ourselves, bringing nothing new? If so, then we have closed ourselves off from a real meeting with Him.