Cross-Posting with One Peter Five: 18th Sunday after Pentecost

Some of you may know that I also post a weekly offering at One Peter Five.  I comment on the readings for the upcoming Sunday Mass, and sometimes also an oration.  Here is something of what I wrote for this week:

As the northern hemisphere drifts from the fullness of summer into the crisp melancholy of autumn, Holy Church too moves into a season of spiritual harvest. In her ancient cycle of Sundays, formed in the lands where the light fades earlier each day, she begins to turn her gaze toward the final realities – the waning of the world’s daylight and the dawning of the eternal. Our sacred liturgical worship becomes autumnal, charged with the scent of judgment and the rustle of things passing away.

Increasingly, the texts of Holy Mass speak of the end, of the apokalypsis, of the return of the Just Judge. It is no accident that in the modern Novus Ordo, the Epistle once heard on this 18th Sunday after Pentecost – St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians – now resounds on the first Sunday of Advent, the most eschatological of seasons. Even though some bishops amazingly try to curtail ad orientem worship, in both the Novus Ordo and the Vetus Holy Church in her liturgical worship, the warp and weft of our Catholic identity, turns her eyes eastward, ad orientem, to the rising of the true Sun, to the Advent of the Lord who is coming and who has come.

As the fields yield their last fruits, the Church gathers her own: souls recalled to grace, hearts turned again toward the Face that judges and saves.

Our Gospel this Sunday, Matthew 9:1-8, opens in Capernaum, Jesus’ adopted town. However, the fuller story begins, curiously, across the water. We need a wider context for this Sunday’s Gospel.  The preceding chapter of Matthew, the eighth, places Our Lord in the land of the Gadarenes (or Gerasenes) in Gentile country east of the Sea of Galilee. There He performs an exorcism and the unnerving miracle of the swine which rush screeching to their death in the sea.

Matthew 8:28–34, Mark 5:1–20, and Luke 8:26–39 each tell the story, with their own brushstrokes. Mark and Luke show us a single demoniac, naked, howling, cutting himself, fierce enough to snap chains, possessed by the demons who name themselves “Legion.” Matthew, however, has two demoniacs, the man possessed by “Legion” and another possessed by an unnamed demon. Discrepancies between the Gospels troubled the Fathers less than it troubles the modern literalist. St. Ambrose observed, “I think we should not idly disregard but seek the reason why the Evangelists seems to disagree about the number. Although the number disagrees, the mystery agrees” (Expos. in Lucam 4.44). Scripture, for Ambrose and his like, is not to be deconstructed but to be read with the mind of the Church.   He saw in the unclothed demoniac a figure of fallen humanity: “Whoever has lost the covering of his nature and virtue is naked…. A man who has an evil spirit is a figure of the Gentile people, covered in vices, naked to error, vulnerable to sin.”

When Christ cast out the demonic legion and the man appeared clothed and in his right mind, it was not merely a cure of madness, but an image of grace restored, of the garment of baptism laid again upon the shoulders of a fallen son of Adam.

The exorcism of the Gentile and the forgiveness of the Jew in the next chapter, this Sunday’s Gospel, mirror one another, showing the universality of the Savior’s mercy. The miracle east of the lake prefigures what will occur west of it: from both sides of the human divide – the pagan and the chosen – the Lord draws His new people into one.

Then Jesus crossed again by boat and came “into His own city”, Capernaum.  There, a small house, possibly Peter’s own, suddenly became the locus of revelation.

The scene: a crowd so dense that the doorway is blocked, the air thick with dust and expectation.  As the parallel passages in Mark 2:1–12 and Luke 5:17–26 report, there would suddenly have been muffled sounds of effort above as the roof is pried apart, tiles clattering down, light piercing the gloom. Several men then lower a pallet with a paralyzed man upon it. One can almost hear the startled shouts and see the upraised faces as daylight pours through the opening.

The scribes are present too, the grammateis, teachers of the Law, experts in the sacred letters. They stand apart, wary eyes narrowing.

Jesus sees the faith of the roof-breakers and the still figure on the stretcher. Instead of simply healing and commanding the limbs to move, He says something more astounding: “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven” (v.2).

The paralysis was deeper than muscle and bone; it was the stasis of a soul turned in on itself. The Lord heals first what is within, and only then what is without.

He reads the thoughts of the scribes, their silent charge of blasphemy.   The Lord says:

“Why do you think evil in your hearts? ⁵ For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? ⁶ But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic—“Rise, take up your bed and go home.” ⁷ And he rose and went home. ⁸ When the crowds saw it, they were afraid, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

A command that fuses heaven and earth: “Rise, take up your bed, and go home.”

At once the man stands, strength flowing through him like grace into dry channels.

This miracle is a miniature apocalypse, a revelation of divine authority.

As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing [apokalypsis] of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In the healed man the eschaton is prefigured: sin remitted, the body restored, man returned home – to paradise, to God.

It is a foretaste of the final judgment and resurrection, but also of every absolution spoken in the confessional.

In the confessional, too, the paralyzed soul, carried by the faith of others perhaps, lowered before the Lord through the roof of humility, hears the same words and rises clothed anew in grace.

The confessional is the room of that Gospel house; the priest, alter Christus, speaks.

The sinner enters on a stretcher and departs upright, carrying the very pallet that once bore his weight.

[…]

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