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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
The gospel today tells the amazing story of friends carry a paralyzed man on a mat, getting on the roof, all to see Jesus. What are we willing to do to help our friends see Jesus?
Bring your friends to Jesus
What an incredible group of friends. I don’t know if it was a long way they had to carry this paralyzed man or somewhat short distance, but I can only imagine the scene as they got up on top of this building.
Now, the tiles, just so that you kind of understand the scene here, would have been likely made of clay. So when they’re lowering Jesus down, they’re paralytic down, they’re actually, they dug through the tiles to open up the roof so they could do so. But I can only imagine how hard it was. I don’t know that they would have had access to a ladder, for example. How did they both get on the roof and lower this person down?
But they had a primary goal to get the paralyzed man to Jesus. I think that we live in an age where we need to be those friends. We need to recognize that we have one primary goal because of our baptism, to bring people to Jesus. If we believe that Jesus has so changed our lives that we are no longer in our sin and we have the pathway to eternal life open, then why wouldn’t we want to bring our friends to Jesus?
Of course, we know the challenge. It’s not always easy to do so. Like, we don’t know what everybody else reacted when they brought this paralyzed man to Jesus. Did they laugh at him? Did they mock them? Did anybody offer to help? We don’t know.
We know that when we sometimes think of our role in telling others about Jesus, it can be the case that people don’t understand, or that people think that it’s too hard, it’s too difficult, it’s not normal, it’s whatever. The other thing we need to know is how, in fact, do we get to Jesus?
They had to know that Jesus was here preaching in this house. How do we get there? Well, Isaiah tells us. You remember over the weekend I talked about how the Old Testament really can be best understood in light of the New Testament and vice versa, that there’s a reaction or a dynamic interchange between the two.
And what did Isaiah talk about in the first reading today? The way. What does Jesus call himself? The way. Not only does Jesus want to heal us, he gives us the help so we know how to find him. Who is it that God is asking you to accompany to Jesus today?
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