The burden that others bear

Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene (translation from the original Greek text)

Homily on the Gospel according to Matthew 9:1-8

In the Gospel pericope of the sixth Sunday of Matthew, we see the power of friendship. The power of those who love us and which can lead us to truth and salvation. Some lifted him, it says, without questions and credentials. This is the first event of the pericope, before every word and every miracle, a man is carried by others, “lying on a bed” (Matt. 9:2). The participle has its own harshness, it says “cast down”, that is, thrown upon the bed, just as you leave something that you no longer expect to be of use for anything. How many years his immobility lasted, the narrative does not reveal. It leaves us, however, to understand clearly that no miracle did he himself ask for, not a word did he say. They carried him. The movement towards Christ was made with foreign feet.

Hope rarely dies abruptly, it wanes, as the light diminishes in a room whose windows no one opens anymore. The paralytic of the Gospel had reached, as it seems, that inward region where man ceases to expect, and this cessation is a sickness deeper than the paralysis of the limbs.…