This man had literary nothing. His social status –if he had one- was tarnished due to sickness, thus rendering him useless for society. He was lost in pain, pity and despair. In thirty-eight years, his physical impotence never attained any kind of social worth: the world saw him as worthless. Not that he was the only one in such a pickle- everybody in that pool must’ve felt that way. It is never easy for a person to continue living after his body has succumbed into sickness. One can adjust, but life will never be the same. Even then, this man succumbed to an even worse fate: self-depreciation. Instead of a railway for glory, his torment (or so he thought) became a trap to his psyche. He felt like the Israelites on the road to Canaan: so distressed were they upon learning the notions of freedom, their comfort was berothed in become in becoming slaves again. Likewise, he was so uncomfortable of observing the responsibilities of a healed man, that he used his affliction as some sort of distorted refuge.
The long-haired Nazarene looked at the cripple with eyes of tenderness- eyes of fire, but tenderness. Fire, but purified gold. He then commanded to the heavens with words, words that brimmed with authority above:
“GET UP! Pick up your mat and walk.” And the man got up, picked up his mat…and walked. He walked as if he was no longer indebted by the troubles of the earth. He glided as free as an eagle trying to fly for the first time without his mother’s permission. Those toes finally felt the thorny blades of grass, the muddy puddle on the corner and the sunrays burst over his corns and calluses. He walked to the beat of moving waters and swift head turns. He didn’t care; he walked.
In the end, he never saw the healer-man again. Only rumors banged through his ear. Some say he got married with a former hooker and escaped to Egypt and had many children. Others saw him up on a cross in Golgotha because he dared to face Rome straight through the eye. Still others say he went into hiding somewhere in the desert, and they crucified a decoy instead. But the man was free to be himself, without any impediment destroying his life. His life, and not what other attempted to see him, messed up in body and spirit. What thoughts passed through the paralytic’s mind, we will never know. What the world can definitely sure about reigns over his hopelessness and faithlessness. Need barely even describes the trials that he faced alone. All those years of worthlessness, squealing and squirming as the fateful worm of society…were to be broken by a touch, a meeting between heaven and earth. Two things the man learned that day: one, he became one of the very first witnesses of the Son of man. Two, he finally realized the true extent of his worth. Yes, he needed a push to believe in his own worth.