Health has both personal and social dimensions, each related to the holistic account of health and illness as the fulfillment or frustration of human aspirations and intentions. These dimensions come together in the concept of health as liberation—a setting free which each individual must seek for him or herself but which also requires a transformation of social values and a redistribution of political power.

You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat.  And no let-up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

The People Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
Breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
Hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
Shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

Had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
With the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat
Looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
In the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms with ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

[Jesus’] commonest, indeed his almost invariable procedure, was to tell those who were to be cured that their sins were forgiven them; by thus relieving them of their moral infirmities they were automatically relieved of their physical ones. This was especially infuriating to the legalistic Scribes;

The scribes think that [these words] are blasphemous, but for Jesus—as for the author of the Qumran fragment—the phrase ‘to for give sins’was synonymous wi th ‘to heal.’ He clearly used it in that sense.

The words of the prayer uttered by Nabunai king of the l[and of Ba]bylon, [the great] king, [when he was afflicted] with an evil ulcer in Teiman by decree of the [Most High God].

I was afflicted [with an evil ulcer] for seven years … and an exorcist pardoned my sins. He was a Jew from [among the children of the exile of Judah, and he said], ‘Recount this in writing to [glorify and exalt] the name of the [Most High God’. And I wrote this]:

‘I was afflicted with an [evil] ulcer in Teiman [by decree of the Most High God]. For seven years [I] prayed to the gods of silver and gold, [bronze and iron], wood and stone and clay, because [I believed] that they were gods … ’

In the Gospel accounts, it is the adversaries of Jesus who accuse him of forgiving sins. Jesus only reminds the poor wretches that their sins are forgiven. We know this in our inmost heart as soon as we know God as “Abba.”

Jesus … proposes a disjunction of his own. Is it easier, he asks, to say to the paralyzed man that his sins are forgiven ot to say, “Stand up, tak your bed and walk?” Then, proving that he cand do both, Jesus raises the paralytic; …

The logical strategy attributed to Jesus in this passage is more subtly developed and more dramatically displayed that the one he will use in most of the subsequent confrontations, but essentially it amounts to negating a disjunction, thereby affirming a conjunction. Jesus’ opponents always try to limit him to a choice between or among alternatives. Jesus rejects the alternation, proposing instead a conjunction. (p. 30 f.)

The immortality of the soul is much easier to conceive than the resurrection of the body.  … God loves bodies.  …  God means to welcome risen bodies and not just disembodied souls to heaven’s banquet table.  The resurrection of the dead is the radic al insistence that matter matters to God.

God, wishing to show that He could form a people holy with an invisible holiness and fill them with an eternal glory, made visible things. (p. 181)

For the visible blessings which they received from God were so great and so divine, that He indeed appeared able to give them those that are invisible, and a Messiah. (p. 190)

In both the Old Greek and Theodotian [versions] the word EXOUSIA is used to speak of ‘one like a son of man,’ in Dan. 7:14. Given the allusion to the vision elsewhere in Mark, this is a likely reference to the verse.

… there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth.

When wilt thou bid me, “take up my bed and walk?” As my bed is my affections, when shall I bear them so as to subdue them? As my bed is my afflictions, when shall I bear them so as not to murmur at them? When shall I take up my bed and walk? Not to lie down upon it as it is my pleasure, not sink under it as it is my correction?

[At the Church of Chora in Istanbul] As we stepped over the threshold we came face to face with a slightly more than life-size mosaic of the head of Christ looking at us with a gaze of indescribable power. It was fierce face, nothing weak about it, and I knew that if this man had turned such a look on me and told me to take up my bed and walk I would not have dared not to obey. And whatever he told me to do I would have been able to do.

[Mosaic, St. Apollinare Nuovo, Revenna — Jesus with fingers lifted up and another man with a young man carrying his bed.]

This is the meal equally ser, this the meat for natural hunger
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

Bacon knew and said repeatedly that the light of truth could pass without harm over corruption and pierce unsullied the darkest and most noisome sewers.

A student asked Suzuki Roshi if he kept and eye on his students to see if they were following the precepts, the Buddhist guidelines of conduct.

“I don’t pay any attention to whether you’re following the precepts or not,” he answered.  “I just notice how you are with one another.”

It is not by accident that the Gospel of John weaves into the very earliest period of Jesus’ public life this human-interest story of the wedding that comes across with the lilt of springtime. The intention is to depict a contrast with the winter of his austerities in the forbidding wilderness of Judea. The story shows in bold relief how Jesus had survived the shortcomings of the wilderness and how he had moved beyond the ill-humored image of God upheld by the sectarians there. Jesus thoroughly enjoyed the wedding party of the young lovers.

It is worth our while to compare his laughing face … with the face of John the Baptist, the man … haranguing people forever about the wrath of God. This story discovers to us the beaming joie de vivre of Jesus, who had moved beyond the wilderness and beyond the religious brotherhood of John …

“… the preaching of John was a burden heavy with the old-time threat of utter destruction. But the preaching of Jesus is a song of joy.” To paraphrase a certain verse in Mark, the face of John the Baptist’s disciples personified sobriety itself, whereas the disciples of Jesus were like guests at a wedding party (Mark 2:18)

These are no longer Jesus’ own words, but a reflection of Christians on the fact that now Jesus has gone away. This emerges touchingly from the way in which the old memories of the disciples’ life with Jesus during his earthly days are expressed. These Christians felt acutely the difference between now and then. The text puts this movingly: when Jesus was still with them – we are told – they could not fast, they were not in a position to, because of the living presence of Jesus. That the disciples did not fast then was not a kind of legal dispensation from fasting but an existential matter: they couldn’t do anything but not fast. … Jesus is dead. Now we fast, now we mourn, since that is what is called for.

[Jesus’] followers tried to pour his wine into some old wineskins, and the old wineskins of Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Roman organizing principles spoiled the new wine of the reign of God.

     Truth … demands fresh lyricization, new ways of putting it, new wine and new wineskins, new ways of listening for the word of the Lord.

When an oak seed is planted in a clay pot, the pot breaks; when new wine is poured into old wineskins, they burst. What happens, then, when God the king plants himself in the frailty of a human being? Does he not become a new person and a new vessel! Oh, this becoming – how difficult it really is, and how like birth itself! How terrifying! It is indeed less terrifying to fall upon one’s face, while the mountains tremble at God’s voice, than to sit with him in love as his equal. And yet God’s longing is precisely to sit in this way.

When we invite the potential of deep difference into our home, we change.

… we see in Jesus’ description of the new wine and old wineskins in Mark 2 that it is the nature of the gospel to burst old paradigms.

It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find them—fail.

Therefore, the persons must be favoured and not the institution. Marriage was made for men and women.

In fact, even the apparently more shocking statement of Jesus concerning the sabbath being made for man and not man for the sabbath (Mark 2:27) does not exeed the opinion expressed by a rabbi of the second century A.D., “The sabbath is delivered to you and not you to the sabbath” (Mekhilta on Exod. 31:14)