REFLECTION
THE MAT
Martí Colom
In the second chapter of the Gospel of Mark we
find the story of the paralytic lying in a mat who is being carried to Jesus by
four men (Mark 2:1-12). Jesus cures him, saying that his sins are forgiven: the
paralysis that prevented him from walking him was his own sin. Why, at the end
of the story, once the man has been healed, does Jesus tell him to pick up his
mat (Mark 2:11)? We might ask ourselves, why would he need it now that he can
walk? What’s more, why does the reference to the act of picking up the mat
appear not once, but three times (verses 9, 11 and 12)? It is obvious that Mark
intends, with this insistence, to underline that when leaving the presence of
Jesus, he who had been cured of his paralysis carried with him the mat on which
he arrived. Why is this important?
Let us explore two responses: First
(and this is a very speculative explanation) we can imagine that, implicitly,
Jesus is inviting the person who had been paralytic to do for others what those
four men did for him. As if he was saying: “Pick up your mat, so that it may be
useful to others as it was to you, but now you can be one of those that carry
it.”
On the other hand, to pick up the mat is
the gesture that reveals that the former
paralytic’s new awareness of his past is complete. He does not try to run
away from the past by leaving the mat thrown in some corner. True healing is
not about erasing every trace of our selfish pasts, nor about burying our
errors in oblivion, it is about
integrating them into our story. “Pick up your mat” means: be aware of who
you have been. Knowing full well, however, that our sins do not define us anymore. That is why Jesus told the man to pick up
his mat and the text goes on to
narrate how he “took up the bed”
(Mark 2:12): it is no longer his. Or
perhaps it was, but only in the sense that it belonged to his past. In this
sense it is good to carry our mats without misgivings; being aware that they do
not define our present. Picking up the mat is to integrate completely our past
experience – without making of its negative aspects the decisive factors of our
present and future lives.
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