Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)

Isaiah 43:18-19, 21-22 & 24-25, 2 Corinthians 1:18-22, Mark 2:1-12

The border-running continues - this time it's through a roof. The house was packed with people all listening intently to the teacher. Then, distracting their attention and perhaps disturbing his own train of thought, they became aware of the sound of digging and of a mounting torrent of dust and debris falling to the floor. Reactions in the room must have ranged from annoyance at this interruption, anger at having one's house vandalised, to unbounded admiration at the resourceful determination of these friends, whose overriding concern was the welfare of one of their own. For him they would clearly go to any lengths. Their making a hole in the roof was like Isaiah's God `making a road in the wilderness' for his own people.

What moved the Lord so much that day was that he was watching a mirror image of what was motivating him. Did he see in their determination to climb up onto that house the same love that would one day take him up the hill to Calvary? Did he see in their purposefulness in ripping through the roof a reflection of his own Father's love that had recently torn the heavens open at his baptism, the love that would soon tear the veil of the Temple right down the middle? Did he see in what those friends were doing that day an icon of his own mission and ministry - to intercede, to go between, with a stretcher-bearing love that will always find a way, borders notwithstanding?

Theologians speak of `liminality' and of `Liminal spaces', from the Latin word limen meaning threshold or edge (or border for that matter). They speak of the Liminal Christ who lived at the edge of his cultural world, who made himself at home with those on the margins, who chose to walk over all kinds of boundaries. The gospel invites us to make our home on the same precarious borderlands, imitating the limi­nal stance and strategy of our Master. But when we speak of liminality, surely the definitive liminal space is the one we cele­brate each Sunday, Easter itself. The ulti­mate border walked along and over by the Lord, in order to show us how, is the one through death to Resurrection.