Carried to the King: Miphiboseth at David's Table and the Man Let Down Through the Roof
Old Testament: 2 Kings 9:1, 3, 6-8, 13
And David said: Is there any one, think you, left of the house of Saul, that I may shew kindness to him for Jonathan's sake? ... And Siba said to the king: There is a son of Jonathan left, who is lame of his feet. ... And David said to him: Fear not, for I will surely shew thee mercy for Jonathan thy father's sake, and I will restore the lands of Saul thy father, and thou shalt eat bread at my table always. He bowed down to him, and said: Who am I thy servant, that thou shouldst look upon such a dead dog as I am? ... But Miphiboseth dwelt in Jerusalem: because he ate always of the king's table: and he was lame of both feet.
Old Testament, also: 1 Kings 20:15, 42
... Thou shalt not take away thy kindness from my house for ever ... And Jonathan said to David: Go in peace: and let all stand that we have sworn both of us in the name of the Lord, saying: The Lord be between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever.
New Testament: Mark 2:3-5, 11-12
And they came to him, bringing one sick of the palsy, who was carried by four. And when they could not offer him unto him for the multitude, they uncovered the roof where he was; and opening it, they let down the bed wherein the man sick of the palsy lay. And when Jesus had seen their faith, he saith to the sick of the palsy: Son, thy sins are forgiven thee. ... I say to thee: Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy house. And immediately he arose; and taking up his bed, went his way in the sight of all.
The connection
Two men who cannot walk are brought to a king, and in neither case does the man's own standing have anything to do with what he receives. Miphiboseth is a survivor of a ruined house, the grandson of the king David replaced, lame in both feet since the day the news of Gelboe came from Jezrahel. By every reckoning he is a liability and knows it: "Who am I thy servant, that thou shouldst look upon such a dead dog as I am?" He did not seek David out. David sought him, and the question David keeps asking tells you why. Not is there anyone deserving, but "is there any one, think you, left of the house of Saul, that I may shew kindness to him for Jonathan's sake." The mercy is real and it is addressed to Miphiboseth, and the reason given for it is somebody else, a man already dead, and an oath sworn years earlier between two friends in a field: "The Lord be between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever" (1 Kings 20:42). Miphiboseth is carried to a table he could not have walked to, and seated "as one of the sons of the king." The man in Capharnaum cannot get to Christ either, and for the same reason and a second one: he cannot walk, and the house is full. What he has instead is four men who will not be stopped by a crowd or a ceiling. They carry him, and when the door is impossible they take the roof apart and lower him through it. And then the sentence the whole scene turns on: "when Jesus had seen their faith, he saith to the sick of the palsy: Son, thy sins are forgiven thee" (Mark 2:5). Not his faith. Theirs. The text does not smooth it over, and it is the detail the Fathers seize on. St Peter Chrysologus puts it as sharply as it can be put: "Christ therefore with good reason accepts the faith of those that bare him." The shapes match at the joints. A man who cannot come. Others who bring him or send for him. A king who gives on account of someone else's love rather than the recipient's merit. And in both cases the gift overshoots the need: Miphiboseth needed not to be killed and is given a permanent seat among the king's sons; the paralytic was brought for his legs and is given his soul back clean, and then his legs as well, almost as an afterthought, to prove the first gift was real. Even the address carries it. The cripple eats "as one of the sons of the king." Christ looks at a man lowered through a hole in someone's ceiling and calls him Son.
Moral sense
There are seasons when you cannot get yourself to God, and the only honest thing is to be carried. The four men are not incidental to that story; they are the reason it happens, and the Lord looked at them and acted. So it is worth being the kind of person other people can carry, which means letting them see that you cannot walk, and it is worth being one of the four, because the faith you are short of on your own behalf may be supplied on somebody else's. Neither of these men arranged his own rescue. One was sent for. One was carried through a roof.
Anagogical sense
The end of both stories is a table. Miphiboseth eats at the king's table always, in Jerusalem, lame to the last verse and seated anyway. What is promised is not that the lameness is edited out of the record but that it stops being what determines the seating, and the wedding supper of the Lamb is full of people who were carried there by someone else's love and are counted as sons.
The Fathers
St Peter Chrysologus, in the Catena Aurea on Mark 2: "Of how great power with God must a man's own faith be, when that of others here availed to heal a man both within and without. The paralytic hears his pardon pronounced, in silence uttering no thanks, for he was more anxious for the cure of his body than his soul. Christ therefore with good reason accepts the faith of those that bare him, rather than his own hardness of heart."
Warrant
Interpretive, and the badge should be read strictly. Mark does not cite 2 Kings 9, no New Testament writer names Miphiboseth, and no Father in the site's corpora reads him as a figure of anything; the name occurs three times in the whole of the harvested Schaff and the Catena and not once typologically. The pairing is my own. What is patristic is one leg of it. That Christ forgave the paralytic on account of the faith of the men who carried him is read that way outright by St Peter Chrysologus, quoted in the source field, and the passage stands in the Catena on Mark 2. So a Father supports the principle the entry turns on, and not the parallel the entry draws. The verbal link is thin and is not leaned on. The Douay has Miphiboseth eat at the king's table "as one of the sons of the king" (2 Kings 9:11) and Christ address the paralytic as "Son" (Mark 2:5), but the two words differ in the Greek, so nothing lexical carries across. The correspondence is of situation, not of vocabulary, and is recorded as such. One thing the entry is careful not to claim. Chrysologus says Christ accepted the bearers' faith "rather than his own hardness of heart", which is his reading of the paralytic's silence and is stronger than Mark says; Mark reports no disposition in the man at all, favourable or otherwise. The entry keeps Chrysologus's point about the bearers and does not take up his judgment of the man on the bed.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1421.
The verses
2 Kings 9:1 · 2 Kings 9:3 · 2 Kings 9:6 · 2 Kings 9:7 · 2 Kings 9:8 · 2 Kings 9:13 · 1 Kings 20:15 · 1 Kings 20:42 · Mark 2:3 · Mark 2:4 · Mark 2:5 · Mark 2:11 · Mark 2:12
