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Mark 2:1-12
Jesus Heals a Paralytic
A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. 2 They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them.3 Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them.4 Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
6 Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves,7 “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
8 Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things? 9 Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? 10 But that you might know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . .” He said to the paralytic, 11 “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 12 He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”
There are obviously a lot of healing stories in the gospels, and each of them provides something interesting for us to think about. But this particular story seams especially interesting, because it has a couple of unusual aspects that don’t appear in other healing stories.
For instance, one of the details of this story that I missed in reading it until recently is that as Jesus was teaching the people around him on this occasion, there was a group of “teachers of the law” listening to him. The versions of the Bible we read in the past, like the King James Bible or the Revised Standard Version, always used to call these teachers “scribes.” But I can’t help thinking that’s a little misleading. Calling them scribes suggests that they just copied the Scrolls that included the Hebrew scriptures. But the historians and Bible scholars say these teachers of the law were more like theological scholars than like copyists. So that, by the way, is one of the ways that more modern versions of the Bible give us a more accurate understanding than the traditional versions.
But in any case, the fact that these teachers of the law were hanging around listening to Jesus says that by this point in his ministry, Jesus had gained such a reputation as a preacher and teacher that the theological leaders of the Hebrew religion were turning out to hear him. It’s hard to tell why the teachers of the law were there. We tend to view them with suspicion, and to assume they were just there hoping to catch Jesus in some sort of mistake or heresy. And certainly some of the leaders were hostile to Jesus. But not all of them — some seemed genuinely interested in his insights, and others like Paul and maybe Nicodemus became leaders in the early church.
The twist that’s unique in this story is that the teachers of the law play an actual role in the lesson Jesus teaches. In the first part of the story, after the man is lowered into Jesus’ presence, he declares the man forgiven of his sins. Jesus only heals the man physically after the teachers of the law objected to his having declared the man forgiven of its sins. Now, we don’t really know what was on Jesus’ mind — he might have intended to heal the man of his paralysis all along. But the way the story is told, the Jewish teachers had a real role in the story – they weren’t just spectators.
I’m also kind of intrigued by the possibility that this story actually took place at Jesus’ own house. Jesus is often referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth,” because that was his childhood home, but the Bible scholars say he seems to have lived in Capernaum as an adult. The passage says that “people heard that he had come home.” So apparently Jesus’ reputation had grown to the point that lots of local people showed up to hear him preach and teach when he got back to town. At one point later in his ministry, Jesus said, “Birds have nests and foxes have dens, that the son of man has no place to lay his head.” But it seems possible that at one point he lived in a house like a normal person would have. If that’s the case, it’s really interesting that he was so ‘non-threatening’ that strangers would be willing to tear a hole in his roof.
It also seems really interesting that a group of people came carrying a paralyzed friend, and were so determined to get their friend to Jesus that when they couldn’t get through the crowd, they climbed up and tore that hole in the roof. The passage tells us that it was when Jesus “saw their faith,” that he acted to bring forgiveness and healing to the paralyzed man. That seems very significant to me — it reminds us that our faith might not just change our own lives – it might also change the lives of people we know and love.
But the part of this story that always seems most striking to me is that when Jesus looked at the man, it wasn’t his physical paralysis that Jesus dealt with first. It seems that in Jesus’ mind, the paralysis wasn’t his most important problem. I’m sure the friends took the man there with one thing in mind: to get the paralysis healed, but Jesus had different priorities. It was the man’s sins that Jesus felt called to ‘heal’ first. It was only after forgiving those sins that Jesus turned his attention to the man’s physical paralysis.
When you stop and think about it, this tends to cast a different light on the whole question of sinfulness. I suppose it’s true that when most of us think of the kind of sins that would need to be forgiven, the first things that come to our minds would be things like stealing or violence or sexual promiscuity. But that kind of physical sins might be impossible for a paralyzed person. So what sins might Jesus have seen in this man’s life? Maybe bitterness about his physical condition? Hatred of the person who caused a paralyzing injury? Or even hatred of God for not answering prayers for healing? Whatever it was, it’s clear that Jesus saw something about the man that struck him as sin.
Maybe it’s just me. But those who know me well may remember hearing me say that as I’ve gone on in my life of faith, as I’ve tried to listen more closely to what the Holy Spirit is saying to me, the sins he’s been pointing out are often not what I would have expected. So I see something of my own experience reflected in this story
Maybe you do too. I suspect most of us have things in our lives we’d like God to ‘heal.’ But this story suggests to me that God’s highest priority for the followers of his Son is to be healed of things that God sees. And that’s apparently the burden of sin we carry around. Whatever it is about ourselves that we think needs to be ‘healed,’ apparently in God’s eyes, it’s less important than the self-inflicted wounds of our sins.
That seems to suggest that prayer of confession is an especially important kind of prayer. Maybe when we go to God in prayer, we should make it a point to ask him to show us what there is about us that offends him, and then we should ask for help in turning aside from those things before we ask for anything else about us to be healed.
Let’s pray. Lord, we invite you to look within our hearts and minds, within our very lives, and see those things that most need your healing touch. Heal the wounds we cause ourselves by our own sins, and let our priorities change, so that we are more concerned about those sins than we are about the wounds and sicknesses that are evident to the world. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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