Preaching Text: Mark 2.1-12 - Jesus heals a paralyzed man.
In first century Capernaum, the rooftop of a house was an important thing to have. There's a good chance that the house which Jesus called 'home' in Capernaum was a simple, one-room building where sleeping areas & cooking areas were shared. In the middle of a hot Palestinian summer, you wouldn't want to sleep where you'd been baking bread all day – so most people moved their sleeping quarters upstairs when the days were hot. Rooftops were also hosting places, where you could host guests under a canopy; you'd get the breeze to cool you rather than the stifling air below.
These houses were made of stone and wood, but the rooftops were beams covered by thatch and clay. It was a hot, dirty job to build a roof that would support the weight of houseguests and be weatherproof. So you can imagine the chaos inside the house when the ceiling started coming down while Jesus was talking. The first little spill of dust might have gone unnoticed, but when the people inside heard the men upstairs breaking through the ceiling, they must have been astonished. As the clods of dirt started raining down, they must have been shocked, perhaps even frightened. But the gospel of Mark doesn't even mention the reaction of the crowd at this point – which has to make us wonder: "If digging through the roof wasn't a shocking thing, what was shocking to the people listening to Jesus?" Let us pray:
Heavenly Father, we come to You for healing and You give us forgiveness. We come to You paralyzed by so many things, yet You know what it is we need the most. We humbly ask this day that You ignore the things for which we are asking and give us the healing we need – and give us the eyes and the wisdom to see the difference. In the name of Your Son Jesus we pray, Amen.
When the paralytic's friends started digging through the ceiling, we should notice that Jesus wasn't healing anybody. The crowds had gathered, but Mark doesn't tell us why they gathered. However, it's fairly safe to assume that they came because Jesus had developed a reputation as a healer in Capernaum. But look closely: for Jesus, the first priority was the Word He had for the people, and He was giving them that Word when He was interrupted.
You don't just pretend that nothing's happening when someone starts digging through the ceiling of your house. Bill Cosby once did a bit about how New Yorkers steadfastly refuse to be surprised by anything. He said, "I went out and I got a rhinocerous. Kept him in my apartment. I'd invite people over and they'd say, 'Oh, you have a rhinocerous. We used to have a rhinocerous.'" You can't do that, anymore than Jesus could have ignored the men digging through the roof to get to Him, and so Jesus allowed the crowd to change His teaching, so that He could blow their minds.
Here we have a man paralyzed in his body, whose friends were digging through the ceiling so that the man could be healed. We have no record of what Jesus was saying before the friends started digging, but I think we can be fairly certain that they were not digging through the ceiling to get to Jesus for teaching. They weren't digging for the Word that Jesus had to give; they were digging for healing. But Jesus had a surprise in store for these friends: instead of saying to the paralytic, ‘you’re healed,' Jesus said, ‘you’re forgiven.’ Now we have to wonder: what was the reaction of the friends when Jesus ignored what they were asking for and gave the paralytic something completely different.
But the paralytic wasn't the only person paralyzed in that crowd of listeners. There was a group of scribes who were paralyzed as well. Their paralysis wasn't physical: it was a paralysis of the heart. They saw a miracle of forgiveness take place and they questioned whether it could be real. For the paralytic, the obstacle between himself and Jesus was the roof of the house: for the scribes, the obstacle was their paralyzed hearts and their lack of faith in Jesus' authority. Just as the paralytic's friends dug through the ceiling to get him to Jesus, so Jesus started digging through their paralyzed hearts and paralyzed faith to give them the great surprise He had in store for them. The scribes were paralyzed by their thoughts of blasphemy and their questions about Jesus' authority, and Jesus didn't heal them by answering their questions but by raising more through forgiveness and a miracle of healing.
The central question in this whole reading is found in verses 6 and 7: "Who is this man who is saying and doing these things?" The scribes were RIGHT, by the way: only God can completely forgive sins. Notice carefully that Jesus didn't say "I" forgive your sins; he gave the paralytic a promise – 'your sins are forgiven.' It is only when the scribes began to question Jesus that He broke through their paralyzed hearts with a stronger Word – "I do have the authority to forgive sins, and just so you don't doubt it, I will heal to prove it. If I can heal the sick, then surely I can forgive sins as well."
It is here that we begin to see that Jesus was doing a new thing. Our reading from Isaiah this morning shows, however, that when God starts doing new things, people often have trouble seeing and believing it. The scribes, the paralytic's friends, and even the paralytic himself must have been astonished both by the fact that Jesus could heal AND by the fact that Jesus didn't consider his healing to be the first priority. Who is this man, really – and how is it that He considers forgiveness to be more important and perhaps more difficult than healing paralysis?
In Jesus the Word was breaking out into the world with God’s authority, a new thing that would change the world forever. In the Gospel of Mark we have surprises and astonishment from beginning to end – Jesus was pushing the boundaries all the way to Golgotha. Where there were obstacles to genuine faith in God, Jesus broke through them just like the paralytic's friends broke through the ceiling to get to Jesus. The difference, however, is that Jesus knew which obstacles to break through and what healing would be required on the other side.
By forgiving sins and healing paralysis, Jesus increased the stakes involved in His own ministry. For the scribes, at that moment, they had to begin considering that Jesus was either the Messiah or a lunatic – there was no middle ground left for them. C.S. Lewis perhaps described the stakes best in his book Mere Christianity:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon and you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."[1]
The paralytic had to pick up his own mat and walk home – how in the world would he explain his healing to his family? What would he do now that he couldn't beg anymore? His life had been changed in ways he couldn't have predicted, but no one was able to show him how the future would turn out.
The paralytic's friends probably felt the same way – how do we treat this friend of ours now that he has been healed? For years we've given him our pity and our care; can we accept him in the wholeness of his healing? And if he needed forgiveness more than he needed healing, what does that say about us, who never needed to be healed of paralysis in the first place?
The scribes were saddled with a huge question: who is this man Jesus, who can heal paralysis and claims He can forgive sins?
And so here we are today, 2,000 years later. We've dug through the obstacles of sleep and cold and heaven knows what else to get here this morning, where Jesus is offering us His word and His healing. But the question remains: who is this man who forgives sins before He heals paralysis? If we are paralyzed in ways we don't know, what will happen to us if we, like the paralytic's friends, start digging for the word?
If we want to know who Jesus is, we have to look at what He’s doing. He is speaking the word – and what has Jesus’ word done so far in Mark? Jesus' word has been proclaimed as "Good News" for all people, news that proclaims the kingdom of God has come near. Jesus has gone out from Capernaum into the surrounding cities because this good news must be proclaimed for others; it is not news that can be limited to one place and one time. Jesus has shown us that the powers of darkness are not tolerated by the Word He brings; indeed, the ones who know this surprising, healing word the best are the ones who are threatened by its power. The demonic powers in Mark's early chapters show us that Jesus' word is a threat to their possession of human beings. We remember that Jesus' word is for us: Jesus calls people of all walks of life to follow His word, to "repent, believe in the good news." Finally, we hear that Jesus' word is a word of promise, too – “Your sins are forgiven”
This is what happens when we start digging for the Word: the Word starts digging for us, too. The word of Jesus is breaking through the obstacles of time & space to us, to we who are paralyzed people needing a word of forgiveness and healing. The word of Jesus is removing the paralysis of sin & death from us, from we who are paralyzed people held captive by the powers of darkness. The word of Jesus is challenging us, the strong and the weak in new and surprising ways – and we who are paralyzed people are astonished by its power to change, to transform, to heal wounds we never knew we had.
In Mark's gospel, people knew that Jesus had something spectacular to offer, even if they didn't understand it. People were digging through rooftops to get to Jesus – but the word Jesus brought to the people was often completely different than what they expected and what they thought they needed. Jesus was giving people what they needed, not what they wanted, and in so doing Jesus healed paralysis of body, mind and soul in ways that people didn't know was necessary.
In our world today, in our lives at this moment, what paralysis is Jesus breaking through? As we gather here this day, as we are digging for the Word we hope to hear, will we be astonished by the Word that Jesus brings? What happens when we start digging for the Word? God has planted in us a desire to be healed by Jesus, yet we become so paralyzed by our sin that we often ask Jesus for only what we want, which is far less than what we need.
Thanks be to God, though, because Jesus won't leave us paralyzed. The Word Jesus gives is a Word of surprise, a Word of astonishment, a Word of transformation. Jesus' Word goes past the symptoms we're trying to manage and begins to heal our deepest paralysis, in ways we cannot control and through means we cannot create by ourselves. When we start digging for the Word we want, Jesus starts digging to give us the Word we need – and He won't rest until we let Him heal us the way we need to be healed.
"Your sins are forgiven."
"I will bear your burdens with you."
"You are my beloved child and I will never let you go."
"I will die for you if that's what it takes to make you my own."
These are the kind of words that break through our paralyzed hearts and heal wounds we'd forgotten we had – and these are the words Jesus is digging through our paralysis to give us. Mind-blowing? Yes. Astonishing? Of course. Challenging? Absolutely. But Jesus won't have it any other way, not until we all stand before Him, amazed, glorifying God, and joining the heavenly chorus: "we've never seen anything like this!" Praise be to God for letting us dig for His Word. Amen.
[1] Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity
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