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Looking up content for: Mark 2:1-12 (posted on 02/13/2006)
Comments and Observations
By this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ is renowned throughout that region as a healer and exorcist. He also had proven himself to be a strikingly new kind of teacher—when Jesus spoke about the things of God, he seemed to be drawing his information about God not so much from his head as from his heart, as though he himself had spent a long time personally being with God. Even so, Jesus’ apparent close association WITH God was still a far cry from thinking that perhaps Jesus WAS God in any sense. So far only the demons have known Jesus’ true identity. As excited as the crowds were about Jesus, up to this point no one thought him to be divine.
But now comes Mark 2 and this begins to change as Jesus takes it upon himself not just to heal a man’s body but to forgive his sins. When the teachers of the law said that God alone may forgive sins, they were correct.
After all, if you wrong me, hurt me, or mistreat me, then I am in a position to forgive you for this activity against me. I am the wounded party and so I am, quite naturally, the one in a position to forgive my offender. But if Mary has done something nasty to Jill, what sense would it make for me, as an outsider to the situation, to go up to Mary and say, “I forgive you for what you did to Jill.” Surely Jill would not be terribly happy with me, but Mary might be merely confused, too. “This has nothing to do with YOU,” she might properly say. (Jill could say the same.)
In the grand scheme of things, of course, ALL sins are offensive finally to God. If God is the creator and sustainer of all that exists—and if this same God has, therefore, given us the blueprint of how life in this creation is supposed to go by providing us with laws and rules and wise tips on how to get along best in the world he made—then every fracturing of shalom is finally a wound to the heart of God. It is for this reason that God is in a position to forgive any and every sin you could ever name.
So when Jesus, from out of the blue, forgives the sins of a man he had never before met, he clearly was appropriating for himself the authority and position of God. And as Mark 2 presents this story, it appears that to Jesus’ mind, forgiveness is the main event. The healing—although far more striking to the crowds—ends up being secondary, not nearly as important or as impressive (from Jesus’ vantage point) as the primary matter of forgiveness. Indeed, Jesus used the healing as a way to bolster his authority to do the truly impressive matter of forgiving sins.
Questions to Ponder/Issues to Address
Why did Jesus say what he said?
Picture the scene: Jesus is sitting in a Capernaum house that is so clotted with people, it’s difficult to move. Every window in the house is blocked by the faces peering into the house from the street. The doorway is likewise blocked as the overflow crowd outside is trying to get inside to where Jesus is. These are needy people for the most part. They are sick, lame, blind, deaf, demon-possessed. One glance at the crowd and there could be no doubting why they were there.
Then, right in the middle of it all, dirt starts to fall onto Jesus’ head and onto the heads and shoulders of the people near him. The tip of a shovel suddenly pokes through the living room ceiling followed by still more clods of dirt as four desperate people resort to desperate means to get at Jesus with their paralyzed friend. Finally, as the crowd gapes in astonishment, they lower the litter bearing the man’s limp body.
Now, it did not require the brain of a genius to puzzle out why the friends of the paralyzed man had gone through the trouble of bringing their buddy to Jesus. By now Jesus had been rumored to be a great healer of disease, and so the friends and the paralyzed man himself are hoping against hope that Jesus can heal even a body that had been so long rendered useless by paralysis.
So what does Jesus do? He looks at the man and says, "Buck up! Take courage, son. Your sins are forgiven!" Well now that's not exactly what this man and his friends were looking for! This is a little like someone's stopping at a bad highway car accident, poking his head into the damaged vehicle, and then saying to the injured passengers, "Can I get anyone some coffee?" When injuries or sickness are obvious, most folks know what has to come first.
So the only reason Jesus would start with forgiveness is if in Jesus' eyes getting forgiven is the more startling reality. Jesus begins with the best and most stunning thing he has to offer: grace unto forgiveness. When Jesus does get around to healing the man physically, even then Jesus does it primarily to back up the far more difficult matter of declaring sins forgiven. The physical healing is not an afterthought exactly but Jesus frames it in the context of what he regards as the main event: forgiveness.
Textual Points
Much of the narrative structure in Mark’s gospel is motored along by a series of controversies and misunderstandings regarding Jesus. Mark 2:1-12 presents the first such controversy and Jesus’ free willingness to declare the forgiveness of sins renders him liable to the charge of blasphemy (verse 7). This is about as serious a charge as can be imagined and, if Jesus is not God, it is also a charge that could stick.
In his Word Biblical Commentary on Mark, Robert Guelich points out that Jesus’ words in verse 5 can be taken one of two ways: the expression can be read as a divine passive, in which case Jesus would be offering a word of assurance along the lines of, “Take heart, God has forgiven your sins.” Or it could be a more direct assertion of Jesus’ own ability to forgive sins, hence the equivalent of his saying, “Son, I MYSELF am declaring that your sins are forgiven.” The ensuing controversy would seem to indicate that the religious leaders understood Jesus himself to be doing the forgiving, and Jesus’ subsequent words in verse 10 (. . . that you may know the Son of Man has authority . . .) back this up. Of course, even if this was a divine passive in verse 5, the question could legitimately be asked, “How can Jesus be so sure this is so unless he has some rare insight into the mind of God?” But in this context, it appears that Jesus’ words in both verse 5 and verse 10 go well beyond a divine passive and the uttering of some consoling word. Jesus is taking a far more active role in the forgiveness of this man’s sins.
Illustration Idea
In the Roman Catholic Church the process of being declared a saint is called canonization. It's a fairly lengthy process with a number of steps and requirements. Among the more curious prerequisites for sainthood is that the canonization candidate must have at least one bona fide miracle to his or her credit. The miracle in question may be an act directly performed by the person or, as appears to be the case with Mother Teresa's canonization, the miracle may be some healing that is associated with at least the name of the would-be saint even if he or she was not directly involved at the time.
But suppose it is proposed that Pope John Paul II be canonized. Obviously some miracle will need to be found if John Paul is to make the sainthood grade. Probably what will be sought will be a miraculous healing: maybe a person the pope touched once or prayed over and who then, immediately or some time later, recovered.
Whatever it ends up being, such a miracle will clearly tilt toward the extraordinary, the unusual, the spectacular. But what will almost certainly not be proposed to count as a miracle will be John Paul's highly publicized meeting with Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot the pope in an attempted assassination in 1981. Most of us no doubt recall that meeting when the pope gently held the hand that had squeezed off the bullets. John Paul looked at the man who had nearly killed him and then forgave him.
That was a highly moving event, and if this pope ever gets declared a saint, I do not doubt that the holiness and piety he displayed in forgiving his attacker will go a long way in substantiating why John Paul deserves special recognition. But it will not count as a miracle.
Perhaps it should. Because what Jesus displays in Mark 2 is the reverse of the way we tend to think. At one point Jesus asks, "Which is easier: forgiving sins or healing bodies?" My guess is that the Pharisees then and most of us now would reply, "It's easier to forgive a sin than it is to heal a body." We'd probably say that because whereas all of us have forgiven someone at one time or another, probably none of us has ever healed anyone. You could be the best, most consistently gracious forgiver in the world. You could spend a lifetime forgiving sins large and small. But that would probably never get your picture on the cover of Christianity Today much less Time magazine. Ah, but if just once you visited a paralyzed person and, with a touch and a prayer, release that poor soul from his or her wheelchair and ventilator, you would skyrocket in fame.
So what's easier: forgiving sins or healing bodies? Well, we know how we'd answer. But it does not appear to be Jesus' answer.