Here is one of the most revealing pictures of Jesus.
(1) He did not drive away a man who had broken the law. The leper had no right to have spoken to him at all, but Jesus met the desperation of human need with an understanding compassion.
(2) Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him. He touched the man who was unclean. To Jesus he was not unclean; he was simply a human soul in desperate need.
(3) Having cleansed him, Jesus sent him to fulfil the prescribed ritual. He fulfilled the human law and human righteousness. He did not recklessly defy the conventions, but, when need be, submitted to them.
Here we see compassion, power and wisdom all at work together.
A FAITH THAT WOULD NOT BE DENIED
Mark 2:1–6
When, some time afterwards, Jesus had come back to Capernaum, the news went round that he was in a house. Such crowds collected that there was no longer any room left, not even round the door. So he was speaking the word to them. A party arrived bringing to him a paralysed man carried by four men. When they could not get near him because of the crowd they unroofed part of the roof of the house in which he was, and when they had dug out part of the roof, they let down the stretcher on which the paralysed man was lying. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralysed man, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven.’
AFTER Jesus had completed his tour of the synagogues, he returned to Capernaum. The news of his coming immediately spread abroad. Life in Palestine was very public. In the morning the door of the house was opened and anyone who wished might come out and in. The door was never shut unless someone deliberately wished for privacy; an open door meant an open invitation for all to come in. In the humbler houses, such as this must have been, there was no entrance hall; the door opened directly on to the street. So, in no time, a crowd had filled the house to capacity and jammed the pavement round the door; and they were all eagerly listening to what Jesus had to say.
Into this crowd came four men carrying on a stretcher a friend of theirs who was paralysed. They could not get through the crowd at all, but they were men of resource. The roof of a Palestinian house was flat. It was regularly used as a place of rest and of quiet, and so usually there was an outside stair which ascended to it. The construction of the roof lent itself to what these ingenious four proposed to do. The roof consisted of flat beams laid across from wall to wall, perhaps three feet apart. The space in between the beams was filled with brushwood packed tight with clay. The top was then made watertight. Very largely the roof was of earth and often a flourishing crop of grass grew on the roof of a Palestinian house. It was the easiest thing in the world to dig out the filling between two of the beams; it did not even damage the house very much, and it was easy to repair the breach again. So the four men dug out the filling between two of the beams and let their friend down directly at Jesus’ feet. When Jesus saw this faith that laughed at barriers, he must have smiled an understanding smile. He looked at the man, ‘Child,’ he said, ‘your sins are forgiven.’
It may seem an odd way to begin a cure. But in Palestine, in the time of Jesus, it was natural and inevitable. The Jews integrally connected sin and suffering. They argued that if people were suffering they must have sinned. That is in fact the argument that Job’s friends produced. ‘Who’, demanded Eliphaz the Temanite, ‘that was innocent ever perished?’ (Job 4:7). The Rabbis had a saying, ‘There is no sick man healed of his sickness until all his sins have been forgiven him.’ To the Jews, a sick person was someone with whom God was angry. It is true that a great many illnesses are due to sin; it is still truer that time and time again they are due not to the sin of the one who is ill, but to the sin of others. We do not make the close connection that the Jews did, but any Jew would have agreed that forgiveness of sins was a prior condition of cure.
It may well be, however, that there is more than this in this story. The Jews made this connection between illness and sin, and it may well be that, in this case, the man’s conscience agreed. And it may well be that that consciousness of sin had actually produced the paralysis. The power of the mind, especially the subconscious mind, over the body is an amazing thing.
Psychologists quote a case of a girl who played the piano in a cinema in the days of the silent films. Normally she was quite well, but immediately the lights went out and cigarette smoke filled the auditorium she began to be paralysed. She fought against it for a long time, but at last the paralysis became permanent and something had to be done. Examination revealed no physical cause whatever. Under hypnosis it was discovered that when she was very young, only a few weeks old, she had been lying in one of those elaborate old-fashioned cots with an arch of lace over it. Her mother had bent over her smoking a cigarette. The draperies had caught fire. It was immediately extinguished and no physical harm was done to her, but her subconscious mind was remembering this terror. The dark plus the smell of the cigarette smoke in the cinema acted on the unconscious mind and paralysed her body – and she did not know why.
The man in this story may well have been paralysed because consciously or unconsciously his conscience agreed that he was a sinner, and the thought of being a sinner brought the illness which he believed was the inevitable consequence of sin. The first thing that Jesus said to him was, ‘Child, God is not angry with you. It’s all right.’ It was like speaking to a frightened child in the dark. The burden of the terror of God and estrangement from God rolled from his heart, and that very fact made the cure all but complete.
It is a lovely story because the first thing that Jesus does for every one of us is to say, ‘Child, God is not angry with you. Come home, and don’t be afraid.’
THE UNANSWERABLE ARGUMENT
Mark 2:7–12
Some of the experts in the law were sitting there, and they were debating within themselves, ‘How can this fellow speak like this? He is insulting God. Who can forgive sins except one person – God?’ Jesus immediately knew in his spirit that this debate was going on in their minds, so he said to them, ‘Why do you debate thus in your minds? Which is easier – to say to the paralysed man, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up, and lift your bed, and walk around”? Just to let you see that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’ – he said to the paralysed man – ‘I say to you, “Get up! Lift your bed! And go away home!” ’ And he raised himself, and immediately he lifted his bed, and went out in front of them all. The result was that they were all astonished, and they kept on praising God. ‘Never’, they kept repeating, ‘have we seen anything like this.’
JESUS, as we have seen, had already attracted the crowds. Because of that, he had attracted the notice of the official leaders of the Jews. The Sanhedrin was their supreme court. One of its great functions was to be the guardian of orthodoxy. For instance, it was the Sanhedrin’s duty to deal with anyone who was a false prophet. It seems that it had sent out a kind of scouting party to check up on Jesus; and they were there in Capernaum. No doubt they had taken up a prominent place in the front of the crowd and were sitting there critically watching everything that was going on.
When they heard Jesus say to the man that his sins were forgiven, it came as a shattering shock. It was an essential of Judaism that only God could forgive sins. For any human being to claim to do so was to insult God; that was blasphemy, and the penalty for blasphemy was death by stoning