Jesus the Great Physician

Mark 1: 21-45; 2:1-12

This is now the second in a series of sermons on the Gospel of Mark.  As I mentioned last week, more than any other Gospel, Mark emphasizes the miracles, healings, and exorcisms of Jesus (Lamar Williamson, Jr., Mark, Interpretation, 20).  We see that clearly in today’s texts.

The passage that was read to us from Mark 2 has a parallel in Luke 5.  We’ll be taking a closer look at this passage shortly, but first let’s see why there was such a large crowd gathered around Jesus in Capernaum.  [READ Mark 1:21-45]

v. 21-28 Beginning with this exorcism, Jesus’ fame begins to spread.

v. 29-31 Notice, in Mark the very first physical healing by Jesus involves a woman, Peter’s mother-in-law.  Here we see that Simon Peter was married; in fact, Paul tells us that Peter’s wife later traveled with him on some of his missionary journeys:1 Cor. 9:5 – “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (Cephas Aramaic for Peter).  So this is purely an aside, but isn’t it fascinating that Peter, the first Pope, is married?  I’ll have to ask my Catholic friends about that sometime.

v. 32-34 More healings and exorcisms – here, we see the first instance of what’s called the Messianic secret (v. 34) – Jesus wants to keep his identity secret.  “Injunctions to silence about Jesus’ identity or power are frequent in Mark” (NRSV notes).  He doesn’t want people to tell others who he is at this time – he will disclose who he is when he chooses.  It’s analogous to Jesus calling himself the Son of Man in C. 2 – it’s a hidden, ambiguous phrase Jesus uses to refer to himself (he never calls himself the Son of God – that’s always said about him; he always calls himself the Son of Man, which is a strange phrase that shows his identification with us and is a Messianic phrase from the book of Daniel).

v. 35 –45 Jesus not only heals this leper, but he restores him back to the community by first touching him (lepers were never touched) and telling him to show himself to the priests so they can welcome this outcast back to the community.  “The healing of the leper confirms the impression given throughout Mark that Jesus is the great physician” (Lamar Williamson, 61).  Another example of the Messianic Secret, of Jesus urging someone to keep quiet about who he is and what he’s done, which the leper completely ignores.

We see now why Jesus’ fame as a healer starts to spread, and why the paralytic is brought to him by his friends in C. 2.  When they try to enter the house where Jesus is teaching, they can’t because of the crowd that has gathered to hear him.  So they go up on the roof and make a hole in the roof so that they can lower their friend to Jesus.  Many houses in Palestine had a flight of stone steps built on the outside and leading to the roof.  Luke tells us that the roof had tiles, which these men starting pulling out.

I shudder to think of what the owner of that house was thinking as the hole in the roof got wider and wider.  Finally the hole is big enough and suddenly this 1^st century elevator appears.  This is tricky work, because the men have to carefully balance their friend on all four sides as they lower him down, otherwise he’s going to slide off his stretcher and land on his head. 

While all this is going on, Jesus shows so much composure.  He doesn’t scold these men for interrupting his teaching.  He doesn’t clear out of the house to escape the falling tiles (I’m sure the men were being as careful as possible, but one or two tiles probably got away and fell into the crowd).  He simply watches this whole operation take place in front of him.

And this is the best part of the story: when the man is lowered to the floor, Jesus looks at him and says, "Son, your sins are forgiven."  And I can just imagine the friends on the roof looking at each other and saying "What'd he say?!  Your sins are forgiven?  Oh, great!  What are we supposed to do with that?  Is that all we get for the risks we’ve taken to bring our friend here?”  They were probably very disappointed -  "Your sins are forgiven!  Great, wonderful, it's nice to finally have his moral crisis resolved, but that's not why we brought him.  If that’s all there is, you could have just shouted that out the window!" 

But Jesus isn’t finished.  He then says, "But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins," he tells the paralyzed man, "Get up, take your bed and go home."  And the man was healed – he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them.  Luke ends this passage with the people muttering, “we have seen strange things today.”

If Jesus had simply healed this man, his fame and popularity would have continued to spread without a hitch.  However, there’s controversy in this narrative because of what Jesus told the paralytic: “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  The scribes caught the fact that only God can forgive sins, so they thought that Jesus was committing blasphemy. 

C.S. Lewis saw what an amazing claim Jesus was making when he said he forgives sins:  “Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic.  We can all understand how a man forgives offenses against himself.  You tread on my toe, and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you.  But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money?  Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct.  Yet this is what Jesus did.  He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured.  He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses.  This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.” (Lewis, Mere Christianity, 51-52).

Jesus perceives what the scribes are thinking and responds, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” – and as proof that his word is true, he says to the paralytic – “stand up, take your mat and go to your home.”  The people are amazed and glorify God.

I want to make four reflections on this text.  First, Jesus Christ has the freedom to act in any way he chooses.  In engaging in his ministry, he keeps his own priorities.  He does what he wants to do in the way he wants to do it, and sometimes it surprises our expectations.  The community didn’t expect Jesus to heal lepers by touching them, and the scribes didn’t expect Jesus to forgive sins before healing the paralyzed man.  Jesus is free to act as he chooses.

Second, notice that Jesus Christ has the authority and the power to forgive sins and heal sickness.  He’s free to act in favor of ordinary people in concrete ways when he chooses.  He cares about people – physically, spiritually, and morally.  A word of caution is in order, however.  The paralytic who was forgiven and healed is a good example of the good news that Jesus came to proclaim.  However, “it is possible for a person to be healed and not forgiven, or forgiven and not healed.”  (Williamson, 65)

Third, this event raises a serious theological and practical problem: why doesn’t God always choose to heal those who in faith seek him out?  The passages we read this morning make it clear that God has compassion for the sick and that God has the authority to heal.  Then why aren’t sick people (and especially sick Christians) always healed?

One commentator believes that “both experience and the text suggest that perhaps we’ve created the problem by stating the premise wrongly.  We wish to hear: ‘God always wills healing,’ but this is justified neither by Scripture (e.g., Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’) nor by life.  If this affirmation were true, the ultimate arbiter of events would be our will, not God’s.” (Lamar Williamson, Mark, 62)

But we’ve seen in our text that Jesus is Lord, not us.  And healings must be interpreted finally in light of Jesus’ own submission to the will of God.  Remember, Jesus himself, at his crucial hour, prayed, ‘Father, for you all things are possible; yet not what I want, but what you want’  (14:36).  In a way, it’s comforting to know that not even Jesus got everything he prayed for.

My final reflection has to do with an element of the story I had not considered before.  William Willimon notes that the paralytic’s friends had to go to all the trouble of making a hole in the roof because of the great crowd clustered about Jesus.  It was such a great crowd that people couldn’t even stand at the front door and hear what Jesus was saying.  And these weren’t just any people in the crowd – some of these people were scribes, people who spent their day studying the word of God.

In other words, these were “good, religious, theologically informed, dedicated people – people just like us – who quite unintentionally kept a person in need from getting to Jesus”  (Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Feb. 19, 2006, 34).  Willimon says that, “because of people like us, there was no way to get in or through the door.  The paralytic’s desperate friends have to tear the roof apart, knock a great hole in the house, to get their needs met by Jesus.  Sad, when you have to tear the roof off the house to get to Jesus.  But sometimes Jesus’ friends have got him so covered up and cut off, well, you have to do what you have to do.”  (Willimon, 34) 

There’s a story of a church, a fine Episcopal congregation.  They built a beautiful new church, but on the edge of one of the poorest parts of town.  People warned them that might not be a good idea, to build such a fine church in that part of town.

Sure enough, no sooner was the church building built and dedicated to God than one night somebody knocked the lock off the door and broke in.  Next morning, they looked around to see what had been taken.  Nothing was missing.

The locks were repaired, the doors again locked.  A week later, locks broken, door forced open.  They could see some muddy footprints up and down the halls of the church but again, after an extensive inventory of the church’s belongings, nothing was found missing.

Next week the janitor happened to be talking with the priest and said, “You know, of all the places I’ve worked, this church uses more toilet paper than any place I’ve ever been.  I’ve had to order more toilet paper twice since…”

And then the priest realized why people were breaking into the church.  He stood there with the janitor, in the hall, saying, “This church doesn’t have to go looking for its mission.  When people have to break into the church to get toilet paper…take that lock off the door. (Willimon, 35)

Sometimes, the church is the primary reason people decide not to follow Jesus and embrace the Christian faith.  Usually, that’s because, even though we may try our best, Christians aren’t perfect – we make mistakes just like everybody else.  We need to be careful that we don’t prevent people who desperately need Jesus from reaching him because we inadvertently crowd them out. 

Fortunately, the good news is that even when we make mistakes, we are not able to prevent Jesus from working.  The story doesn’t end with the crowd defeating the paralytic and his friends.  The story ends with Jesus reaching out beyond his inner circle in order to save.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.