Week 23 ———  Jesus Heals a Paralytic that Drops By
Matthew 9:2-8,  Mark 2:1-12,  Luke 5:17-26

Mark 2:1-12   And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home.  And many were gathered together, so that there was no more room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them.  And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men.   And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay.   And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts,   “Why does this man speak like that?  He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”   And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts?   Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?   But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—   “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.”   And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”

“And when Jesus saw their faith”    

This is a concept we desperately need to understand.  Faith is something you can see.  We often talk about “faith” as if the word is simply a belief you have.  “What faith are you?”  Do you have faith?  Is your faith strong?  That is not the way Jesus talks about faith here.  This faith is not a belief or idea in your mind but an action you can see.  

These four friends went to a lot of trouble to get their paralytic friend to Jesus.  They tore a hole in the roof and dropped him in, knowing they would be responsible for repairing it.  They would not have gone through this trouble if there was any doubt in their mind that Jesus could heal their friend.  

Let’s look at this differently.  Say these friends had a ‘little bit of faith’ in Jesus.  They thought there was a possibility that Jesus could heal the man, but they weren’t quite sure.  I would imagine that they would have gone back home when they approached the home and saw it was impossible to go to the door.  So, this ‘little bit of faith’ would lead to inaction.  Is that really any faith at all?

In Matthew 17, there is a story about a boy possessed by a demon. The disciples are unable to help him. Jesus rebukes the demon, and the boy is healed. This has the disciples wondering.

Matthew 17:19-20   Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Here, “little faith” (Greek oligopistia) means having faith less than a mustard seed.  The black mustard plant in Israel grows all over in the wild.  I have seen it on the banks of the Jordan and the side of highways outside of Jerusalem.  This mustard seed is even smaller than your local grocery store’s 1 mm mustard seeds.  Jesus is saying that any faith less than that size is, in effect, no faith at all. “Faith,” in Matthew, means the confidence that God can and will act on his people’s behalf; without that, however much a person may “believe” intellectually, they are, for practical purposes, “faithless.”

R.T. France, in The New International Commentary on the New Testament, says it this way:

“Faith is not a measurable commodity, but a relationship, and what achieves results through prayer is not a superior “quantity” of faith but the unlimited power of God on which faith, any faith, can draw. The disciples, Jesus implies, had failed to bring any faith at all to bear on this situation.”¹

“Fatih is a relationship,” France said.  You can think of it as trustworthiness.  Our faith in God is never blind.  It is the result of built-up trust over the years. In what is perhaps the most important verse in the Old Testament, Exodus 34:6, God describes himself to Moses with five character traits, the final one being faithfulness.  The Hebrew word there is ‘emet,’ a derivative of the commonly used transliterated word ‘amen,’ which means “that is true.”  

Throughout the Old Testament, we see God’s faithfulness in keeping his promises and being a reliable covenant partner. Trust builds in the relationship as one repeatedly shows himself to be true to his word. Our faith is not blind but is based on a long history of God always keeping His promises in the Bible and our relationship with Him, in which we likewise experience the reliability of His word and covenant with us.  Your trust in God, your faith, grows with every day you experience God’s reliability in keeping promises to you.  

So the paralytic and his four friends know that Jesus can heal.  They probably heard of his healing others and likely witnessed some healings.  Perhaps one of the friends was healed himself.  Regardless, their faith was not blind but was based on experience.  When they picked up the bed on which their paralyzed friend lay, they were making their faith visible.  Jesus saw their faith not just of the one who would be healed but of all of them.  This is not the only time in the Bible that the faith of an outside party led to the healing of another.  It was the Centurion’s faith that healed his servant in Matthew 8:10-13.  It was the faith of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 that healed her daughter oppressed by a demon.  This is why we lift up others in prayer.  We come before the Father, trusting in His promises to be a loving, merciful God who wants to work all things for good.  Our faith in God can lead to the healing of others.

Is your faith visible?  Can Jesus see your faith?  

James 2:14-20   “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?  If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?   So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.   You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!   Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless?”

Don’t misread James.  James is not a proponent of “works-based righteousness.”   Martin Luther was not a big fan of the book of James because, for a while, at least, he felt it contradicted Paul’s idea of justification by faith alone.  He called James an “epistle of straw” [from his preface to the New Testament.)  He considered it a ‘lesser book’ because it “has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.”² 

This tension of grace and works is something we have invented — it wasn’t a problem for Paul.  Paul states in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”  But in the very next verse (10), he says what the result of salvation is: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”  Paul had no trouble seeing that God’s saving us leads to us doing the good works that he created us to do.  Works are not the cause of our salvation, but they are a natural result of our salvation.  Our faith has to be visible.  It is manifest in our works.

We will continue this conversation of faith, “little faith,” and doubt as we move through Jesus’ ministry. But I want to briefly discuss Jesus’ statement to the paralytic that his sins were forgiven and the scribes’ response to this statement.

Jesus surprises everyone by saying, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  To this point, Jesus has not demonstrated that forgiving sins are a requirement for healing.  Certainly, in the day’s culture, many believed that all illnesses resulted from sin. (Jesus will specifically contradict that idea later.)  Faith, not forgiveness, seems to be the prerequisite for healing elsewhere.  Here, the pronouncement of forgiveness is related to the healing of illness only because the proof of Jesus’ authority to forgive is the healing of the paralysis.  

“Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts,   “Why does this man speak like that?  He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

Jesus “perceived their thoughts.”  The Greek word for ‘perceived’ carries the idea of seeing or witnessing. Jesus ‘saw what they were thinking.’  This doesn’t mandate the use of Jesus’ supernatural power to know people’s thoughts, though the Gospel writers are not hesitant to show that Jesus has this power (Matthew 12:25 and 22:18, for example). We all have experienced occasions where it is easy to discern what others are thinking by their expressions or body language.  (Perhaps, like me, you have a friend whose facial expressions are always in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!)

They think Jesus is committing blasphemy because he has just claimed to have the power only God has – to forgive sin.  Then Jesus responds “ “Why do you question these things in your hearts?  Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?”  Notice that Jesus didn’t ask them what was easier to do, but what was easier to say?  Clearly, forgiving sins is the more difficult task. Many Old Testament prophets were able to heal, but none forgave sins.  We have the ability (and requirement) to forgive others when they wrong us, but I like how Chad Bird says it:  

“Sometimes we treat forgiveness like it is our property… we’re going to decide to whom we can give it because it is ours to give.  But in Christianity, forgiveness is never your property…forgiveness always belongs to Jesus…When we forgive someone else, really, what’s happening is that the stream of forgiveness, which flows from the heart of God our Father through Jesus Christ, passes through us and into the heart of someone else.  We just don’t dam it up. We don’t stop it.  It is not our property.”³

But Jesus said, “Which is easier to say…”.  Anyone can say, “Your sins are forgiven,” because a claim to forgive is not easily tested, but a claim to cure paralysis is easily observed immediately as true or false.  So, Jesus uses his healing power to prove his ability to forgive.  And the scribes think, “But only God can do that,” to which the story proclaims, “Exactly.”

Before we conclude, remember that I often ask you to put yourself into the story.  Especially the very familiar stories in the Gospel.  See these stories through the eyes of all those involved.  So, just for a moment, put yourself in the place of the paralyzed man.  Consider how this has affected your life in the days of Jesus, when medical care was primitive by our standards. You have no wheelchair (much less motorized).  If not for friends, you are immobile and unable to care for yourself.  There are no social programs to support you.  You have to depend on friends for food and shelter, or you have to beg.  Then, one day, you have hope.  This prophet is in your area.  He is healing many diseases.  You have heard about it.  You know he can heal you if you can only get close.  Some friends are kind enough to carry you there.  But the crowd is so thick you can’t get anywhere near Jesus.  Disappointment.  Then, one of your friends has the crazy idea of dropping you down through a hole they cut in the roof.  It sounds ridiculous, but this is your only chance, so you agree.  Carrying you up the ladder to get to the roof was sketchy, and now your friends demolished this person’s home.  They tie ropes to your bedding and lower you down in front of Jesus.  How will he react?  Will he admonish you for destroying property?  Will he have mercy and heal you?  Then he says, “Take heart, my son. Your sins are forgiven.”  

How do you respond to Jesus’ statement?  You didn’t come here for forgiveness; you came for healing.  What good is forgiveness if you can’t walk?  Can’t Jesus just heal?  Consider the moment while Jesus has the interchange with the scribes.  Why didn’t Jesus heal me?  “Didn’t you see what horrible shape I am in, Jesus?”

Indeed, Jesus saw.  Jesus saw that this man’s greatest need was not for legs to be made new but for a life to be made new.   His primary need was not for his legs to be strengthened but for his heart to be strengthened.  “Take heart, my son,” Jesus said.  What you need most is to know your heart has found peace with God, to know that I have called you son. 

After that brief pause, Jesus heals this man’s paralysis and proves his authority to heal and forgive. But we will not all find healing so quickly. Some of us will not be healed until Jesus comes again. But we can all find that peace with God if we desire it.  All who seek healing will not be healed in this life, but the gift of salvation is free to all.  

Finally, we have to compare ourselves to the four friends. They would stop at nothing to bring their friend who needed healing to Jesus. They were willing to demolish a roof. What are we willing to do in order to bring our friends to Jesus. Do we bring our sick or troubled friends before God’s throne in prayer with this kind of fervor? Are we willing to go out on a limb or put ourselves at risk to make sure our friends find Jesus. God forgive us for taking our access to you for granted.

1. France, R. T.  The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdsman. (2007).
2. Luther, Martin.  Word and Sacrament Volume 1.  page 362.
3. Bird, Chad.  From a TikTok video: https://www.tiktok.com/@chadbird1517/video/7197510765635669294]