JC & the Law: healing the paralytic … (12/11/18)
Originally shared via the first twelve verses of Mark 2, this story tells the tale of a most peculiar healing – one in which a paralyzed man could not be brought directly to Jesus (due to the presence of a large crowd of people who were already present – a large crowd who had come to hear him “speak the Word” or, in other words, teach his own interpretations of the Law – see Mark 2:2) and was therefore lowered to him through the roof of his own home.1 Thereafter – in all three Synoptic accounts – Jesus verbally forgives the man his sins2; an act that is deemed blasphemous by the scribes & Pharisees sitting nearby, who incredulously ask “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”3 (see Mark 2:5-7 & Luke 5:20-21 – also Matthew 9:2-3) In response to this most harsh of accusations, Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of his critics’ religious piousness; boldly stating “Which is easier – to merely say to a paralytic ‘Your sins are forgiven’ [what the religious leaders of that day often insincerely did] or to tell him directly to stand up and walk?” (see Mark 2:9 & Luke 5:23) Finally, and in truth most importantly, Jesus then inspires the actual healing of the man’s paralysis, prefacing the same with the highly confrontational “so that you may know that the Son of Man4 [i.e. not the priesthood] has the authority on earth to forgive sins” (see Mark 2:10 & Luke 5:24). In doing so, Jesus – in no uncertain terms – claimed that the power to access the Divine (the same redemptive power that had been withheld from the layman by the strict interpretations of the Law imposed by the scribes & the Pharisees) had in that moment been taken back from the Temple and returned to the people; a Gospel message that happened to reside at the very heart of his ministry from its very beginning (see Matthew 4:17 & Luke 4:18) to its very end (see Matthew 24:12-14).
“Where dogma imprisons, Love liberates.
Where judgment paralyzes, Love empowers.
Where fear disheartens, Love encourages.
Where selfishness sickens, Love makes whole.
Where pride makes useless, Love makes serviceable.”
~ inspired by Harald Fosdick & Jesus Christ
………………………………………………
1Luke 5:17-26 tells essentially the same tale – with the only major differences being the noted presence of “Pharisees and teachers of the law” in the very beginning of its telling, and the replacement of Mark‘s “We have never seen anything like this” with the similar “We have seen strange things today” at its close … Matthew 9:1-7 tells essentially the same story, though an abbreviated version thereof (omitting the lowering of the paralytic through the roof and the utterance of amazement by the onlookers at the story’s end), and the event is reflective as well of a similar Jesus-inspired healing of another paralytic – this time by the pool near Sheep’s Gate (called Bethesda; a word which appropriately meant both “house of mercy” and “house of shame” in Hebrew) – in Jerusalem in John 5:2-14 (“Stand up, take your mat, and walk” ~ John 5:8). This latter Johannine healing was also performed on the Sabbath, making it just as “blasphemous” in the eyes of the contemporary religious authorities as the paralytic healing shared by its Synoptic cousins … Also important to NOTE is that Mark has this healing taking place in Capernaum – essentially Jesus’ home during his three year ministry, and a place renowned for the lack of faith of its inhabitants (see Matthew 13:54-57, Mark 3:21, Mark 6:4-6, Luke 4:24, & John 4:44); a fact which greatly enhances the potency of the events here relayed.
2Any relatively devout Jew in Jesus’ day who was familiar with the Hebrew Bible would have known that health was considered to be a reward for obedience to God, and that sickness was often a punishment for a lack of the same (see Deuteronomy 28:60-61 et al). Indeed, it was a maxim among the Jews that no afflicted person could be healed until his or her sins had been absolved. This knowledge is hinted at in John 9:2 (when Jesus’ disciples asked him “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”) and was even espoused by Jesus himself in John 5:14b (“Sin no more, so that nothing worse happens to you”).
3According to the Pharisees and other Judaic leaders, there were three primary ways via which a person could commit the sin of blasphemy – attributing the unworthy to God, denying the worthy of God, or personally claiming to possess an attribute or a power or an authority that was exclusively God’s. It was of this latter form that Jesus’ was here accused, an accusation that he had to have known his actions would provoke. After all, it was well-accepted at the time that a current illness was often indicative of a previous sin, it was well-established in Scripture that “one who justifies the wicked [is] an abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 17:15 – also Proverbs 24:24), it was demanded by the Law that all sins be cleansed (and thereby all forgiveness be effectuated) by sacrifices made to God via the priesthood (see Leviticus 27:2-8 et al), and it was even a part of the Oral Law that only God could forgive sins (see Mishnah Yom 8:9).
4The term “Son of Man” was almost exclusively used by Jesus in the Gospels to refer to humanity in general – not himself. This is subtly-yet-powerfully the case in Matthew 8:20 (especially when juxtaposed with Matthew 19:29), Matthew 12:8, Matthew 18:11, & Matthew 26:64 – and it is quite flagrantly the case in Matthew 16:28 (where Jesus in no uncertain terms states that “there are even some standing here who will not taste death before they see [their] Son of Man coming [from their inner] Kingdom”). Indeed, the one time in the Bible where “the Son of Man” unequivocally refers to the lone Messiah is found in Daniel 7:13-14, where said “savior” is pointedly seen receiving the very same rewards that Jesus himself rejects when offered the same by Satan in Matthew 4:1-10 & Luke 4:1-11 (see also John 6:15).
;