Mark: Faith That Heals

A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, "If you are willing, you can make me clean."

[41] Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" [42] Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured.

[43] Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: [44] "See that you don't tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them." [45] Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.

[2:1] A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. [2] So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. [3] Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. [4] Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. [5] When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."

[6] Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, [7] "Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?"

[8] Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, "Why are you thinking these things? [9] Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? [10] But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. . . ." He said to the paralytic, [11] "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." [12] He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this!"

God wants to be trusted. He is ultimately trustworthy and faithful—more so than any person. And He wants us to trust Him, to believe that He is who He says He is. These two stories today highlight the role of faith in our relationship with Him.

The plight of lepers in Jesus’ day was really harsh.[1] The word translated leprosy in both the Old and New Testaments referred not only to the disease we know as leprosy today, but also to any other infectious skin disease. Leprosy itself has several forms, but the most common of them destroys the nerve endings in the extremities, so that people would severely hurt themselves, but feel no pain. Muscles waste away; tendons contract until the hands become like claws. The person develops ulcers on their hands and feet; fingers and toes, and then whole hands and feet may essentially rot off their body. It might take 20 – 30 years for the disease to finally kill the victim. It’s a horrible way to die.

Because this and other skin ailments were thought to be contagious, the law said that the afflicted person had to be quarantined from the rest of society. They were required to live outside the city walls, in leper colonies. Whenever they came into the city, they had to have torn clothes, a bare head, a covering of some sort over their upper lip, and they had to constantly cry out, “Unclean! Unclean!” so that no one would inadvertently bump into them. They weren’t even supposed to approach or talk to anyone else. As far as the law was concerned, they were completely cut off from society.

Think for a minute what that must have felt like. Think how lonely, how isolated this man must have felt. Teens sometimes get to feeling like no one likes them, like they have some kind of social disease, but they are not required to dress funny and verbally announce to the world that they are “unclean.” No one wanted this man around; they made wide circles around him to avoid touching him.

And yet, Jesus touched him. Mark 1:41, “Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.” Babies, if they are not cuddled, even if they are fed and changed, will fail to thrive physically. They just don’t develop normally without compassionate human touch. Single adults sometimes struggle with this, because they do not get touched in love nearly enough. This man had not had any physical contact with another human being for perhaps years. Which is why Jesus touched him. He was filled with compassion for the man’s plight—both his physical condition, and his social and emotional situation. We have plenty of other instances where Jesus healed without touching the person—sometimes even at a distance. But here, the man needed the touch as much as the healing, so Jesus gives him that.

The motive for this powerful act, Mark says, is that Jesus was filled with compassion. I believe that we here at Faith Church need to demonstrate more of the compassion of Christ to the hurting people in our community. There are unwed teenage mothers, and alcoholics, and meth addicts, and homeless people, and kids who need a mentor, and people with mental illness, and those with AIDS, and on and on. By the way, I think that for the Christian community today, AIDS is very similar to leprosy in Jesus’ day. We think HIV-positive people are “unclean.” We point out that the HIV virus is transmitted through sexual contact, and we feel justified in concluding that these people must have done something wrong. Just as leprosy in biblical times was considered the curse of God, so I have heard of Christians who denounce AIDS patients as suffering the judgment of God for their sin. A person with AIDS is seen as altogether different from a person with a disease like meningitis or tuberculosis—there is something “unclean” about them that makes us want to avoid them rather than help them. Brothers and sisters, we need to get over this. Regardless of how they got AIDS, they need the love and compassion of Christ, and the salvation He can bring them. We need to figuratively touch some rotting flesh in the name of Christ to show His compassion to hurting people around us.

In Leviticus 14, Moses spelled out the process a person was to go through if they had been cured of leprosy. It was a very involved process, stretching over eight days, and included two different animal sacrifices and other offerings. When all those things were done, then the priest would pronounce the person clean, and he could re-enter the society. So Jesus tells this man to show himself to the priest and do all that, as a way of proving that he really was cured.

But he was not to tell anyone else that he had been healed. This is always confusing to us, because we would want to tell everybody, and we can’t understand why Jesus would tell people not to talk about their healings, but He said that to lots of folks He healed. We have a clue in this passage as to why Jesus might have said that. It says that the man went out and began to spread the news everywhere, and as a result, the crowds began to mob Jesus wherever He went. He couldn’t go into a town without getting mobbed, so He had to stay out of the towns and villages, in more isolated areas. So one reason why Jesus tells people He healed not to talk about it is just because it created a hindrance to His ministry, which was not exclusively healing, but also preaching, and mentoring the disciples. [2]

All throughout the gospels, we see that Jesus heals in response to faith. We’ll look at another example of that in just a minute. But the question is, What do we have to believe in order to elicit the healing power of Jesus? Do we have to believe that He will heal us, or only that He can heal us? In Mark 11:24, Jesus says, “…whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Is that the universal rule, then? Do we have to believe so strongly that God is going to answer our prayer that it’s as though we have already received it? And if so, how do we get to that place? I know Christians who spend a lot of time and energy trying to talk themselves into this attitude. Is that what’s required?

This story is encouraging to me. Mark 1:40, “A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean.’” He doesn’t know God’s will. He is not presumptuous, He does not assume Jesus will heal him; he’s not confident of that at all. He’s not doing a lot of self-talk, or quoting Old Testament Scriptures about how God answers prayer. He is just absolutely sure that if Jesus wants to, He can. And Jesus does heal him. Apparently, that’s all it takes.

I find that extremely encouraging. Because while I am always confident that God can answer my prayers, I am not always sure that what I’m asking for is in His will. To be perfectly honest with you, there have been many times when I was “sure” that my request was the sort of thing that God would want to do—it was consistent with Scripture, with His character, it would get Him glory, my motives were as pure as they ever are—and yet God didn’t grant what I asked for. How do you deal with that sort of thing? I think you just have to say that God has His reasons, and we don’t always get to know what they are. So that’s why this passage is so encouraging to me, because it says I don’t have to know the will of God with certainty with regard to my request—the leper didn’t know if Jesus was willing or not. But He healed him anyway. The man’s faith was not so deficient as to prevent Jesus from doing a miracle for him. “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” “I am willing; be clean.” Praise God.

A few days later, when Jesus came back to Capernaum, the people heard that he had returned home. This was probably Peter’s home, where Jesus had been before, when he taught and healed Peter’s mother-in-law, and cast out demons. Houses in that day were usually not very big, consisting of just a few small rooms. They were built of stone walls, with a flat roof. The roof was made by laying wooden beams from one wall to another, about three feet apart. This space was then filled in with branches, reeds, etc. running crosswise to the timbers and mud was packed down on it which hardened to form a solid barrier, maybe a foot or more thick. Often, grass would be growing on the top. The roof of the house was sometimes used as a place of rest and quiet, so they would often run a set of stairs up to it on the outside of the house.

So Jesus is in Peter’s house, teaching, and a crowd gathers, first filling up the inside of the small house, and then spilling out the front door and all around; the people were crowding in close, trying to hear. Four men hear that Jesus is in town, and they immediately think of their paralyzed friend. Why don’t we take him to Jesus? He healed lots of people the last time He was here; maybe He will heal him. So they carry him to the house where Jesus was, but when they get there, they discover that the crowd is just packed tightly around the door. They try to make their way through, but everybody is so eager to hear what Jesus is saying that nobody wants to move to let them in.

Lesser men would have stopped there. O well. I guess we can’t get to Jesus today. Sorry friend; maybe another day. But not these guys! They just know Jesus can help their friend, so they are determined to find a way to get him to the Teacher. Alright, let’s see: what are our options? Windows? Too small. Hey—what about the roof? What about it? We could dig through it and lower him down to Jesus. You’re nuts! No, wait, it could work! But we’ll need some tools to dig through the roof with, and some rope to lower him down. OK, let’s fan out and see what we can get from the neighbors. Hang in there, buddy-- we’ll be right back when we’ve got the stuff. Let’s go!

[BRING BOY UP THE BACK BALCONY STAIRS, ALREADY WRAPPED IN THE HAMMOCK] So then, armed with their rope and tools, they carry their paralyzed friend up the steps onto the roof. They make a calculated guess about where Jesus is sitting in the house, and pick a spot in the roof and start digging. At first, it may not have been all that noticeable to the people inside the house, but as they get through to the bottom of the roof, dirt and debris start falling on the people below. What do you think Peter, the owner of the house, thought about this? You can imagine a few choice words being exchanged with the men on the roof as the dirt continued to fall on the people below!

When they had cleared a space, the men tied ropes to the man’s mat, and lowered him down between the beams. [5^TH GRADE BOY LYING IN A HAMMOCK, LOWERED OVER THE BALCONY WITH ROPES. START LOWERING THE BOY NOW; JM KEEP TALKING AS PEOPLE ARE DISTRACTED] I know Jesus was the master teacher, but it must have been hard, even for Him, to keep the people’s attention when there were all these distractions going on. Everybody in the house was looking up, brushing dirt and branches off their heads, suddenly they were all talking at once, wondering what was going on.

[JM WALK OVER TO THE BOY, OPEN UP THE TARP, BOY REMAINS MOTIONLESS. JM LOOK UP AT THE PEOPLE WHO LOWERED HIM] When the man had finally gotten all the way down to the floor, and people had made room for him, Jesus looked up, saw the men peering down through the hole they had just made in the roof, looked at the man and said, "Son, your sins are forgiven."[3] [BOY REMAINS MOTIONLESS]

Now some teachers of the law were sitting there. Remember them? They’re the professional teachers, the legal theological scholars of the day. They’re thinking to themselves, "Why does this guy talk like that? He's blaspheming! Who can forgive sins besides God?"

Jesus knew what they were thinking, and he said to them, "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to this man, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? But in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. . . ." "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." [BOY GETS UP, GATHERS UP THE TARP, AND RUNS OUT, SHOUTING “HALLELUJAH!”.]

The teachers of the law ask, “Who can forgive sins?” That’s a good question. We might start with our human relationships. Who can forgive me when I sin against you? You can. Your wife can’t; your parents can’t. If I have sinned against you, you are the only person who can forgive me.

But if you do, that only solves the human, horizontal relationship between us—it does not remove my true guilt before God. All sin is ultimately against God, for at least two reasons.

The first is that when we sin, no matter what it is, whether it is something as serious as adultery or as trivial as gossip, we violate God’s law. He’s the Creator of this world, so He has the right to decide how it should be run. He has gone to a lot of trouble to tell us in the Bible how we should live, and when we fail to do that, we are breaking His law, just as surely as speeding and fraud break the laws of our society. But it’s more than just a legal infraction; there is also a personal element to our sin. King David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and ordered her husband murdered, both of which were violations of the Ten Commandments. After the prophet Nathan accused him of his sin, David wrote, Psalm 51:4, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight....” He realized that his sin, which was against Bathsheba and Uriah initially, was ultimately against God.

The second reason our sin is ultimately against God is because every person we hurt in our sin is someone made in His image. When the risen Christ accosted Saul on the road to Damascus, He said, Acts 9:4, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" Saul was hunting down Christians and putting them in prison, but Jesus took it personally. He said, what you are doing to them, you are doing to me. We see much the same thing in Matthew 25:45, which is a picture of the Great White Throne judgment at the end of time. Jesus will call the entire world before His throne and separate the people like a shepherd separates the sheep and the goats. As He decides their eternal fate, He will say, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did (or did not do) for one of the least of these, you did (or did not do) for me.” When we hurt someone made in God’s image, we personally offend God.

So now we come back to the question, “Who can forgive sins?” On the human level, we can forgive those who offend us, and that is important for us to be reconciled. But on the spiritual level, only God can forgive sins in the ultimate sense. Only God can remove that guilt we incur through our sin.

Which brings us back to the teachers of the law. They have the right question: “Who can forgive sins besides God?” Ultimately, no one; only God can do that. They have the right question; they just can’t accept the right answer, because it seemed so preposterous to them that this man standing before them, with the paralyzed man at His feet, could possibly be the God who alone can forgive sins.

But that is exactly the point Jesus is making. He does have the authority to forgive sins, and to prove it to them, he heals the man. They can’t see the forgiveness happening, but they can see the man get up and walk out in plain view of everybody. I love Jesus’ question: “Which is easier: to say 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? One is just as easy to say as the other. And for Jesus, to say it is to do it! He has the authority to impose His will on the man’s physical body and make it whole and well, and He has the authority to remove his guilt in a way that no one on earth can.

By healing the man, which they could all see, Jesus proves that He has the authority to forgive sins, which they cannot see, which proves that He is God in human form.

Mark 2:5, When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven.” Whose faith did He see? When He looked up, He saw the four friends, peering down through the hole they had just dug in the roof, probably grinning from ear to ear. It’s likely that the paralytic also had faith, or he wouldn’t have allowed them to go through with this fool stunt. But the friends certainly had faith, too. They would not have gone through all that trouble if they had not believed that Jesus could heal their friend. For them, it was not a fool stunt; it was an act of faith, trusting in the compassion and the power of Jesus. Here are three qualities in their faith.

Their faith is persistent. It’s not a flash in the pan, Oh, that would have been a good idea; too bad it didn’t work out. Rather, they say, Oh, the crowd is blocking the door? OK, let’s try the roof. And it couldn’t have been easy to dig through the roof, either, with the branches all through the mud dried hard by the sun. How long would it take to dig a hole big enough to get their friend through it? They were persistent and determined, because they believed.

They were also creative. One of the things I love about Barbie is that she is so good at coming up with creative alternatives. If one plan doesn’t work, she is never discouraged like I am; she sees it as a fun challenge to see how many other ways she can find to make it work. Even when she has found one, she’ll keep brainstorming to see if she can come up with a better one. That’s the way these men were. I seriously doubt that they had ever seen anyone dig a hole in a roof in order to lower someone through it. That was really out-of-the-box thinking, but it was sparked by their faith in Jesus.

It wasn’t easy carrying this man around like that. We don’t know how big he was, but he was almost certainly bigger than RYAN / TIM whom we just lowered from the balcony! And he was dead weight. They didn’t have wheel chairs then; they just had to pick him up and carry him. And then when they got to the house, it was no small effort to carry him up the stairs to the roof. These guys spent themselves for their friend. And then they might have anticipated spending a good deal more to repair the roof! But they didn’t care what it cost them; they were willing to sacrifice their time, their effort, their money in order to get their friend to Jesus.

What about our faith, friends? What lengths will we go to in order to get our friends to Jesus? Whatever their needs are, we are the people God wants to use to get them to Him. Let’s be like these four men: let’s be persistent, and creative, and sacrificial in our faith. Let’s not give up just because it’s hard. Let’s keep trying new ways to approach them, new questions to ask them. Let’s spare no expense to get them to Jesus, so He can say to them, “Your sins are forgiven.”

[1] This description taken from William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), p.43ff.

[2] Another reason why Jesus may have said that is because He was on a very tight timetable. He had to die, and He had to die on a certain day—on the day before Passover, a couple of years from then. So He didn’t want the opposition to Him to peak before the right time. He knew that the more famous He became, the more the religious leaders would hate Him, and they might try to kill Him before His time. In fact, there are a couple of instances in John’s gospel where people do try to grab Him, but He manages to slip away. So Jesus may have also been trying to pace things so that the opposition to Him would reach its peak at just the right time.

[3] Why Does Jesus Forgive His Sins? cf. Num 12:10; 2 Chron 26:2; John 9:2

When the man is so obviously paralyzed, why does Jesus forgive his sins? His immediate and obvious need is to be healed. He has a physical problem, not a spiritual one. Why did Jesus pronounce his sins forgiven, when He did not do that with the leper in the previous story? Did this man’s sin cause his paralysis?

We don’t have answers to a lot of those questions. The Bible does indicate that sometimes sin is the cause of physical illness, as for example when Moses’ sister Miriam was stricken with leprosy because of her rebellion against Moses (Num 12:10). But then we have other instances where there is no connection between illness and sin, as for example the man born blind in John 9. The disciples ask Jesus, Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? and Jesus says “neither.” So we don’t know why the man is paralyzed; we don’t know if his sin had anything to do with it. But why, then, did Jesus choose to pronounce his sins forgiven first, when he had such an obvious physical need?

It’s true that forgiveness was the man’s greatest need, but that was true for the leper in the previous story, too, and all the other people Jesus healed without saying anything about their sin. I think the reason Jesus made a point of it this time may have been because of the presence of the teachers of the law. These men are not there as supporters of Jesus; they are there as spies, watching to see if they can catch Him doing something wrong. In their hearts they are suspicious of this man Jesus who teaches with such authority, unlike themselves. I think Jesus knows they are there, and deliberately does something that will force them to show their hand.

[4] These three qualities of their faith suggested by Kent R. Hughes, Mark, vol. 1 (Westchester, IL: Good News Publishers, 1989), p.63f.