Mark 2:1-12
“Forgiveness or Healing?”
February 26, 2012 - First Sunday in Lent

         I hadn’t moved in a long time. I mean that literally. Ever since the dark night when I stumbled off my roof in a drunken stupor, I couldn’t move. When my head hit the ground and I heard my neck snap, I thought I would die, but I didn’t. For a long time I wished I had. From that moment I couldn’t feel my hands or my legs or any part of my body but my face, which I couldn’t even turn to look where I wanted to see.

         The next weeks and months were agony and humiliation. It became clear that I wasn’t going to die, but neither was I ever going to move again. I found myself a helpless burden. I lay on a mat in the corner of my mother’s house. To my shame and disgrace she cared for me like I was once more an infant, putting food in my mouth and turning and cleaning my spiritless flesh when I fouled myself.

         In my heart I knew why. I was paying for my sins. The drunk which led to my fall was hardly the first. As soon as I was old enough to drink wine, I loved it far too much. At an age barely past my entrance into manhood, I began to anticipate the cup poured with the evening meal. I would always accept a second or third, more if I could get it.

         My family began to hide the wineskins, to tell me there was no more left. But I became very clever at sniffing out the leather bottles hid behind a cupboard or beneath a pile of dirty clothes waiting for my mother to wash. Eventually I found I could sneak into a neighbor’s home while everyone was out in the heat of the day and “borrow” a cup or two from their skins. Of course they began to notice and suspicious glances were turned my way whenever I went to synagogue or the market.

         For awhile I controlled myself. I learned my father’s trade of thatching roofs and took a wife. I built a little house and we had children. The price of strong drink came from my own wages and I could not afford much. I loved Abigail and our little son and daughter too much to waste the money which put meat and bread on the table for them.

         Then I met friends who seemed to like wine as much as I. They seemed to have plenty and they shared it with me. But before long, I realized that I was expected to buy the skins for our next night of indulgence. I had only a copper coin or two in my purse, but I remembered the little treasure Abigail kept wrapped in a cloth in a clay jar in our home. Her family gave us ten small silver coins as a wedding gift. She held them against them day when we might have more children and need a larger house.

         I told myself she never looked at those coins, that she wouldn’t miss just one, that I’d replace it with what I would earn doing just a few more roofs. So I took one silver coin and quietly bought a half dozen leather bottles of wine. My friends all slapped me on the back and told me what a fine fellow I was. It was grand and we had some merry nights for awhile.

         But I suppose you can guess part of what came next. That coin was not the last one to disappear from that little pot on the shelf. My friends and I always needed another wineskin and I always found an excuse to take just one more bit of silver from Abigail’s precious hoard. And somehow I never earned enough to put any back.

         One morning I awoke from a particularly merry night to find Abigail kneeling beside me. Her countenance had a glow and for the first time in awhile I noticed that her belly had a familiar curve to it. She told me what I had just realized. Another child was on the way. I shook the drunken haze from my head and put my arms around her and kissed her. Then she did something that struck cold fear into me. She slipped away and stood and took down that little jar. “It’s time,” she said, “to make use of this. We need a bigger house if there is to be room for the new child.”

         All I could do was stare in dismay as she lifted the folded cloth from the jar and made to shake it out in her hand. Only a single tiny flash of copper fell into her palm, my one idiotic attempt at putting back what I’d stolen from my own family. Her eyes lifted to mine and saw through me in a moment. The mouth that had kissed me with so much love twisted with astonishment and then hurt and then anger.

         She cursed me for a fool. She screamed that her namesake in the Scriptures was no worse off married to the fool Nabal than she was married to me. She wept and asked me how I could take and drink away our future together. She grabbed my shoulders and shook me with all the force in her small body.

         Then, God was the witness, I discovered that drunkenness and lying and thievery from my own flesh and blood were not the worst of my sins. I grew hot with anger myself and I drew back my hand and struck that dear face with all my force. Abigail fell back from me and lay still on the straw floor. I knelt beside her and wailed.

         She lived. Neighbors came running and shouldered me aside and ministered to her. They carried her away to her parent’s house. I learned later that she finally woke from the faint caused by my blow. But there was more to her injury. The baby came that night, months before its time, came into the world still and lifeless.

         So it was because of all those sins—and even more I have not time to tell you—that I could not move. She and children stayed in her parents’ home. I was alone. The only consolation I had was the demon which caused it all in the first place.. I sat on the roof of my house and drained the last two skins of wine I had. When I finally rose unsteadily to walk down the steps along the outside wall, I turned toward the wrong side of the house, tripped over the parapet and landed as I’ve told you, unmoving and unable to move.

         My supposed friends could not believe the story they heard about me. They tried to come and see me as I lay there on a mat in my mother’s home, but she cursed them and barred them from the door. For months that’s how it was. I lay alone in the dimness of that house, barely alive, contemplating all the sins which put me there.

         Then came a day when my wild friends came knocking at my mother’s door once again. There was something in the gentleness of their rapping and something in the urgency of their pleas to open the door that melted her anger. This time she let them in to stand around my mat. They bent down beside me and began to tell me about a Man.

         There was this prophet, they said, a great prophet who came from Nazareth. Despite myself, I chuckled. After weeks alone, this was great humor. A prophet from that tiny village? My friends were joking with me, I thought.

         No, they said, we’ve seen Him, we’ve heard Him. We’ve been out in the country following the crowds that gather around Him. He teaches, they said, like no teacher we’ve ever heard. Then one of them quietly whispered, “And He heals.” I wasn’t sure I’d heard it right, but then they all began to tell me stories. Children cured of fevers, lepers cleansed of their sores, even crazy men carrying demons set free. Even confined there in the dark, I saw in my mind’s eye the wonders they described.

         That’s when they began to encircle my mat and take it by the edges. “What are you doing?” I cried as they hoisted me between them. “We’re taking you to Him,” they shouted in unison and moved for the door. My mother had heard all this and at first moved to block them, but then she threw her hands in the air, looked to heaven, and stood aside.

         As we went through the doorway I felt the sun hit my face. I felt the breeze on my cheeks for the first time in many long days. Whatever came of this, I was enjoying those little blessings more than I ever had before.

         I felt them stop. In the edges of my vision I caught the impression of throngs of people. I heard many excited voices. They were gathered around a house. “He’s inside,” my friends told me. They began to try to press through the crowd. “Move, move,” they called, “our friend needs to see the Teacher.” But everyone felt the same urgency as my friends. A carried child’s hand brushed my face and I felt the heat of fever. I heard wracking coughs all around and the weeping of mothers. No one moved to let my pallet through.

         The wildness which drove my friends to their excesses of drink now drove them in another way. Walking with my bed around the house they found the staircase to the roof unblocked. Of course it was. What everyone wanted was in the house, not on top of it. But with much cursing and maneuvering they began to carry me up there. At first I felt anxious about rolling off the mat and down those stairs, but then realized I could not be any worse off than I already was.

         Once on the roof, they debated a moment, then formed a plan. I may have put that roof together myself, so I knew what they were doing. I heard them take sticks and begin to dig and scrape away the hardened mud. That’s how we covered the crisscrossing wooden beams and straw thatch of a roof to make a smooth floor on which one could sit and enjoy the cool night air… and a few skins of wine as I knew too well.

         The dirt dug through, they began to pull up the thatch and push aside the sticks that supported it. I thought to myself what a mess they were making of a perfectly good roof. I still didn’t quite realize what they meant to do until they started tearing strips from the hems of their robes and tying them together before fastening them to the corners of my mat. “No!” I began to say, but they weren’t listening.

         Suddenly, though I couldn’t move, I found myself moving like a bird descending through the air. The four of them each took a corner and a makeshift rope and began to lower me down through the roof.

         Beneath I heard the buzzing voices of the crowd who had managed to get inside the house. I could hear them push and shove, all of them calling a name, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” But then one glanced up and grew still. Then another, and another, until quiet began to take the place of noise in that room. I couldn’t see, but they must have pressed back and away as my bed came down, because in a moment I landed, a little roughly, on the floor. My friends must have dropped me the last half cubit as their ropes ran short.

         I lay there looking up my eyes turning this way and that to see who was there and what would happen next. I saw my friends peering down through hole in the roof above. Then a Man stepped into my field of vision. He looked very ordinary, but I realized this was Jesus, the prophet whom my crazy friends had brought me to see.

         The truth is I had no great expectations. Fevers and skin sores and even demons are one sort of thing, but a broken neck and paralysis are another. I assumed this Nazarene prophet would try to heal me, say some special prayers or whatever, but I had no real hope that it would make any difference.

         But Jesus first looked up at my friends and then down at me and said the last thing I expected. No words of healing, no waving of His hands to invoke an angel, nothing like that. Instead, He said very firmly and emphatically, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

         My eyes flew wide at those words. How could He know? How had He looked into my very heart and discerned the brokenness so much worse than the brokenness of my body? I was a drunkard, a liar, a thief who stole from his own children, and worst of all, the abuser of my wife and murderer of my own unborn child. How could he know? And how could He possibly offer me forgiveness for all that?

         Maybe I had hoped just a bit on the crazy journey down the street and up to the roof. My friend’s stories about Jesus fired my imagination. Maybe, just maybe, He could help me. But I expected to be disappointed. What amazed me was that I was not. When Jesus told me my sins were forgiven, I felt no disappointment at all. I was still a paralytic. I still could not move. I still expected a dismal life ahead. But inside that body which had felt nothing for so long I felt this: the absolute conviction that it was true. I was forgiven… by God.

         Tears began to drip from my eyes. I think those standing around us must have thought they were tears of frustration and despair. Jesus could not heal him, they must have supposed, so He offered him the pointless assurance of forgiveness. I’m sure that’s what they thought, but I was sure they were wrong. I really had been forgiven. That’s why I wept. For the first time in my life, despite my broken body, I felt healed and whole.

         There were scribes there. Unlike me, they could read and write. They studied the Scriptures. For them, Jesus’ words sparked an argument. With my limbs so useless, the senses I did have were more acute. I could hear them muttering, “What does this fellow think He’s saying? Blasphemy! Only God can forgive sins!” They were angry with Jesus and even as uneducated as I was, I understood. How could this Man forgive my sins? What right did He have to pronounce absolution on the life I’d wasted and for the dear people I had harmed? Weren’t they right? Wouldn’t it have to be God who forgave?

         Yet I had been forgiven. I felt it. I knew it. My mind made the connection between what I knew in my heart and the truth the scribes spoke from the sacred writings. I began to realize what all this must mean about who Jesus is. But then He spoke again, this time to the scribes. He also knew what they murmured about. He asked them why they were debating such a question, then asked them a question, “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’?”

         He paused only a moment for them to ponder His query, then continued to speak to them saying, “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” Then He broke off and turned away from the scribes and back to me. He looked down and, in that same gentle, firm voice with which He had forgiven my sins, told me “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.”

         You might expect me to say that what followed was the most incredible moment of my life. For I did stand up. I did pick up the mat on which I’d lain for so many months. I did walk out the door between the crowds who drew back and made way for me. I walked! Yet it was not the greatest thing which ever happened to me. That had already happened, just a few moments earlier, when Jesus said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

         I often ponder it, you know. How would I have felt, what would my life have been like if Jesus had only said one thing to me? What if He had only forgiven my sins, but left my body as it was? Or, what if He had done what my friends had expected and healed me as soon as He had seen me, not saying anything about my sins? What would I have chosen, had the choice been offered me, forgiveness or healing?

         You may guess, I hope, that my answer is always the same, always clear. You may think it’s easy for me to say, with my body whole and healthy now many years later. But it’s the truth. I would choose forgiveness. I’ve heard and learned much more about Jesus now. The scribes were right. Only God can forgive sins. And Jesus forgave my sins. He really did. That’s why now I call Him Lord. And why I would still always choose His forgiveness first.

         They tell me that Jesus died, crucified by the Romans, a horrible death, His body was far more tormented and wounded than mine ever was. They also tell me that He rose again, alive and whole and full of glory. And that gives me confidence to say, though I cannot prove it, that even if I had only been forgiven and not healed that day, I would still one day be healed.

         Yet if, back then, I had only been healed, if Jesus had merely mended my body, I would still be a broken man. I would still be a drunkard and murderer. But I received the best gift first, the grace of God’s forgiveness through this Man Jesus that they call the Christ. And I am confident that the second gift, the gift of healing, would have come to me in God’s time, whether it was that day or not.

         We Christians, that’s what we call ourselves now, believe that just as Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of God, we will all be raised. With our sins forgiven and our hearts made right with God, we have a sure hope that all our sicknesses will be healed, both of soul and body.

         My prayer is that you make the same choice. Don’t be disappointed in this man Jesus if your body is not healed right now. It may be. You or those around you may need a sign like my friends and the scribes did. But the better gift, the best gift, is yours already. In His death and resurrection, He has forgiven my sins and your sins. Accept His forgiveness. Then, as He did for me, He will one day make you completely whole.

         Shalom.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj