Whole—A Sermon on Mark 2:1-12

This sermon is from Cedar Lane (Tullahoma, TN) on January 29, 2017. It's a sermon about the healing of the paralyzed man, ("the Paralytic", as the old translations say). It's part of a sermon series on Mark. The video below is essentially the audio of the sermon with the slides. The manuscript below has been revised by evaluating the transcript of the recording. 

How did you get here?

How did you get here?I want us to stop and reflect on that question for a moment, despite all you smart-alecks who just said to yourselves, "In the car." You know who you are.I want you to think for a second about how you got here, to think about the story that led to you coming to Jesus. What led you to come into this community of faith, or to come to this place in your life? Everybody's got a story.There's an old story in our family a about my great-great-grandfather who when he was a little boy had a head to parents who were ahead Ted serious respiratory illnesses were common back in those generations and they lived over on the east coast and they made the decision, under medical advice to make for their respiratory problems they would make these trips over to over to Texas and they made this journey several times. On one of these my great-great-great-grandmother fell so ill that she did not recover from her sickness and she died and her husband was so struck with grief and his own illness that on the journey back east he just laid in the back of this carriage that was pulled by the two horses.My my great-great-grandfather and his brother, even though they were young boys, were in charge of getting them back home, while their father just laid in the back of the carriage. They asked, "How will we get home? We don't know the way." And he said, "The horses know the way. Let them guide you back." Well, the horses didn't know the way, and so the next five generations of our family lived in North Alabama.Everybody's got a story about how you ended up where you are—that brought you to this moment. The text in Mark that we're looking at opens with a crazy story about how a man came to Jesus. Jesus had been preaching around in the communities around Galilee but he comes back home to Capernaum. When he's there people begin to gather. The house fills up, and there's such a crowd there that it's standing room only all the way out to the door, to the edge of the house.Our story says that there was a man who was paralyzed. We don't get a lot of details about how he came to be like that. Certainly would not have been unusual back in this time for somebody in normal work to suffer terrible injuries. Beyond that, people that have sicknesses and illnesses or birth defects, or for whatever reason their body's broken. The text doesn't really tell us how the man came to be like this, but we know his situation is such that he is paralyzed. He can't walk.Mark says that a group of people bring this paralyzed man to Jesus. Four of them each get a corner of the mat, but it's actually a larger crowd with them. They want to get to the house where Jesus is they can't get inside because it's so crowded in there. They can't find a place among all the people who are already there with Jesus—which is a sad little note in this story.They don't give up, so they climb up on the roof.The carve a little hole in the roof there, and they lower this man down through the roof. Can you imagine it? Jesus is there and all of a sudden the tiles of the ceiling or the thatching or whatever, it starts spreading apart, and you hear the ruckus. Then, all of a sudden, you see some light, and this man is lowered down right there in front of Jesus. What a story about how somebody got to Jesus!Think about the things that brought this man to Jesus. Sicknesses, or injury or whatever it was that caused his paralysis. There's also the the crowd of people. There were the determined friends who were carrying him. Often, that's what it takes, right? How many of you came to Jesus because of the determination of a group of friends, a determined community of people who said, "We're not going to rest until this person gets to Jesus." Sometimes that's what it takes.Some of you came here by way of your own great-great-great grandfather who made a decision about a church, five generations back. Some of you got here because the church served you and your family in some way. Some of you are here because a coworker just kept getting into your ear. That's just the surface of the story—there are all sorts of things at work to bring you to Jesus, to bring you to the place where you could be healed. To the place where you could be whole.

Unexpected

We might imagine the story going on from here something like this: Jesus sees them and he would say say to them "Be healed!", but this story takes a turn that is unexpected. It is a moment that we would not predict. Jesus doesn't look at the man and just give him the healing which he and certainly his friends have sought. Instead, Jesus looks at the man it says that Jesus sees the faith of the ones who have brought him. His faith, too, I'm sure, but Jesus notes "their faith", in the plural. Then, Jesus says to the paralyzed man, "Son your sins are forgiven." He seems pretty content to leave it at that. So what do we have now? We've got a man, still paralyzed, who has received forgiveness—not really the thing that he came for.You know when I think about this story, I think that Mark wants to make it clear that Jesus knows more than we do. Jesus knows more about how the things that are broken got broken.He knows more about what's really wrong, and he sees what really needs to be fixed. Jesus knows more about what it means to be whole for me than I could ever imagine. Jesus knows more about what it means for me to be whole then all those other people who were part of bringing me to Jesus might even imagine.Jesus has a more of a perception about what our brokenness really looks like than we do. We have some understanding of it, but Jesus sees the full scope of it. Jesus gives the man a greater and deeper healing than he even realized he needed.But you just know, it wasn't just about the paralyzed man. Jesus also perceives some other level of brokenness in the crowd as well. I don't really know how that man reacted to Jesus's forgiveness, but the text does tell us how the other people in the crowd reacted. It says that they start muttering to each other, saying things like "Who does this guy think he is? We know that it is only God who can forgive sins so what is this guy saying? That's blasphemy, for him to take on the authority that belongs to God alone—Who does this guy think he is?"When they challenge each other in that way it says "Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these things among themselves." See, it's not just the man that has some kind of hidden unseen bit of brokenness that needs to be healed. Jesus perceived the brokenness in the community too. He sees that these people are more concerned about their standards about the way that people should talk about God than they are about whether this man actually receive forgiveness or not. He perceives that their religious sensibilities are more important to them than the man on the mat. And so, just like he offered the man the forgiveness that he didn't understand he needed, he's also going to offer to this community a word that they didn't come to hear, either. He looks at them and he says

“Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so 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, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them; so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:8-12, NRSV)

You see, there is a multiple healing taking place in this story. There is the man who is paralyzed, made whole by his body. The thing that he actually came for in the first place finally gets done. But it's also the community's perception of God and God's work in the world that's healed as well. Jesus takes their grumbling, stubborn religiosity and he shows them something new. He offers them a way towards something that's a little bit more whole as well. Jesus, who knows more, is able to perceive exactly what it is that I need and what we need as a community. Jesus gives us what we need on the way to being made whole—very rarely according to our time frame or our expectations about the way it should happen—but Jesus does bring us along towards the journey of being made whole.There is so much of what it means to be a follower of Jesus tucked inside of this story. This is a story about what it means to be laid open by Jesus and for Jesus in his own authoritative way brings us towards a complete and full wholeness, beyond what we could have even imagined. This man that comes in the story, he had people in his life that loves him so much that they were willing to do whatever they could to make his body whole again. He had an amazing group of people who were willing to do something outlandish, foolish for his sake. But in Jesus, he meets the one whose expectation about what it means for him to be whole blows their expectations out of the water. Jesus loves us deeper and has a greater vision for the wholeness and fullness of our lives in our humanity than even the people we know in our lives who love us the most. This man comes to Jesus broken in ways that he doesn't even understand, and Jesus makes him whole in a way that he never could have imagined.[bctt tweet="He comes to Jesus broken in ways he can't understand. He's made whole in ways he never imagined." username="stevenhovater"]

A Taste of Grace

This story also shows us that sometimes grace comes to us in stages. A little forgiveness here, a bit of reconciliation there. Until the last day, Jesus is making us whole step by step. None of us have been made fully whole yet, and yet we can say that many of us have already tasted the grace of God. We've received things like having relationships restored back to us that we thought we lost. We've received forgiveness and the relief that it brings. We've received that taste of God's grace that shows us that we are loved. We've received a part of it, but don't we also all carry with us some bit of brokenness left? It's easy for us to believe that all those things define us for who we are. What was the man's name in the story in mark? "Paralyzed man." The only way we know him is by his brokenness. If that sounds harsh, I'd suggest that for many of us that's how we know ourselves, too."I am guy with an anger problem...""I am the woman with chronic pain issues...""I am the man who can't get along with my brother...""I am the woman who carries a deep grudge against my father who's long ago dead...""I am the person whose marriage is falling apart...""I am the person who doesn't seem to be able to hold down a job..."I am broken and for many of us that's how we know ourselves. Jesus perceives us to be something more. Jesus perceives in us our value, our dignity, our life as the children of God—that we are images of the Divine. Jesus sees in us what we are, what we will be when we are whole—he does not know us only by our brokenness. Our brokenness maybe part of our story, it may be part of the way that we come to Jesus. It is not the whole of our identity.[bctt tweet="Our brokenness may be part of the journey but it is never our destination." username="stevenhovater"] Part of what i want you to hear in this story is Jesus's vision for you as a whole person—in this story this man he has no idea what it means for him to coast or thick to go see Jesus but he comes to find out it comes to claim it comes to own it and then he at the end of the story walk away whole in body, whole in soul, in spirit. When the crowd sees it they see the man and they can't help but say alright that's amazing and we've never seen anything like it. The man who was at the beginning of the story just "the paralyzed man" becomes a living, walking, witness to the power of God at work in Jesus—and so are we.This story challenges us on a lot of fronts, but one of the most profound challenges is that it invites us to think about which crowd we are. There's at least three options. There's the first crowd that is willing to do whatever it takes to get a person to Jesus. There is the other crowd that is so stuck on their religious knowledge that they resent Jesus's healing of the man. Then, there is the crowd at the end— which I guess was partly made up of parts of both of the first two— the crowd that seea what Jesus is doing, is amazed, and then is more ready to experience it themselves.If you permit me just a little bit of imagination, I think we can make up an epilogue to this story. The story leaves off with everybody amazed, but I bet we can trace it out a little further. How would you react if you had seen it? How would you react if you had seen it, and knew somebody else who was sick, who was broken? I bet everybody in that crowd that knew somebody at their home who was laying on a mat—I bet they went and found somebody else to help carry them to Jesus.Amen.