And there people brought to him a paralytic lying on a stretcher.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic,
"Courage, child, your sins are forgiven."
When these friends brought the paralytic to Jesus the condition of his soul was probably not on their minds. Rather, it was more likely that they hoped for a physical healing of the condition that made it impossible for the man to come before Jesus by his own agency. They hoped for an external healing, but Jesus was first and foremost interested in healing the heart. No doubt this inner need was real but invisible to all but the paralytic and Jesus himself.
We all tend to be like the friends of the paralytic, identifying issues that, while genuine, are more superficial, but at the same time remaining ignorant of the deeper realities of the heart. We all also have something in common with the paralytic himself, unable to move toward God by our own power. Only grace brings us to the place of healing, often through the agency of others. Yet when we finally find ourselves in that place Jesus does not simply heal an ability to come and go as we please. Rather, he reaches deeper inside to heal the desires that are opposed to him, the chains that keep us imprisoned and prevent us from responding to his love.
Jesus characteristically works in the world through the faith he finds in people, such as he found in these friends of the paralytic. But in so doing he doesn't necessarily give them exactly what they thought they wanted or that for which they thought they were believing. At the very least something else was given first and the actually desire for concrete healing was delayed. And while Jesus doesn't always work in this way, and isn't bound to any particular order of operations, we shouldn't be surprised if this model that prioritizes the inner life is more the rule than the exception. It may even seem as if the exterior healing was given more as a sign of credibility to others than as a response to the true needs of the paralytic.
Which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven,'
or to say, 'Rise and walk'?
But that you may know that the Son of Man
has authority on earth to forgive sins"–
he then said to the paralytic,
"Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home."
This is not to say that Jesus is disinterested in anything that would conduce to human flourishing. He designed that paralytic's body which, because the world was fallen, was not functioning according to the original blueprint. He had every desire to see him up and walking, running, and leaping for joy. But he also knew that such freedom could be abused, would in fact amount to a liability in the possession of a heart still enslaved to sin. Jesus first set free the heart and then when the body was permitted to follow the heart in true freedom it was a beautiful thing.
He rose and went home.
When the crowds saw this they were struck with awe
and glorified God who had given such authority to men.
We may not know what we truly need or how to express what we really desire in the deepest levels of our hearts. But we are meant to see that Jesus knows and desires to give us precisely that. We don't need to be able to create a plan of salvation and bring it to him merely to carry it out. We only need to bring our needs to him with faith. We can have a firm hope that he himself will give us, not what we think we want, but something better.
No comments:
Post a Comment