Healing & Forgiving a Paralytic – (Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26; Matthew 9:1-8)
Now after some days, Jesus got into a boat and crossed to the other side and came to his own town. When he returned to Capernaum, the news spread that he was at home.On one of those days, while he was teaching, there were Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting nearby (who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem), and the power of the Lord was with him to heal.
So many gathered that there was no longer any room, not even by the door, and Jesus preached the word to them. Some men came bringing to him a paralytic, carried on a stretcher by four of them. They were trying to bring him in and place him before Jesus.
But when they were not able to bring him in because of the crowd, they removed the roof tiles above Jesus. Then, after tearing them out, they lowered the stretcher the paralytic was lying on, right in front of Jesus.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Have courage son[1], your sins are forgiven.”
Time out. This guy’s friends didn’t knock a hole in the roof for him to get his sins forgiven. He was there so this miracle worker could make him walk again. Yet Jesus offers the best miracle: the forgiveness of sins.[2]
Now some of the experts in the law and the Pharisees were sitting there, turning these things over in their minds: “Why does this man speak this way? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
When Jesus saw their reaction, he immediately realized in his spirit that they were contemplating such hostile thoughts, he said to them, “Why are you raising objections within yourselves and thinking such evil things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up, take your stretcher, 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 tell you, stand up, take your stretcher, and go home.”
I’ve noted this before, but it’s worth noting again: Physical miracles serve a greater purpose than simply the healing of the physical infirmity (though that’s also a gift of grace). Ultimately, forgiving sins is a greater act than a healing miracle (“Only God can forgive sins.”) The miracles are meant to reveal the power of God to do the greatest miracles of all in the realms we cannot see: the salvation and restoration of our hearts. Miracles confirm or affirm the Jesus is God, the Messiah, the long-awaited King and Redeemer.[3]
Immediately he stood up before them, picked up the stretcher he had been lying on, and went home in front of them all, glorifying God. Then astonishment seized them all, and they glorified God who had given such authority to men. They were filled with awe, saying, “We have seen incredible things today. We have never seen anything like this!”
No, they haven’t, but wait until they see what comes next.
Notice their awe, though. It wasn’t that a man’s sins were forgiven. It was that he could walk again. And they glorified God “who had given such authority to men.” Glorifying God is good, but they still didn’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. And they seem far more fascinated by the potential to have physical diseases cured than to have their sins forgiven.
So Jesus is going to make the point really clear. He’s about to transform a man whose occupation made him a social pariah—a known sinner and an associate of publicly known sinners.[4]
Calling Matthew/Levi, Eating with Sinners (Mark 2:13-17; Luke 5:27-32; Matthew 9:9-13)
Jesus went out again by the sea. The whole crowd came to him, and he taught them. As he went along, he saw Levi, or Matthew, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax booth. “Follow me,” he said to him. And he got up and followed him, leaving everything behind.
Jewish people viewed tax collectors as traitors. When harvests were bad, it was not unheard of for the population of an entire village to leave town and start a village somewhere else when they heard that a tax collector was coming. Later rabbis sometimes contrasted Pharisees, as the godliest Judeans one would normally meet, with tax collectors, as the most ungodly one would normally meet.[5]
Then Levi gave a great banquet in his house for Jesus, and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table eating with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him.
When the experts in the law and the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they complained to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
When Jesus heard this he said, “Those who are healthy don’t need a physician, but those who are sick do. Go and learn what this saying means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
So Jesus said to Matthew/Levi – while he was sitting in his tax collecting booth – “Follow me.” And Matthew did. And then threw him a banquet and invited all of his sketchy friends.
THE BANQUET
Table fellowship was an important social and even religious event. Eating with someone established a covenant of friendship, which normally also signified approval.[6] Boundaries designated who was included and excluded and outlined religious and ethical obligations toward the participants.
Within Judaism, the Pharisees were well known for the role that table fellowship played in defining their group identities. They consumed food made sacred through various ritual practices such as ceremonial washings or tithing. Participants needed a prior initiation.[7]
In Judaism a scrupulous Pharisee would not eat at the home of a common Israelite (am ha’aretz, “people of the land”), since he could not be sure that the food was ceremonially clean or that it had been properly tithed. To avoid ceremonial defilement, a guest at the home of a Pharisee would be required to wear a ritually clean garment provided by the host.[8]
THE GUESTS
"Sinners" could have just been those who did not share all the observances of the Pharisees, but it seems to be prostitutes, tax collectors, and other people with publicly bad reputations. The term “sinner” (hamartōlos) was often used by the Pharisees to point to an identifiable segment of the people who were opposed to God’s will, but “sinner” is normally used more generally to designate the person who commits acts of sin defined by the law.[9]
The derision that many felt generally for tax collectors was aggravated because they were regarded as ceremonially unclean due to their contact with Gentiles and their compromise of the Sabbath.[10]
Though eating with them entailed dangers of ceremonial defilement, Jesus and his disciples did so. He became known as "a friend of tax collectors and `sinners" (Matthew 11:19).[11] In the minds of the Pharisees, for Jesus to share a meal with these types of persons indicated that he not only included them within his own fellowship, but also that he condoned their behavior.
But that’s in the mind of the Pharisees. Jesus will clarify what’s actually going on.[12]
THE PHARISEES’ BLIND SPOT
I don’t want to completely throw the Pharisees under the bus. They were trying. If Nicodemus is any indication, there were certainly Pharisees who were sincerely dedicated to pursuing the Kingdom of Heaven. As they understood it, getting all 600+ laws right and following all the details added by tradition were the key. But…they couldn’t see the forest for all the trees.
They had lost a key aspect of the heart of God for the world as expressed in Jesus: mercy.
THE PROVERBS JESUS QUOTES
“Those who are healthy don’t need a physician, but those who are sick do.”
Jesus' quotes about the doctor connected his healing ministry with his "healing" of sinners. The physically sick need physical healing; the sinfully sick need the spiritual healing of mercy and forgiveness.
“I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”
This is a quote from Hos. 6:6. In the context of Hosea, God’s people were keeping up on their sacrificial duties but living terrible lives.
Mercy here means benevolence or kindness toward others.
Sacrifices were offerings made to God on account of sin or as an expression of thanksgiving.They were always costly, usually crops or animals. You couldn’t offer a sacrifice without being reminded of what kind of penalty sin deserved.[13]
“I desire mercy and not sacrifice” is a Hebrew way of speaking in which an order of priorities was contrasted with really stark language (like saying you have to hate your family to love God).[14] It means:
"I am more pleased with acts of benevolence and kindness than with a mere external compliance with the duties of religion."
The sense in which Jesus applies it is this:
"You Pharisees are exceedingly tenacious of the "external" duties of religion; but God has declared that he prefers benevolence or mercy to those external duties.” [15]
There is a danger revealed in this story: even those most dedicated to religious observance will fail to see their own need for healing, and thus fail to understand the mercy God has shown them and expects them to pay forward.
The Pharisees were not only in need of the Great Physician, they were nowhere near as healthy as they thought. They had missed the importance of mercy. They didn’t understand how much they themselves still needed it. Jesus was doing more than telling them to be more sympathetic to outcasts; by quoting Hosea, Jesus was connecting them with the apostates of ancient Israel whose worship God rejected.[16]This us why Jesus challenged the Pharisees to "go and learn" what it means to live out what they claim to believe about what kind of people God calls his children to be.
They were baffled that someone demonstrated mercy and compassion to such blatantly obvious sinners while dismissing the "righteous" as hypocrites because they didn't understand that how showing mercy is more important than going through the motions of ritual worship. Your hands can be the most ceremonially clean hands in the history of the world while your heart is desperately unclean.
And what ‘furniture of the heart’ do the Gospel writers spotlight in this incident? The merciful heart of Jesus for sinners that motivates him to go to them. The Pharisees were concerned about righteousness (right living) and holiness (being separate as those called out by God), but they misunderstood what that meant.
Righteousness is not just withdrawal from; it’s active engagement to.
Righteousness is not just walking from sin; it’s walking to sinners.
Holiness isn’t meant to isolate us from the world; it’s meant to preserve us as we go in to the world.
The righteous should be known for modeling Jesus-inspired mercy to the despised, the unclean, the rejected. There is something about that posture that reflects the priority of the heart. Who is today’s tax collector? Who is the person or group of people you think so unclean, so unsavory, so wrong that the best thing to do is isolate them, avoid them, and paint them in the worst light possible when we talk about them? Who are the ones we think don’t deserve the dignity of being treated as image bearers of God?
The Pharisees were known for all the outward conformity that kept them clean through avoidance and distance. They were also known for their haughtiness, isolation, and hardness. They did not understand how God intended all the ceremonial rituals they loved to remind them of their sinfulness, their need, their inability to generate their own righteousness. They were supposed to see the deep and ongoing mercy of a God who continued to offer grace and forgiveness to them. Read Galatians 3. The Law was there to identify sin and constrain its impact. The Law was inspired behavior modification in a world that desperately needed it: it told God’s people what not to do and what to do. They were saved fromand to.
Simultaneously, there had to be a system for forgiveness of sins because nobody has the power to keep the law as God intends for it to be kept. Nobody. Unfortunately, the Jewish leaders thought the solution was to just keep adding details to the Law. And over time, keeping the Law became what we now call “virtue signaling” - publicly displaying how their personal behavior and opinions deserved the praise of people while totally missing the heart of God for all the people they were throwing under the bus.
These distortions of what God intended for the Law are tragic, because neither Hosea nor Jesus were saying God desired mercy and NOT sacrifice. The sacrificial system was put in place by God. The Law was from God. They were good things. It was just that if doing the rituals and sacrifices did not lead to a righteous heart of mercy that guided holy hands of mercy, the sacrifices were wasted.
There are times when the prophets told the Israelites that their sacrifices were a stench in the nostrils of God because their hypocrisy was so bad. They thought going through the motions in the areas that impressed their community would appease God.
Nope. He wasn’t a pagan God to be bribed, and he wasn’t impressed by the pious holiness that impressed people. He was a holy God to be worshipped with heart, soul, mind and strength.[i] Jesus quoted Hosea 6:6 to them. Here are some excerpts about what’s going on with God’s people from Hosea 5:
There are those who turn justice into bitterness and cast righteousness to the ground… There are those who hate the one who upholds justice in court and detest the one who tells the truth. You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain…
For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins. There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts…
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream…
Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy on the remnant of Joseph.
God is serious about religious hypocrisy. He doesn’t want us to go through the motions of worship to Him if they are not accompanied by merciful actions to others. Both are good; both are deeply intertwined.
And then notice… Did you see how tax collectors were called out in Hosea 5? And then Jesus quotes Hosea 6 to defend feasting with a tax collector whom he had just called to be a disciple? That, friends, is called “making a point.” The God who demanded justice on oppressive taxation demonstrates through Jesus that God extends mercy toward those on whom justice was going to roll over like a river.
Sacrifice without mercy is no acceptable sacrifice. To love sinners is a better fulfilling of the law than to stand aloof from them.[17]
So, let’s note what Jesus did and didn't do by eating with sinners and scandalizing the Pharisees.
He feasted with them without fraternizing in their sins. Interesting: Jesus was without honor in his hometown, but sat in a place of honor with the despised and unclean. He didn’t help Matthew collect unjust taxes; he didn’t enable whatever it was he and the other guests were doing. He wasn’t there to tell them their lives were just fine. But he did eat a meal of friendship. They were, after all, created in God’s image, and he was there not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.[18] All of Matthew’s sinner friends were introduced to Jesus’ mercy over a good meal.
He invested relational time without compromising His integrity. Jesus wasn't worried about being made impure by being around impure people, as if sin were spiritual Covid. Granted, we have to be more careful about how easily impressionable we are because we are not God in the Flesh. Wise boundaries matter. But there is a principal here” We are not called to withdraw and circle the wagons in the face of an impure culture full of impure people. We either believe God has the power to preserve and protect the sanctity of our souls when we are on mission, or we don’t. And if we do, then we should have the boldness and peace to be sitting around tables, building friendships, investing time with those both near and far from Christ.
He affirmed people’s value as people while calling them to repentance. It is possible to simultaneously validate the worth of people as people without that meaning we have somehow affirmed everything about that person. I have had so many friends who have affirmed me as a human being - and called me to repentance in areas of my life. They love me at my worst - and hold up a mirror (uuuggghhh). We do this all the time with our friends, our family, with each other inside the church. We know what this tension is like. Surely it is possible to do that with those outside the church. Surely we are not called to be less Christ-like when people are far from Christ.
His message of mercy was effective with those who knew they needed it. I suspect he didn’t have to tell the sinners at the banquet about their sin. I’m pretty sure they knew their reputation. If they were Jewish people living in a Jewish community, they knew. Jesus was there not to condemn them – the Law had done that part already - but to demonstrate that ‘the world through him might be saved.’[19]
No wonder Matthew was so excited that he threw a feast (with all his ill-gotten gain, I might add). He knew what kind of guy he was. Jesus didn’t need to tell him that he needed help. But who in his adult life had shown him this kind of mercy? Who had treated him like a human being with worth? What rabbi in history had called a tax collector actively collecting taxes to be a disciple? History is not destiny when Jesus is involved.
No wonder Matthew threw a feast and invited all his sketchy friends. People long to be known and loved, and that love is felt strongest when that which is known is the worst.
What has lingered with me this week is the kindness and mercy of Jesus to those who did not expect it. Paul – who also new something about the kindness and mercy of Jesus - wrote about it later:
Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance? (Romans 2:4)
If we plan to call others to follow Jesus, I suspect this model ought to be formative in our plans. If God’s kindness, forbearance and patience is intended to lead people to repentance, our kindness, forbearance and patience should be on full display when we lift up Jesus to others.
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[1] “ In the N. T., pupils or disciples are called children of their teachers, because the latter by their instruction nourish the minds of their pupils and mold their characters.” (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon)
[2] “Jesus was illustrating an OT claim that human suffering rests in separation from God. Thus forgiveness is our deepest need.” Expositor’s Bible Commentary
[3] It’s also possible that Jesus was making a point that would have established his Messianic claims to his Jewish audience. “In the Talmud, we find a tradition that “a sick man does not recover from his sickness until all his sins are forgiven him, as it is written, ʻWho forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases” (Ps. 103:3).’ ” In another place, the rabbis appealed to Psalm 103:3–4 to explain why the prayer for forgiveness precedes the prayer for healing: “Redemption and healing come after forgiveness.” (Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Of The New Testament)
[4] Expositor’s Bible Commentary
[5] NRSV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible
[6] NRSV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible
[7] Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Of The New Testament
[8] Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Of The New Testament
[9] Luke 7:36–50; Matt. 26:45
[10] Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Of The New Testament
[11] Expositor’s Bible Commentary
[12] Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Of The New Testament
[13] Having something that could pay the penalty for them pointed to the great sacrifice or offering which Christ was to make for the sins of the world.
[14] Luke 14:26
[15] Barnes’ Notes On The Bible
[16] Expositor’s Bible Commentary
[17] Cambridge Bible For Schools And Colleges
[18] John 3:17
[19] The Holy Spirit will do Holy Spirit work in people’s lives. Part of the mission of the Spirit is to convict the world of sin. See John 16:8.
* * * *
[i]Here are a couple other times in the Old Testament where the prophets beat the same drum about the foolishness of sacrifice when the heart and hands are compromised.
Jeremiah 6:20: “What use to me is frankincense that comes from Sheba, or sweet cane from a distant land? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices pleasing to me.”
Isaiah 1:11–15: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. “When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations. I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”