Down through the roof

A word for the week

Think of a time you could not get somewhere on your own, and someone carried you, when you had no strength to get there yourself. That is where this story starts, with four friends and a man who cannot walk, and it is among the most vivid pictures in the Gospels of what it means to be carried to Jesus by people who love you.

Jesus is teaching in a house in Capernaum, and it is so packed that there is no way in, people crammed to the door and beyond. And four men come carrying a paralyzed friend on a mat, wanting to get him to Jesus, and they cannot get through the crowd. So they do something audacious: they carry him up onto the flat roof, dig through it, break open a hole, and lower him down on his mat, right in front of Jesus, in the middle of the sermon. Picture the dust falling, the crowd looking up, the sheer determined nerve of it. They were not going to let a crowd, or a roof, stop them from getting their friend to Jesus.

And Mark says something worth pausing on: Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man, your sins are forgiven. Their faith. The faith of the friends. It was the four men's stubborn, roof-digging love that Jesus responded to. This is a quiet, important truth: sometimes you are carried to God on someone else's faith when you have none of your own, and sometimes your part is to be one of the ones doing the carrying. Nobody makes it to Jesus entirely alone. We get there on the shoulders of people who would tear a roof apart to bring us.

But notice what Jesus says first. Not, you are healed; not, get up and walk. He says, your sins are forgiven. Everyone expected him to fix the legs, the obvious problem, the visible one. Jesus goes first to the deeper paralysis, the one you cannot see. And this scandalizes the religious scholars sitting there, who think, rightly by their own logic, that only God can forgive sins. Who does this man think he is? Jesus reads their thoughts and asks a shrewd question: which is easier, to say your sins are forgiven, or to say get up and walk? Anyone can say the first; no one can check it. So, he says, to show you I have the authority to do the invisible thing, watch me do the visible one. And he turns to the man: get up, take your mat, and go home. And the man does, in front of everyone, and they are all stunned.

So the healing of the body is offered as proof of the harder, deeper healing of the soul. Jesus is telling us where the real paralysis is. We come to him, or get carried to him, mostly wanting the obvious thing fixed, the circumstance, the illness, the situation. And he does care about those; he healed the legs. But he goes first to the thing underneath, the guilt, the separation, the deeper part of us that cannot move on its own, and he heals that, because that is the paralysis that matters most in the end.

Two things to take home, then. Be the friend who carries someone to Jesus, even if you have to dig through a roof; your faith may be what they are lowered down on. And when you come yourself, let him heal the deep thing first, not only the obvious one. The legs mattered. The soul mattered more.