The Easier Thing to Say

Imagine sitting in a packed house, listening to a teacher. Dust and bits of roof start falling on your head. You look up and see daylight through a hole in the ceiling. Four faces are looking down. Then, slowly, they lower a man lying on a mat.

That really happened. Mark, one of the four Bible writers who told the story of Jesus' life, records it.

It happens in Capernaum, a fishing town by a big lake in the north of Israel, where Jesus was living. Crowds had been following him everywhere, hoping for healing (Mark 1:45). When word got out that he was home, the house filled up, all the way out the door.

And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay.

Mark 2:4

A paralytic is someone who is paralysed. This man could not walk. Houses there had flat roofs people could climb onto. So his four friends carried him up, broke open the roof above Jesus, and lowered him down.

That was hard work, and it damaged someone's house. The friends were sure that if they could get him in front of Jesus, he would walk.

Some scribes were sitting in the room. Scribes were experts in the law of Moses, the rules God gave Israel through their leader Moses, long before. They were about to hear Jesus say something they believed no human was allowed to say.

1. Jesus answered the need nobody brought him

Everyone knew what the man needed: legs that worked. Jesus said something else.

And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."

Mark 2:5

Notice that Jesus "saw their faith". Faith means trusting someone enough to act on it. You cannot see trust, but you can see a hole in a roof.

Sins are the wrong things we do, say, and think, which break God's good rules and hurt other people. To forgive is to cancel a debt, to say, "I will not hold this against you anymore."

That is good news, but it was not what the friends had climbed a roof for. Imagine carrying a friend with a broken leg to the doctor, and the doctor says, "All your debts have been paid." True, and good. But you came about the leg.

So why did Jesus start there? Because he saw a bigger problem than the legs. An old song in the Bible puts both needs side by side.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases.

Psalm 103:2-3

David, a king of Israel, wrote this song about a thousand years before Jesus. He is telling himself to praise God and remember all God does. "Iniquity" means wrongdoing. David lists forgiveness first and healing second, the same order Jesus uses. Healing fixes a body for one lifetime. Forgiveness fixes your friendship with God forever.

But this story is easy to take the wrong way.

His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him."

John 9:2-3

This happened later, in the city of Jerusalem. The disciples, the students who followed Jesus everywhere, met a man blind since birth. "Rabbi" means teacher. They assumed somebody's wrongdoing had caused it. Jesus told them they were wrong.

So Mark 2 does not mean the man was paralysed because he was worse than other people. Jesus spoke about sin first because sin was the problem everyone in that room shared, including the people who could walk.

2. The teachers got the rule right and the person wrong

The scribes said nothing out loud. But Jesus knew what they were thinking.

Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?

Mark 2:7

To blaspheme is to insult God. Here it means claiming to do something only God can do. Under the law of Moses, that crime carried the death penalty (Leviticus 24:16). In the scribes' minds, Jesus had just said something that deserved death.

Here is the surprise: their thinking was correct. Suppose a boy breaks your bike. I cannot forgive him for it. Only you can, because you are the one he wronged. Forgiving belongs to the person who was hurt.

And the Bible says every wrong, whoever else it hurts, is first of all a wrong against God.

Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.

Psalm 51:4

David wrote this after he took another man's wife and then had that man killed (2 Samuel 12:9). He had hurt real people terribly. Yet he tells God, "Against you, you only." He does not mean the people did not matter. He means the deepest wrong was against the God who made them. If every sin is against God, only God can finally forgive it.

God says so himself through Isaiah, a prophet, which means a messenger who spoke for God. Isaiah lived about seven hundred years before Jesus.

I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.

Isaiah 43:25

A transgression is crossing a line God has drawn. To blot it out is to wipe it away, the way you wipe a whiteboard clean. Notice who is speaking: "I, I am he." Wiping away sin is God's own work.

So the scribes were right about God. Their mistake was about Jesus. If only God can forgive sins, and Jesus just did, there are only two choices. Either Jesus was lying about something terribly serious, or Jesus is God. There is no safe middle where he is only a nice teacher.

3. Jesus proved what you cannot see with what you can

Jesus answered their silent question with a question of his own.

Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven," or to say, "Rise, take up your bed and walk"? But 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, rise, pick up your bed, and go home."

Mark 2:9-11

"Your sins are forgiven" is easy to say, because nobody can check it. There is no X-ray for forgiveness. "Get up and walk" is hard to say, because everyone will know in a few seconds whether it worked.

Anyone can say, "I can swim." Jumping into the deep end in front of everyone is how people find out. Jesus did the thing that could be checked, to show that the thing that could not be checked was real.

"Son of Man" was the name Jesus used for himself most often. It comes from the book of Daniel. Daniel was a Jewish man taken away to Babylon, a powerful empire, about six hundred years before Jesus.

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man... And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom.

Daniel 7:13-14

Night visions are pictures God showed Daniel at night, like a dream. Someone who looks human comes to God and is given dominion and glory, which means the right to rule everything and the honour that goes with it.

When Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, he is saying: that is me. Authority means the right to act. The one with heaven's authority was standing in a crowded house, using it "on earth", on a real man lying on a mat.

And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God.

Mark 2:12

The man who was carried in walked out carrying the mat that had carried him. "Glorified God" means they praised God. Nobody could argue with those legs. And if the legs were real, the forgiveness was real too.

But "your sins are forgiven" was only the easier thing to say. It was not the easier thing to do. God does not forgive by pretending wrong does not matter. Someone has to pay the cost.

Peter was a fisherman who lived in Capernaum and became one of Jesus' closest followers (Mark 1:29). Years later, he wrote a letter about who paid.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

1 Peter 2:24

"The tree" is the wooden cross that the Romans, who ruled the land then, nailed Jesus to. "Bore" means carried. Jesus carried our wrongs in his own body, the way four friends carried a man who could not walk. The goal is a changed life: to stop living for wrong things and start living the right way.

Peter's last line comes from Isaiah, who described a servant of God who would be wounded and punished for other people's wrongs (Isaiah 53:5). Peter says that servant is Jesus. That is how Jesus could say "your sins are forgiven" and mean it. The words took him a few seconds in Capernaum. Paying for them cost him his life.

What to do this week

Take Jesus at his word. If you have asked God to forgive a wrong, and it comes back to your mind at night, do not start trying to earn forgiveness again. Say out loud what Jesus said to that man: "Your sins are forgiven." He backed those words with a man walking home.

Carry someone. Think of one person who is sick, lonely, or ashamed. This week, do one thing for them that costs you time: take them a meal, sit with them, or pray for them by name and tell them you did.

Stop guessing why people suffer. When someone you know gets sick or has a hard year, leave the question "what did they do?" alone. Ask what they need instead.

The friends brought him to Jesus for his legs. He went home with his legs, and with something better: he was forgiven by the only one who has the right to forgive.