Mark 2:1-12

Jesus heals the paralytic
Mark 2:1-12

Can you imagine this scene?  Jesus is inside a house with a crowd around him when suddenly, bits of roof start falling down.  A hole appears in the ceiling, and a man gets lowered down in a basket right in Jesus’ lap.  Sounds incredible, but it actually happened!

Today’s reading is a favorite of mine!

First off, pray.  Always pray that the Holy Spirit will guide you through your day, and through this reading; that you come to understand the passage and that you can apply it to your daily life.

This is a great story of faith.  Four friends desperately want to have their crippled friend healed, yet the crowd is so large that they cannot get near Jesus.  While some might turn away, these guys do some big time “thinking outside the box” and decide to go through the roof.  Mind you, this was not a common practice and it certainly ruined the roof, but such was their love for their friend that they dug through anyway.

So, down plops the crippled man and what does Jesus do?  He heals him, but not in the way you might think.  He forgives the man’s sins.  Some of the people in the crowd started grumbling about Blasphemy (setting yourself up as God in this case, which Jesus was), which could have gotten Jesus stoned.  Jesus addresses the issue of forgiveness by saying, “hey, what’s harder, to forgive sins or to make this man walk again?”  Today we might think the latter, but in Jesus’ time, only God could forgive.  They would both have been impossible to the Jewish mind.  So Jesus tells the man to get up and walk, and he does.  The people were amazed.  They had “never seen anything like this,” and in restoring the man’s ability to walk, he also, by inference, stated that he could indeed forgive the man’s sins.  Jesus was God after all!

Jesus can forgive your sins too.  Why not ask Him to take that burden off your shoulders today.