'And again He entered into Capernaum after some days; and it was
noised that He was in the house. 2. And straightway many were gathered
together, insomuch that there was no room to receive them, no, not so
much as about the door; and He preached the word unto them. 3. And
they come unto Him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was borne of
four. 4. And when they could not come nigh unto Him for the press,
they uncovered the roof where He was: and when they had broken it up,
they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay. 6. When Jesus
saw their faith, He said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be
forgiven thee. 6. But there were certain of the scribes sitting there,
and reasoning in their hearts, 7. Why doth this man thus speak
blasphemies! who can forgive sins but God only! 8. And immediately
when Jesus perceived in His spirit that they so reasoned within
themselves, He said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your
hearts? 9. Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy
sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and
walk! 10. But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth
to forgive sins, (He saith to the sick of the palsy,) 11. I say unto
thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house. 12.
And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went forth before them
all; insomuch that they were all amazed, and glorified God, laying, We
never saw it on this fashion.'--Mark ii. 1-12.
Mark alone gives Capernaum as the scene of this miracle. The
excitement which had induced our Lord to leave that place had been
allowed 'some days' to quiet down, 'after' which He ventures to
return, but does not seem to have sought publicity, but to have
remained in 'the house'--probably Peter's. There would be at least one
woman's heart there, which would love to lavish grateful service on
Him. But 'He could not be hid,' and, however little genuine or deep
the eagerness might be, He will not refuse to meet it. Mark paints
vividly the crowd flocking to the humble home, overflowing its modest
capacity, blocking the doorway, and clustering round it outside as far
as they could hear Christ's voice. 'He was speaking the word to them,'
proclaiming His mission, as He had done in their synagogue, when He
was interrupted by the events which follow, no doubt to the
gratification of some of His hearers, who wanted something more
exciting than 'teaching.'
I. We note the eager group of interrupters. Mark gives one of the
minute touches which betray an eye-witness and a close observer when
he tells us that the palsied man was carried by four friends--no doubt
one at each corner of the bed, which would be some light framework, or
even a mere quilt or mattress. The incident is told from the point of
view of one sitting beside Jesus; they 'come to Him,' but 'cannot come
near.' The accurate specification of the process of removing the roof,
which Matthew omits altogether, and Luke tells much more vaguely,
seems also to point to an eye-witness as the source of the narrative,
who would, of course, be Peter, who well remembered all the steps of
the unceremonious treatment of his property. His house was, probably,
one of no great pretensions or size, but like hundreds of poor men's
houses in Palestine still--a one-storied building with a low, flat
roof, mostly earthen, and easily reached from the ground by an outside
stair. It would be somewhat difficult to get a sick man and his bed up
there, however low, and somewhat free-and-easy dealing with another
man's house to burrow through the roof a hole wide enough for the
purpose; but there is no impossibility, and the difficulty is part of
the lesson of the incident, and is recognised expressly in the
narrative by Christ's notice of their 'faith.' We can fancy the blank
looks of the four bearers, and the disappointment on the sick man's
thin face and weary eyes, as they got to the edge of the crowd, and
saw that there was no hope of forcing a passage. Had they been less
certain of a cure, and less eager, they would have shouldered their
burden and carried him home again. They could well have pleaded
sufficient reason for giving up the attempt. But 'we cannot' is the
coward's word. 'We must' is the earnest man's. If we have any real
consciousness of our need to get to Christ, and any real wish to do
so, it is not a crowd round the door that will keep us back.
Difficulties test, and therefore increase, faith. They develop a
sanctified ingenuity in getting over them, and bring a rich harvest of
satisfaction when at last conquered. These four eager faces looked
down through the broken roof, when they had succeeded in dropping the
bed right at Christ's feet, with a far keener pleasure than if they
had just carried him in by the door. No doubt their act was
inconvenient; for, however light the roofing, some rubbish must have
come down on the heads of some of the notabilities below. And, no
doubt, it was interfering with property as well as with propriety. But
here was a sick man, and there was his Healer; and it was their
business to get the two together somehow. It was worth risking a good
deal to accomplish. The rabbis sitting there might frown at rude
intrusiveness; Peter might object to the damage to his roof; some of
the listeners might dislike the interruption to His teaching; but
Jesus read the action of the bearers and the consent of the motionless
figure on the couch as the indication of 'their faith,' and His love
and power responded to its call.
II. Note the unexpected gift with which Christ answers this faith.
Neither the bearers nor the paralytic speak a word throughout the
whole incident. Their act and his condition spoke loudly enough.
Obviously, all five must have had, at all events, so much 'faith' as
went to the conviction that He could and would heal; and this faith is
the occasion of Christ's gift. The bearers had it, as is shown by
their work. It was a visible faith, manifest by conduct. He can see
the hidden heart; but here He looks upon conduct, and thence infers
disposition. Faith, if worth anything, comes to the surface in act.
Was it the faith of the bearers, or of the sick man, which Christ
rewarded? Both. As Abraham's intercession delivered Lot, as Paul in
the shipwreck was the occasion of safety to all the crew, so one man's
faith may bring blessings on another. But if the sick man too had not
had faith, he would not have let himself be brought at all, and would
certainly not have consented to reach Christ's presence by so strange
and, to him, dangerous a way--being painfully hoisted up some narrow
stair, and then perilously let down, at the risk of cords snapping, or
hands letting go, or bed giving way. His faith, apparently, was deeper
than theirs; for Christ's answer, though it went far beyond his or
their expectations, must have been moulded to meet his deepest sense
of need. His heart speaks in the tender greeting 'son,' or, as the
margin has it, 'child'--possibly pointing to the man's youth, but more
probably an appellation revealing the mingled love and dignity of
Jesus, and taking this man into the arms of His sympathy. The palsy
may have been the consequence of 'fast' living; but, whether it were
so or no, Christ saw that, in the dreary hours of solitary inaction to
which it had condemned the sufferer, remorse had been busy gnawing at
his heart, and that pain had done its best work by leading to
penitence. Therefore He spoke to the conscience before He touched the
bodily ailment, and met the sufferer's deepest and most deeply felt
disease first. He goes to the bottom of the malady with His cure.
These great words are not only closely adapted to the one case before
Him, but contain a general truth, worthy to be pondered by all
philanthropists. It is of little use to cure symptoms unless you cure
diseases. The tap-root of all misery is sin; and, until it is grubbed
up, hacking at the branches is sad waste of time. Cure sin, and you
make the heart a temple and the world a paradise. We Christians should
hail all efforts of every sort for making men nobler, happier, better
physically, morally, intellectually; but let us not forget that there
is but one effectual cure for the world's misery, and that it is
wrought by Him who has borne the world's sins.
III. Note the snarl of the scribes. 'Certain of the scribes,' says
Mark--not being much impressed by their dignity, which, as Luke tells
us, was considerable. He says that they were 'Pharisees and doctors of
the law ... out of every village of Galilee and Judaea and Jerusalem
itself, who had come on a formal errand of investigation. Their
tempers would not be improved by the tearing up of the roof, nor
sweetened by seeing the 'popularity' of this doubtful young Teacher,
who showed that He had the secret, which they had not, of winning
men's hearts. Nobody came crowding to them, nor hung on their lips.
Professional jealousy has often a great deal to do in helping zeal for
truth to sniff out heresy. The whispered cavillings are graphically
represented. The scribes would not speak out, like men, and call on
Jesus to defend His words. If they had been sure of their ground, they
should have boldly charged Him with blasphemy; but perhaps they were
half suspicious that He could show good cause for His speech. Perhaps
they were afraid to oppose the tide of enthusiasm for Him. So they
content themselves with comparing notes among themselves, and wait for
Him to entangle Himself a little more in their nets. They affect to
despise Him, 'This man' is spoken in contempt. If He were so poor a
creature, why were they there, all the way from Jerusalem, some of
them? They overdo their part. The short, snarling sentences of their
muttered objections, as given in the Revised Version, may be taken as
shared among three speakers, each bringing his quota of bitterness.
One says, 'Why doth He thus speak?' Another curtly answers, 'He
blasphemeth'; while a third formally states the great truth on which
they rest their indictment. Their principle is impregnable.
Forgiveness is a divine prerogative, to be shared by none, to be
grasped by none, without, in the act, diminishing God's glory. But it
is not enough to have one premise of your syllogism right. Only God
forgives sins; and if this man says that He does, He, no doubt, claims
to be, in some sense, God. But whether He 'blasphemeth' or no depends
on what the scribes do not stay to ask; namely, whether He has the
right so to claim: and, if He has, it is they, not He, who are the
blasphemers. We need not wonder that they recoiled from the right
conclusion, which is--the divinity of Jesus. Their fault was not their
jealousy for the divine honour, but their inattention to Christ's
evidence in support of His claims, which inattention had its roots in
their moral condition, their self-sufficiency and absorption in
trivialities of externalism. But we have to thank them for clearly
discerning and bluntly stating what was involved in our Lord's claims,
and for thus bringing up the sharp issue--blasphemer, or 'God manifest
in the flesh.'
IV. Note our Lord's answer to the cavils. Mark would have us see
something supernatural in the swiftness of Christ's knowledge of the
muttered criticisms. He perceived it 'straightway' and 'in His
spirit,' which is tantamount to saying by divine discernment, and not
by the medium of sense, as we do. His spirit was a mirror, in which
looking He saw externals. In the most literal and deepest sense, He
does 'not judge after the sight of His eyes, neither reprove after the
hearing of His ears.'
The absence from our Lord's answer of any explanation that He was only
declaring the divine forgiveness and not Himself exercising a divine
prerogative, shuts us up to the conclusion that He desired to be
understood as exercising it. Unless His pardon is something quite
different from the ministerial announcement of forgiveness, which His
servants are empowered to make to penitents, He wilfully led the
cavillers into error. His answer starts with a counter-question--another
'why?' to meet their' why?' It then puts into words what they
were thinking; namely, that it was easy to assume a power the reality
of which could not be tested. To say, 'Thy sins be forgiven,' and to
say, 'Take up thy bed,' are equally easy. To effect either is equally
beyond man's power; but the one can be verified and the other cannot,
and, no doubt, some of the scribes were maliciously saying: 'It is all
very well to pretend to do what cannot be tested. Let Him come out
into daylight, and do a miracle which we can see.' He is quite willing
to accept the challenge to test His power in the invisible realm of
conscience by His power in the visible region. The remarkable
construction of the long sentence in verses 10 and 11, which is almost
verbally identical in the three Gospels, parenthesis and all, sets
before us the suddenness of the turn from the scribes to the patient
with dramatic force. Mark that our Lord claims 'authority' to forgive,
the same word which had been twice in the people's mouths in reference
to His teaching and to His sway over demons. It implies not only
power, but rightful power, and that authority which He wields as 'Son
of Man' and 'on earth.' This is the first use of that title in Mark.
It is Christ's own designation of Himself, never found on other lips
except the dying Stephen's. It implies His Messianic office, and
points back to Daniel's great prophecy; but it also asserts His true
manhood and His unique relation to humanity, as being Himself its sum
and perfection--not _a_, but _the_ Son of Man. Now the wonder which He
would confirm by His miracle is that such a manhood, walking on earth,
has lodged in it the divine prerogative. He who is the Son of Man must
be something more than man, even the Son of God. His power to forgive
is both derived and inherent, but, in either aspect, is entirely
different from the human office of announcing God's forgiveness.
For once, Christ seems to work a miracle in response to unbelief,
rather than to faith. But the real occasion of it was not the cavils
of the scribes, but the faith and need of the man and His friends;
while the silencing of unbelief, and the enlightenment of honest
doubt, were but collateral benefits.
V. Note the cure and its effect. This is another of the miracles in
which no vehicle of the healing power is employed. The word is enough;
but here the word is spoken, not as if to the disease, but to the
sufferer; and in His obedience he receives strength to obey. Tell a
palsied man to rise and walk when his disease is that he cannot! But
if he believes that Christ has power to heal, he will try to do as he
is bid; and, as he tries, the paralysis steals out of the long-unused
limbs. Jesus makes us able to do what He bids us do. The condition of
healing is faith, and the test of faith is obedience. We do not get
strength till we put ourselves into the attitude of obedience. The
cure was immediate; and the cured man, who was 'borne of four' into
the healing presence, walked away, with his bed under his arm, 'before
them all.' They were ready enough to make way for him then. And what
said the wise doctors to it all? We do not hear that any of them were
convinced. And what said the people? They were 'amazed,' and they
'glorified God,' and recognised that they had seen something quite
new. That was all. Their glorifying God cannot have been very
deep-seated, or they would have better learned the lesson of the
miracle. Amazement was but a poor result. No emotion is more transient
or less fruitful than gaping astonishment; and that, with a little
varnish of acknowledgment of God's power, which led to nothing, was
all the fruit of Christ's mighty work. Let us hope that the healed man
carried his unseen blessing in a faithful and grateful heart, and
consecrated his restored strength to the Lord who healed him!