"A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing him a paralytic, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.' (Mark 2:1-5)
What a dramatic scene! If somebody suddenly came down through the roof as I was preaching, everything would stop--I would be speechless. What were these men so determined to get from Jesus? Well, it doesn't seem at first that Jesus understands. Jesus turns to the paralyzed man, and instead of saying 'Rise up, be healed,' he says, 'Your sins are forgiven.' If this man were from our time and place, I believe he would have said something like this: 'Um, thanks, but that's not what I asked for. I'm paralyzed. I've got a more immediate problem here.'
But in fact Jesus knows something the man doesn't know--that he has a much bigger problem than his physical condition. Jesus is saying to him, 'I understand your problems. I have seen your suffering. I'm going to get to that. But please realize that the main problem in a person's life is never his suffering; it's his sin.' If you find Jesus's response offensive, please at least consider this: If someone says to you, 'The main problem in your life is not what's happened to you, not what people have done to you; your main problem is the way you've responded to that'--ironically, that's empowering. Why? Because you can't do very much about what's happened to you or about what other people are doing--but you can do something about yourself. When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do. It's not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be--it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it's rebelling against him by living without reference to him. It's saying, 'I will decide exactly how I live my life.' And Jesus says that is our main problem.
Jesus is confronting the paralytic with his main problem by driving him deep. Jesus is saying,'By coming to me and asking for only your body to be healed, you're not going deep enough. You have underestimated the depths of your longings, the longings of your heart.' Everyone who is paralyzed naturally wants with every fiber of his being to walk. But surely this man would have been resting all of his hopes in the possibility of waking again. In his heart he's almost surely saying, ' If only I could walk again, then I would be set for life. I'd never be unhappy, I would never complain. If only I could walk, then everything would be right.' And Jesus is saying, 'My son, you're mistaken.' That may sound harsh, but it's profoundly true. Jesus says, 'When I heal your body, if that's all I do, you'll feel you'll never be unhappy again. But wait two months, four months--the euphoria won't last. The roots of the discontent of the human heart go deep.'
Nobody has articulated the damage caused by that discontent better than Cynthia Heimel, who used to write for the Village Voice. She wrote an article that I've never forgotten. Over the years she had known a number of people who were struggling actors and actresses, working in restaurants and punching tickets at theaters to pay their bills, and then they became famous. When they were struggling like all of us, they said, 'If only I could make it in the business, if only I had this or that, I'd be happy." They were like so many other people: stressed, driven, easily upset. But when they actually got the fame they had been longing for, Heimel said, they became insufferable: unstable, angry, and manic. Not just arrogant, as you might expect--worse than that. They were now unhappier that they used to be. She said,
I pity [celebrities]. No, I do. [Celebrities] were once perfectly pleasant human beings...but now...their
wrath is awful...More than any of us, they wanted fame. They worked, they pushed....The morning
after...each of them became famous, they wanted to take an overdose....because that giant thing they
were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything okay, that was going to make their
lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and...happiness, had happened.
And nothing changed. They were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable.
She was sorry for them. They had the thing they had thought would make everything okay--and it didn't. Then Heimel added a statement that took my breath away: 'I think when God wants to play really rotten practical joke on you, he grants your deepest wish.' You know what Jesus is saying to the paralyzed man? I'm not going to play that rotten joke on you, I'm not going to just heal your body and let you think you've gotten your deepest wish." pgs 27-30
- Tim Keller
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