THREE

THE HEALING

Jesus had begun to preach and teach publicly. His words were commanding and his commands were irresistible. News of him spread like wildfire, and soon there were crowds surging forward to see him. How did Jesus react? Mark writes:

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.”

(Mark 1:35–38)

Jesus got up very early to pray in a solitary place. The language indicates that this prayer was not brief and perfunctory but took hours—he was still praying by the time Simon came to get him.

When Simon told him that there were huge crowds gathered to see him, Jesus said that they should immediately leave. Though he was riding a wave of popular support, Jesus left it behind. Why? He was much more interested in the quality of the people’s response to him than in the quantity of the crowd. Still the people came to him—some to hear his teaching, some to be healed, some out of curiosity, some for other reasons, but they came in great numbers:

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, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to 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 walking 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 than 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 a really rotten practical joke on you, he grants your deepest wish.”20 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.

Going Deeper

The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus. Whether it’s to succeed in our chosen field or to have a certain relationship—or even to get up and walk—we’re saying, “If I have that, if I get my deepest wish, then everything will be okay.” You’re looking to that thing to save you from oblivion, from disillusionment, from mediocrity. You’ve made that wish into your savior. You never use that term, of course—but that’s what’s happening. And if you never quite get it, you’re angry, unhappy, empty. But if you do get it, you ultimately feel more empty, more unhappy. You’ve distorted your deepest wish by trying to make it into your savior, and now that you finally have it, it’s turned on you.

Jesus says, “You see, if you have me, I will actually fulfill you, and if you fail me, I will always forgive you. I’m the only savior who can do that.” But it is hard to figure that out. Many of us first start going to God, going to church, because we have problems, and we’re asking God to give us a little boost over the hump so that we can get back to saving ourselves, back to pursuing our deepest wish. The problem is that we’re looking to something besides Jesus as savior. Almost always when we first go to Jesus saying, “This is my deepest wish,” his response is that we need to go a lot deeper than that.

C. S. Lewis put this so poetically in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There’s a boy named Eustace, and everybody hates him and he hates everybody. He’s selfish, he’s mean, and nobody can get along with him. But he finds himself magically on a boat, the Dawn Treader, taking a great voyage. At one point this boat pulls in to an island, and Eustace wanders off and finds a cave. The cave proves to be filled with diamonds and rubies and gold. He thinks, “I’m rich!” And immediately, because he is who he is, he thinks that now he’ll be able to pay everybody back. Anyone who has laughed at him, stepped on him, slighted him, will now get their comeuppance. Eustace then falls asleep on the pile of treasure—which he doesn’t yet know is the hoard of a dragon. And because he falls asleep with greedy dragonish thoughts in his heart, when he wakes up, he’s become a dragon—big, terrible, and ugly. Soon he realizes there’s no way out. He can’t go on the boat, he’s going to be left on the island alone, he’s going to be horrible all of his life. He falls into despair.

One day the great lion Aslan shows up, leads him to a clear pool of water, and tells him to undress and jump in. And suddenly Eustace realizes that “undress” means “take off the dragon skin.” He begins to gnaw and claw off the scales, and he realizes that he can shed his skin. Working at it, he finally peels off this skin—but to his dismay, he finds that underneath he’s got another dragon skin. He tries a second time and a third time, to no avail; the same thing still happens each time. In the end the lion says, You’re going to have to let me go deeper. And here’s how Eustace tells the story later:

I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. . . . The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. . . . Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. . . . Then he caught hold of me . . . and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. . . . Then I saw . . . I’d turned into a boy again.21

For many of us, it’s hard to read that passage without weeping. Because like the paralyzed man, and like Eustace, we thought if we just got a little bit of help we could save ourselves. But we learned that Jesus wanted to take us deeper. We had to let him use his claws and go all the way to our heart and reconfigure the main thing that our heart wanted. You see, it wasn’t our deepest wish itself that was the problem, just as it wasn’t wrong for the paralytic to want to walk or for the celebrity to want to succeed or for Eustace to want to be loved and respected. The fact that we thought getting our deepest wish would heal us, would save us—that was the problem. We had to let Jesus be our Savior.

Even Deeper

When Jesus says to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven,” he is doing something unexpected. So unexpected that it triggers his first clash with the religious leaders of his day:

When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts.

(Mark 2:5–8)

Jesus can read the motives of the hearts of those around him—in this case the religious leaders. When Jesus says to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven,” they are shocked and angry. They believe Jesus is blaspheming—showing contempt or irreverence toward God—because he claims to do something only God can do. They think to themselves: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They’re totally right.

Let’s say Tom, Dick, and Harry are talking. Tom punches Dick smack in the mouth. There’s blood everywhere. Then Harry goes up to Tom and says, “Tom, I forgive you for punching Dick in the mouth. It’s all right. It’s over.” What is Dick going to say, once he’s calmed down? “Harry, you can’t forgive him. Only I can forgive him. He didn’t wrong you; he wronged me.” You can only forgive a sin if it’s against you. That’s why, when Jesus looks at the paralyzed man and says, “Your sins are forgiven,” he’s actually saying, “Your sins have really been against me.” The only person who can possibly say that to a human being would be their Creator. Jesus Christ, by forgiving the man, is claiming to be God Almighty. The religious leaders know it: This man is not just claiming to be a miracle worker, he is claiming to be the Lord of the universe—and they are understandably furious about it. How does Jesus respond to their thoughts?

Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man [“Son of Man” was Jesus’s favorite way of referring to himself] has authority on earth to forgive sins. . . .” He said to the paralytic, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”

(Mark 2:8–12)

The penetrating question that Jesus asks them—“Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take up your mat, and walk’?”—has been puzzled over for twenty centuries. Once while preparing a sermon on this text I got out my Anchor Bible Commentary, which is arguably the most thorough, scholarly, and respected set of critical studies of the Bible. And when the commentator arrives at the place in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus poses this question, he says, in essence, “You know, after countless pages written on this, we still have a good question before us. Which is easier? It’s hard to say.”

On the first reading, Jesus seems to be saying, “Anybody can say ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ but not everybody can heal. To show you therefore that I am the Lord with authority to forgive sins, I say to you, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’” The apparent implication is that it’s a lot harder to heal somebody than to forgive somebody, and he is signaling his power to do the latter by performing the former. But this is such a profoundly puzzling question because it has more than one answer. Jesus is also saying: “My friends, it is going to be infinitely harder to effect the forgiveness of sins than you can imagine. I’m not just a miracle worker; I’m the Savior. Any miracle worker can say ‘Take up your mat and walk,’ but only the Savior of the world can say to a human being, ‘All your sins are forgiven.’”

Many biblical scholars say that here, as early as chapter 2 of Mark, the shadow of the cross falls across Jesus’s path. Jesus knows what the religious leaders are thinking, so he knows that if he begins to let on that he’s not just a miracle worker but also the Savior of the world, they’re eventually going to kill him. If he not only heals this man but forgives his sins as well, he’s taking a decisive, irreversible step down the path to his death. By taking that step, he is putting a down payment on our forgiveness.

You see, at that moment Jesus had the power to heal the man’s body, just as he has the power to give you that career success, that relationship, that recognition you’ve been longing for. He actually has the power and authority to give each of us what we’ve been asking for, on the spot, no questions asked.

But Jesus knows that’s not nearly deep enough. He knows that whether we’re a paralyzed man lying on a mat or a struggling actor or a former struggling actor who’s become a celebrity, we don’t need someone who can just grant our wishes. We need someone who can go deeper than that. Someone who will use his claws, lovingly and carefully, to pierce our self-centeredness and remove the sin that enslaves us and distorts even our beautiful longings. In short, we need to be forgiven. That’s the only way for our discontent to be healed. It will take more than a miracle worker or a divine genie—it will take a Savior. Jesus knows that to be our Savior he is going to have to die.

And we will discover that in the process of dealing with what we thought were our deepest wishes, Jesus has revealed an even deeper, truer one beneath—and it is for Jesus himself. He will not just have granted that true deepest wish, he will have fulfilled it. Jesus is not going to play the rotten practical joke of giving you your deepest wish—until he has shown you that it was for him all along.