This is a great story.  If you don’t have a Bible handy, check it out here!

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%205%3A17-26&version=NLT

Luke 5:17-26 Jesus is teaching once again.  His audience largely consists of religious teachers. Were they already jealous of him? Were they just trying to figure out this guy who taught with authority even though by birth and position he didn’t have any? Sometimes I am very hard on the religious leaders of Jesus time, but their world was about to stand on its head. Their position in society as part of the Roman Empire was already challenging. Mistakes were made, but most of these guys were just trying to protect the law they had grown up trusting. It sounds like people were talking about Jesus and the religious leaders were coming out of the woodwork to find out what he had to say. 

Whatever he was talking about, Luke tells us that the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick. This is one of those lines that reinforces to me that when Jesus came as a man he really gave up his God capacities. He had no help that isn’t available to me. Jesus needed the Father’s power and authority to accomplish anything. He says elsewhere that he does nothing apart from the will of the Father. Jesus really was as human as you and I. That thought is both humbling and encouraging. 

A group of friends hear that Jesus is nearby.  One of them is paralyzed and they have heard Jesus can help. Unfortunately,  Jesus is inside a house that is already standing room only, and their buddy is lying down. So, yay for having ingenious and determined friends. They go, “Hey that roof looks retractable. (I’m told it was probably flat with tiles that they could move aside without doing permanent damage. I don’t know, I wasn’t there.) Let’s drop him in front of Jesus!”  And that’s exactly what they do.

Jesus response is awesome and we will talk about that more. But first I want to make sure we don’t miss an important side-note that I have often heard in relation to this story. This is an object lesson in picking good friends. Sometimes when your faith is just not carrying you, all you need is a faith filled friend! We don’t really hear what the paralyzed man is thinking. Maybe he begged his friends to bring him there. Maybe they dragged him kicking and screaming. Maybe they were tired of carrying him around. But Jesus helps the man in response to his friend’s faith. That’s an encouragement to me, not only to choose good friends, but also to keep praying when someone I love has lost their capacity to pray for themselves. 

And of course, as always, Jesus is thinking 67 steps ahead of everyone present. He has every intention of healing this man but he also sees his audience. He knows their hearts. He knows the questions they haven’t even asked out loud, and he uses this moment to demonstrate something that no one is quite ready to understand. He forgives the man’s sins. Of course he knows the man needs to be healed of his paralysis, but he also knows he has a greater brokenness. Paralysis is easy to see. But his sin was probably a lot harder to observe. And while he was probably the only paralytic in the room, he wasn’t the only sinner. So Jesus starts by healing the brokenness that every person in that room shared, that every person on the planet shares. 

Now, the response of the religious leaders was kind of fair. “Wait, what? Only God can forgive sins.” They weren’t wrong. But their conclusion was. They respond, “This guy is speaking blasphemy.” 

It’s not blasphemy if you are God. But that wasn’t a possibility they were prepared to entertain just yet. And I wonder, when Jesus prioritized the man’s sin problem over his mobility problem, if that made them feel a bit judged. It’s great when people get healed of sicknesses that I don’t have. Yay, praise God for healing brokenness! But what if someone is healed of a disease I have, and I’m not healed? What if I don’t even want to concede that it’s a disease? That gets a little personal. I wonder if it stung a bit.

Anyways, Jesus knows what is going through their heads and he isn’t there to confuse people. So he calls them out a bit. “Oh! You want me to help him walk, but you don’t want me to fix what’s really wrong? Or do you think I can’t forgive sins? Ok. Well, God wouldn’t work a healing through me if I was blaspheming him now, would he? So if he heals the guy’s paralysis, you have to concede that I also forgave his sin.” And then Jesus tells the man to get up, go home and take his mat with him.

People like to claim that Jesus never said he was God. They want to say he was just a good guy that God used to do nice things. But this story really messes with that theory, because those religious leaders weren’t wrong. God alone can forgive sins, so acting like you can do that is blasphemous unless you really are God. God really hates blasphemy. Good guys who God uses to do his work don’t blaspheme. Jesus was either God, or he was evil. There is no middle ground after this interaction. 

And the people watching (probably even a lot of the religious leaders) are amazed, (no kidding), and praise God. Maybe some of the religious leaders started to wonder if their Messiah had finally come. Maybe they were feeling cautiously hopeful. I’m getting ahead of myself here but I think a lot of people, including some religious leaders, thought and hoped he was the Messiah. I wonder if the reason some of them turned against him was because they misunderstood the Messiah’s mission, and he kind of failed to meet expectation. 

Ya, the longer I live the more I have to acknowledge that I have a lot in common with the religious leaders. I guess that’s why I have a little more grace for them than I used to. When I was a kid, the Pharisees and Sadducees were the bad guys. It was black and white. Now that I’ve lived long enough to make a lot of the same mistakes they did, I see how easily I could keep making the same ones myself. It doesn’t make them any more right, but it’s humbling to realize how easily I can be just as wrong as they were.