Mark 2: 1-12
Part two of a three part mini series ‘Hope for a troubled world’ by Nat Charles.
This week: Is the world getting better or worse?
Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday Zoom service. Everyone is welcome to join us, see details on our home page.
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Transcript
Is the world getting better or worse? That question was asked in a lecture hall full of undergraduates when I was at university soon after 9.11. The answer was… mixed. Some of my fellow students were adamant we were making progress, pointing to the gradual eradication of global poverty, increased equality between men and women, black people and white. Others were less sure.
In recent months, the picture seems much more mixed. Back in March, as a novel Coronavirus spread around the globe I remember readings newspaper headlines like ‘Is this a warning from the universe?’ There was a deep sense of angst and tension in the country because we just didn’t know how scared we ought to be.
That was compounded by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the worldwide protests about racial injustice that followed.
Christian thinkers often talk about the problem of pain and suffering in two ways. They talk about natural evil that causes unintentional suffering – when people die in an earthquake or tsunami. And they also talk about moral evil – when suffering is caused by the evil actions of other humans.
In the past few months we’ve been confronted with both. In a way that we just cannot escape or deny. The world that we live in is deeply broken.
And what we’re all looking for is hope. Is the world broken beyond repair, or is there hope?
We’re going to take a few minutes in this familiar story in Mark’s gospel. Jesus of Nazareth is caught up in a scene that appears to lean in to some of these issues – innocent suffering, natural and moral evil. And yet his perception of the problem goes much deeper than anyone expected. But like a good doctor, he doesn’t only recognise the issue, but offers hope of a cure.
Let’s see that worked out in this narrative.
AN UNEXPECTED DIAGNOSIS
First, notice that Jesus wastes no time in identifying the real issue.
The great shock of the story for us comes at the end of Vs 5. Huge crowds have been following Jesus, a young Rabbi with a big reputation. And a group of men have gone to great lengths to bring a paralysed man to Jesus. They carried him to the house where Jesus was, and because they couldn’t go through the door as there were so many people in the house, they made a hole in the roof and lowered the man through the hole to Jesus’ feet.
And can you imagine what those men might have felt when they heard Jesus say ‘Son, your sins are forgiven?’ They had come in the hope of a miraculous healing, and instead Jesus offered forgiveness.
But note the implication of Jesus’ words. In his view, what this man needed even more than healing, was forgiveness. As far as Jesus is concerned, the root cause of the brokenness of the world is sin.
That’s not to say that the paralysed man is more sinful than anyone else in the room, or that sin has caused his physical condition. That’s what many people in Jesus’ world believed, but it’s a view that Jesus contradicts a number of times in the gospels. We’re not supposed to think that the paralysed man was any more sinful than anyone else in the room.
That’s one of the great levelling realities at the heart of the Christian faith. Every human shares the same condition. The belief that we are all sinners tells us even at our best we are deeply flawed and have all sorts of imperfections. That each of us have lived in God’s world without any recognition of who he is.
This belief was expressed in the words of one of Shakespeare’s characters in ‘All’s well that ends well’. Shakespeare puts these words into the mouth of one of his characters, ‘the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’.
But here’s the real issue. Jesus saying these words to a paralysed man offers a parallel of our own situation. Just as this man was powerless to change his physical condition, so we are powerless to do anything about our spiritual condition. He couldn’t just make himself stand up and walk through will power or ingenuity. We can’t just fix ourselves through trying to do better.
Yet we try to, don’t we? A recent example is the debate that’s happening around cancel culture at the moment. As you probably know a letter was written to Harper’s Magazine last week, signed by authors and academics and political activists, warning that free speech is being stifled by cancel culture. In response, Philippa Soo, who stars in the screen version of Hamilton tweeted that ‘If you are cancelled and don’t wish to be, you must work to earn back people’s respect…’ Yet how will you know if you’ve ever done enough.
If that’s true on the widest scale, so it’s true on the personal too. And Jesus’s words front us up to that.
AN UNEXPECTED HOPE
But as hard hitting as they are, so they offer hope. Because as he gets the diagnosis right, so he can offer the cure.
I said a moment ago that we are powerless to help ourselves as we are confronted with the reality of who we are. That’s the message of the Christian scriptures – from beginning to end they tell us that the predicament of humanity is so serious, grave and unfixable from within that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.
But the good news is that God has acted. When Jesus says ‘your sins are forgiven’ he really means it. And to demonstrate to the watching crowd that he can forgive sins, he does the seemingly harder thing of miraculously healing the man. You see the point that he’s making in Vs 9? It’s easy to say ‘your sins are forgiven’ because that claim can’t be tested. It’s much harder to say ‘be healed’ because that can be tested immediately.
So he does the thing that seems harder as a demonstration that he can do what appears easier.
Here’s the point – Jesus really can forgive us. He really can offer the forgiveness that we so desperately need.
If you’re with us this afternoon, and you have never known or received that forgiveness, can I invite you to come to Jesus and find it. Or maybe you are here and even though you would have called yourself a Christian for a long time, you know that a sin of some kind is clinging on to you really tightly, or maybe you are holding it. And you haven’t yet come to Jesus to find forgiveness. Can I invite you too to come to Jesus and find forgiveness?
It might be that you are thinking, why does Jesus have the authority to forgive sins? That’s a fair question. It’s asked by some of the people who are in the room with him that day in Capernaum. And the answer is that even at this early stage of Mark’s gospel, there are already hints of how the story will end.
We’re told in the next Chapter that the Pharisees, and the teachers of the law in Vs 6, were looking for a way to kill Jesus because of what he claimed about himself.
Yet in Mark’s narrative, it’s when Jesus dies, that his full authority to forgive is revealed. Because in his death, he pays the penalty for all of our sin against God, so that we might know his forgiveness. On the cross, he experienced the full consequences of sin, and because he did, he has the authority to offer forgiveness to everyone who turns to him.
One of my favourite Christian thinkers and speakers is an American woman who is now in her 80s. She spent many years in the Anglican church in the US but now in her retirement continues to travel and speak and write and I find much of her work very stimulating. This is how she describes the solution that Jesus offers through the cross, ‘In order for God truly to overcome the very worst, the Son underwent the very worst.’
Friends, our world is more broken than we know. We are more broken than we know. Yet the hope that Jesus offers is deeper and richer than we can possibly imagine. There is forgiveness in him that will right every wrong. There is hope in him.
SILENCE
PRAY/SING