“The Greater Need” Mark 2:1-12
Intro.: What do you
really need in life? Now, many times
when we hear this question we might feel threatened because we know that we
have far more than we actually need. Those
of us who recently returned from our congregation’s mission trip to Louisiana
were given a glimpse of what can happen to all of the things we think we need
as we sifted through the muck and piled upon a trash heap every shred of one
family’s material possessions and all the things that once held great
sentimental value to them.
My
purpose today is not to make you feel guilty because you have more than you
need, rather through the words and actions of Jesus in today’s Gospel I hope to
impress upon you that your need may be greater than you think and to assure you
that Jesus will meet that greater need.
So many people, even some of us here today,
A. As our Gospel lesson we meet a great number of people
who were probably in hot pursuit of the lesser needs which they thought Jesus
could offer them. After performing
miracles, driving out demons, healing the sick, and in last week’s lesson
cleansed a man from leprosy Jesus had trouble even going into town to
teach. Everywhere he went he was mobbed
with people who wanted something from Him; something they thought was
important, which was not. Today’s lesson
begins with Jesus again going into
When the paralyzed man and his friends
came to Jesus, like so many others there that day, they probably were not
coming to hear Jesus teach, nor to receive forgiveness. If you asked the man on the mat or his
friends to name his greatest need, my guess is that they would have answered,
“To Walk!” It seemed so obvious. The man’s life was a mess because he couldn’t
walk. He couldn’t work to provide for
himself, so he had to live off of the generosity of his friends, or sit on
street corners and beg for alms. He had
no hope of life ever being different or better, unless somehow, he could be
healed.
So hearing that Jesus was back in town,
and knowing that Jesus could heal him as he had healed so many others, his
friends went to him, got him to agree to go see Jesus, and the four of them
picked him up, mat and all, and carried him to Jesus. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see
how determined they were to get him in front of Jesus. The story tells us what they did. Not being able to reach Jesus through the
crowd, they climbed to roof, dug a hole, and lowered their friend down on his
mat.
Imagine after all of that effort, after
giving the homeowner and unrequested skylight, after
all their work to lower him down right in front of Jesus, what they must have
thought when Jesus said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” That wasn’t what they came for, was it? That wasn’t what they thought the man needed
most. I think after a moment’s silence
they must have asked themselves, “What?
Is that it? That’s all he’s going
to say. How about healing him so he can
walk again?”
B. That’s
how it is with us sometimes also. We
pursue the lesser needs with a temporal faith, that is, a faith that is seeking
only temporal blessings or deliverance.
Struggling with fallen bodies in a fallen world, we want out of the
consequences, without giving thought to the condition which has brought them. We want our friends and the members of our
families who are sick to be healed. We
want our children who have gone astray to return to us and behave better. We want our fractured relationships to be put
back together. We want our finances
fixed so we don’t have to worry about money anymore. We want God to make things in our life right,
rather than looking to him to make us right first.
Some of us come here on Sunday with so
many things that paralyze us, so many things we want Jesus to fix for us, and
so many things we want to experience. We
come here with a lot of needs that we want Jesus to address. We’d like him to give us healing.. or at least tell us what to eat
or how to exercise or how to meditate so that we can get better on our
own. We’d like him to give us better
marriages… or at least some guiding principles that we can use on our own to
make them better. We’d like him to give
us a raise .. or at least
give us ideas on how to manage our money better. We come here with all kinds of expectations,
with a long list of wants and needs; we come here to the One we know has the
power to do it all for us, and what does he offer instead? “Son, daughter, your sins are forgiven.” We want the pastor to give us what we need
and what do we hear, another sermon about our sin. We want to hear him tell us how to walk, and
instead he says again this week, “In the stead and by the command of my Lord
Jesus Christ, I forgiven you all your sins in the name of the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit.”
Ask yourself today, what do I want from
Jesus? What do I think I need from His
Church? Far too often, what we want is
to be out of the consequences that come from living in a fallen world –
consequences like disease and disability, futility and failure. But what we really need, and what Jesus offers
us through His Church is to take us out of the grasp of sin and raise us up
from our fallen state.
II. Jesus Knows Our Greatest Need And Provides For It. (vv. 5-12)
A. Jesus knew what our greater need was; the need behind
all needs. The curse behind every
deficiency in our life, and the root from which spring all our unmet needs is
sin. Before sin entered the world Adam
and Eve lacked for nothing. All their
needs were met, because their greatest need of living in perfect fellowship
with God was secure. They did not hunger
nor hurt. They did not suffer from
disease nor disability. It was all good! But then when Adam sinned, he, his offspring,
and the entire world was turned over to death and
decay. Jesus, who is the eternal Son of God in the
flesh, knew that what was most important was to take away the curse away and
destroy the rotting root.
B. Our greatest need is forgiveness and reconciliation
with God. What we need most in our lives
is to hear the words that Jesus spoke to the paralytic: “Your sins are forgiven.” It is interesting that the Psalm appointed
for this Sunday from is Psalm 130 which not only reflects the words of our
introit “He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases” but also asks: “If You, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O
Lord, who could stand? But with you
there is forgiveness.” Our Lord Jesus,
knew that the real reason the paralytic could not stand was not the disease
which followed sin, but with all of sin itself.
So it is with us, our greatest need is not physical health, temporal
security, or material wealth, but forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with
God. So Jesus’ first words to the man
who could not stand, nor walk were “Son, your sins are forgiven you!”
C. This is when the scribes got ticked
off. “Who said he could do that? That’s blasphemy. Only God can forgive sins.” Of course they had good reason for those
thoughts. No one in their history had
the audacity to say what Jesus was saying.
None of the prophets forgave sins; not even Moses. According to everything they knew about God
from the Scriptures, forgiveness was His business. What Jesus was doing was certainly new to
them. What they failed to understand was that it was
the new thing foretold by the Lord through the prophet Isaiah: “Forget
the former things; do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing! Now
it springs up; do you not perceive it?... I, even I,
am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your
sins no more.” (Is. 43:18-19)
Many people still have a problem with this
today. Some because they like to believe
that God is sort of generically nice, that there’s no real need for forgiveness
through Christ, and that God has given up on the whole wrath, judgment and hell
thing. They assume that He understands
us better now – that we don’t really sin, but just make mistakes – that we
really just can’t help ourselves so how can He blame us – that we are really
not living as enemies apart from Jesus.
They like to believe that we are actually good at heart, and that God is
generically forgiving, and permissive, and everything is just fine.
But Jesus gets very personal and specific
in our Gospel. He tells the paralytic, “your sins are forgiven.”
He doesn’t want us to fall into the trap of the scribes in thinking that
maybe we don’t need personal forgiveness for our specific sins, nor to think that our sins are just dismissed as something
not even worth God’s consideration.
Jesus wants to get real personal with us. He wants us to know that our sins were not
dismissed, but paid for by His holy blood and innocent sacrifice on the
cross. He wants us to know that He went
to that cross personally for us, and for our specific sins. We are not by nature actually good at heart,
free from blame, nor short of being sinful, and God is not generically
forgiving and permissive.
Jesus is the power of forgiveness, and in
today’s Gospel proved that He has been given the authority to forgive our
sins. Jesus asked the question, “which
is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get
up, take your mat and walk?’” And then
to prove that He had the authority to forgive sins Jesus told the man, “Get up, take your
mat, and go home..” and the man did.
Jesus performed this healing miracle to give us the assurance that His
Word had the very power and authority of God to offer spiritual healing through
the forgiveness of sins.
Today, we do not need miraculous works and
signs to prove to us that Jesus can forgive our sins. All we need to be assured of his power and
authority to provide for our greatest need is to look to His saving work, and
the signs of the cross and empty tomb. Jesus
has fulfilled all things for us. By his
death on the cross, he paid the greatest price for our redemption, and in His
resurrection the Father answered the question about who Jesus was, and whether
He truly had authority to forgiven sins.
He is the eternal Son of God in human flesh, who
possesses the unquestionable authority which He had and passed on to His Church
to forgive sins. Now through the work
of Christ we know what our greatest need is, and better yet we know that Christ
has met that need for us.
Concl.: Like those people in