How would you choose? You’re dying of cancer, heart disease, whatever, you name it. And God offers you the choice between being healed of your physical illness or being assured of the forgiveness of your sins. Which would you accept?
As people steeped in Protestant Christian culture, it’s hard for many of us to fully grasp the difficulty of a choice between forgiveness and healing would be like. We are supremely confident of the fact of forgiveness, generally taking it for granted like the German poet Heinrich Heine on his deathbed, saying, “God will forgive me. It’s His job.” We are so assured of forgiveness that I’m guessing that we would almost certainly choose healing on the assumption that God would likely toss in the forgiveness as a little bonus.
That whole perspective of an assumed, easy forgiveness for our sins blinds us to the signficance of what Jesus offered the paralyzed man in our text for this week, Mark 2:1-12. The Lord looked into the eyes of a man who could not move from his bed, who had to be lifted to the roof and let down into the presence of Jesus by his friends. He looked at a man totally helpless in regard to his body and offered that man first, not healing, but forgiveness.
We wonder what sins the man might have committed that Jesus discerned forgiveness was the greater need? Murder? Betrayal of a friend? Adultery? What sort of spiritual guilt would overshadow the great physical disability?
Perhaps one form of reflection for us this Lent would be to consider our own spiritual illness and whether it does not in fact handicap us more than any physical ailment we experience.
Jesus’ forgiveness of the man sparks a consternation among the scribes as He takes to Himself one of the perogatives that seems to belong solely to God. What Mark wants us to see, of course, is that Jesus is God. But in this age when there is much talk about therapeutic self-forgiveness it may be a good caution to remember that the scribes’ complaint is true. Only God can forgive sins. And with sin being a more serious illness than total paralysis, we ought not try to self-medicate, but instead rely on the Physician who is able to heal both body and soul.