My Biggest Problem

As I've explained previously, my oldest son, who is now 32, suffered a severe Traumatic Brain Injury in a skiing accident 10 years ago.  He had just finished college and was engaged to be married but now he is blind, mute, fed through a feeding tube and can do nothing to take care of himself.  Our family with three other excellent caregivers have taken care of him at our home since the spring of 2003.  Now, I have stage three cancer and am undergoing the tortures of chemotherapy.  So what is my biggest problem?  Or to put it in the positive, what would be the best thing that could happen to me?  It would appear, from the human perspective that my son being healed or my being definitively declared cancer free and not have to go through chemotherapy would be the best things that could happen to me.  However, as I said at the beginning of this blog what things mean cannot be determined by mere human speculation.  What God says about the meaning of things is the actual meaning of things.  So, I ask again, what is my biggest problem?  What is the best thing that can happen to me?

In Mark's gospel, the second chapter we are given some clear insight into these questions when Jesus encounters a young man, probably a teenager, who has been a paragalegic since birth.  It is a very poignant story.  Jesus is in Capernaum and is in a home teaching the people.  There are so many people crowded in the house and around it that the house itself has virtually disappeared in the sea of humanity.  Four friends from the neighborhood upon discovering Jesus in the home have run off and now returned with a fifth friend, the aforementioned parapalegic.  They are carrying him on a homemade stretcher.  They have brought him so that Jesus will heal him.  However,  they encounter the impenetrable wall of humanity surrounding Jesus and cannot get to him.  Being enterprising teenage boys they see a way through the problem.  They climb on the roof of the home and hoist their friend, lying upon the stretcher, up onto the roof.  Then they proceed to remove the roof from over Jesus's head.  After the demolition is done, they lower their friend down on his stretcher in front of Jesus and, I am sure, in front of the astonished crowd.

This is how Mark records what happens next: "...when Jesus asaw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, byour sins are forgiven.'"  Really?  Is Jesus out of touch with reality or what?  These friends didn't go to all this trouble to have some religious mumbo-jumbo muttered over their friend.  They wanted him to be healed.  Can't you imagine their outrage?  Who cares if his sins are forgiven, he's been a cripple since birth.  He can't have a normal life.  He needs to be healed.  Besides that, how many sins can a paralyzed, teenage boy have committed?  Jesus, you're being pretty harsh and judgmental.  This boy's a victim, not a criminal.  But Jesus looks at this paralyzed boy and says, "Son, your biggest problem is not that you are paralyzed.  Your biggest problem is that you are a willful sinner who deserves God's just condemnation.  So the best thing I can do for you is to forgive you of your sins."

Now the religious leaders, as soon as Jesus tells this young boy his sins are forgiven, are offended because they understand something about reality: only God can forgive sins and thus when Jesus forgives this boy's sins he is saying he is God.  Obviously, it is blasphemy for a mere human being to claim to be God.  Jesus knows that this is what they are thinking and so he asks them a simple question: "Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Rise, take up your bed and walk'?"  If you ever wanted a perfect illustration of the classic rhetorical/literary device called "irony", here it is.  Which is easier to say?  On one hand it is easier to say "your sins are forgiven" because no one knows whether or not they truly are forgiven, whereas, if you tell a paralyzed boy to take up his bed and walk, everyone knows whether or not that happened.  On the other hand, being a man and having the authority which God alone possesses to forgive sins is an impossibility, for God is not a man.  Do you see how Jesus hangs them on the horns of a dilemma?

But then, Jesus does what only the eternal Son of God who took on human flesh could do: to prove that he is God and thus has the authority to forgive sins, he commands the paralyzed and now forgiven young man, take up your stretcher and go home.

How I love this Lord Jesus Christ.  He always tells the truth.  My biggest problem is that I am a hell-deserving sinner, not that my son is disabled or that I have cancer.  So the best news I could ever hear is that my sins are forgiven.  They will not be held against me.  I have been pardoned and made right with God by Christ's dying and rising from the dead.  Once a person has heard this best of all possible news, everything is going to be OK, no matter what happens to him or her in this life.