Fr Matthew Reese

And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.”
—Mark 2:4-5

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today’s Gospel lesson (Mark 2:1-12) is one of my favorites of Jesus’s healing miracles, though there are many such stories in the Gospels. I think of the parallels to the healing of another invalid at the pool of Siloam in John 5:1–15 or of a man born blind in John 9:1-11. But this passage in Mark is certainly one of the most dramatic.

So desperate are this man’s friends and family, that rather than contend with the press of the crowd, they haul his stretcher around another way… perhaps through a narrow and winding alley, up a courtyard wall, and onto the roof, where they start removing thatch and palms, and wooden underlayment.

Can you imagine Jesus and the disciples looking up as hay started to fall on their heads and shafts of light started pouring into the room?

When the man is finally lowered into their midst, however, Jesus attends not to his body, but rather to his soul. “My son, your sins are forgiven.” It is only after the questioning of the scribes that Jesus commands this man to “rise, take up [his] pallet, and go home,” proving a physical healing that was almost ancillary to the spiritual one.

As in the moments where Jesus asks the people before him “do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6), this scene reminds us that God’s healing does not always come to us in exactly the manner, or order, that we expect.

We might pray for one thing in our lives, but find God pouring out his grace in another, unexpected way.

But there is another lesson to this scene, namely that our pursuit of God may sometimes require us to break convention, to go another way from the crowd, to climb on the roof, haul off the thatch and let the light pour in.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew