Reverend Thomas L. Stiers
February 23, 2003
Mark 2:1-12
With A Little Help From My Friends

Mark is acknowledged to be the first of the four gospels to be written. Mark’s message is clear: Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said, “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Since Mark is the earliest of the Gospels, these stories about Jesus lack the embellishment of later times. These short stories are quite revolutionary. The stories remembered about Jesus by the early church are perhaps the most dramatic. They remembered things that were out of the ordinary. They remembered stories that were very unusual. More often than not they remembered stories of Jesus dealing with people on the margins of life.

Take our text this morning – it is a story about a man on the margin. This man was a paralytic. In Jesus’ time the religious would point to the paralytic and quote scripture proving that his illness was associated with sin. For example Psalm 103: 2-3: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals your diseases.”

So what is radical about our text? Jesus takes a man on the margin and makes him a sign of the Kingdom!

The crowd in the house was probably saying to each other: “What has this man done to deserve this? He must have done something!”

Another dramatic part of our text is that the man’s friends did not believe that!

Yes, the crowd in the house might have been saying what did this man do to deserve this. But the man’s four friends knew that he was deserving of healing by Jesus. The man’s friends knew that religion normally applied only to the very religious and perhaps the rich. But the paralytic’s friends believed that God was their friend.

I am not sure we can understand how radical this story is. In the culture of that time, whether it was Greek, Roman, or Jewish it was wrong to associate with an outcast. This man was a paralytic therefore clearly an outcast. He had sinned against God.
So the paralytic’s friends did an amazing thing. Seeing the house was crowded and surrounded by many, they simply went up on the roof with the paralytic. Then they took the roof apart and lowered the man down at the feet of Jesus.

“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’”

“Mark tells us that Jesus began his ministry with an attack on the powers of demonic possession and illness. The approach of God’s rule meant healing of severe physical afflictions, which separated person from the larger human community. In this story, another barrier falls: that of sin. Resistance to Jesus’ words and actions of forgiveness shows that the separation of the sinner from God is not the only barrier created by sin. Humans divided themselves into categories of “righteous” and “sinners,” but Jesus rejects that division. The righteous thinks they know the conditions under which persons may expect to receive mercy from God. Those who experience God’s mercy and compassion are already trying to shape their lives by God’s law. Their desire for holiness is not wrong. The failure occurs when the scribes mistake Jesus’ ministry to sinners as blasphemous disregard for God’s holiness.” (Pheme Perkins The New Interpreter’s Bible)

The second most radical thing about this text: Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is breaking into this world, and this is what it looks like: people on the margin have been included! This paralytic who was an outcast according to the religious rules of Greek/Roman/Jewish society is included in God’s kingdom!

Jesus’ message was that we are to live as if – as if the kingdom of God has broken in – the reality of the Kingdom is that all are included. This is the way that we are to live! Jesus said time and again, I did not only come to the rich, the well, the religious, I also came for those on the margin of life. The covenant has always included the rich and the religious; but my kingdom message is that all are included. Note that when a gang of four opens up a roof and lowers a sick person down, that person is included in my Kingdom!

Remember Mark is writing first. Mark is in a hurry. So Mark’s stories are the kernel, the kernel that is short and pithy.

So we get Jesus’ message: The kingdom of God is breaking into this world. What does it look like? It looks like this paralytic, this man that was lowered down into my presence this outcast that I have healed. Those on the margin are in my kingdom.

The early church added to this story of redemption. The early church told other stories of outcasts being lowered down into the presence of Jesus’ healing power.

The New Testament is full of stories of people being lowered down into the healing presence of Jesus. The Book of Acts contains many of these stories. The early church was a sea of turmoil. There was a huge controversy over whether one had to be first circumcised before one could become a Christian. Another dispute was over whether a Christian should keep kosher. The early church spent a lot of time debating who was in and who was out. The Holy Spirit led them to make the circle wider and wider.

One of the most powerful stories concerning inclusion is found in Acts chapter 8. The disciple Philip was called by the Holy Spirit to leave Jerusalem and go down the road toward Gaza. And on that road, Philip met an Ethiopian eunuch. Now eunuchs were outside the covenant because they could not reproduce themselves. Eunuchs were like the paralytic, the mentally ill, the sick; they had sinned and therefore were outside the Jewish covenant.
Philip the Evangelists invites the eunuch into the kingdom. The eunuch is included in the boundaries of the new kingdom, the kingdom of Jesus. So, here we see the early church following Jesus’ example and expanding the boundaries of the kingdom. The early church had found an alternative social vision and new vision of community.

Hence the story in Acts Chapter eight of Philip’s conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch is a key story of inclusivity in the early church. The Christian community was inviting those on the margin to come into the community.

But the early church was not of one mind on the subject of inclusivity. It struggled with decisions about who was to receive communion and who could be baptized and who could receive the ministries of the church. The community had the right to decide these issues.

If you have followed me so far, you being familiar with the Bible will ask, “Now, Tom, what about St. Paul?” What did Paul believe about inclusivity? As we have continued our congregation’s discussion on inclusivity, several members have asked what about Paul’s teaching in the first chapter of Romans. In that chapter Paul attempts to speak about what is approved behavior and what is not approved behavior. .

The articulate New Testament scholar, Marcus Borg writes: “Next to Jesus, Paul is the most important individual in the New Testament. He wrote more of the New Testament documents than any other person. And more than anybody else, he was responsible for the spread of the Jesus movement into the Gentile world.

“But despite his importance, Paul has a very mixed press today, even among Christians. Some love and admire him, others keep their distance, and still others despise him. Though all Christians have heard of him, many do not know much about him.

“Paul believed that the community of Jesus was open to both Jew and Gentile: that one could become a part of this Jewish/Christian community without observing the sharp boundaries that separated Jews from Gentiles. This was certainly part of the appeal of Paul’s message.

“St Paul believed that the end of the age was at hand. Paul believed that Jesus would return soon, though the heart of his message does not seem to have been ‘Repent, for the last judgment is coming soon.’ His emphasis seems to have been that God through Jesus had inaugurated a new age and that the rule of the ‘powers’ (including the reign of the Roman Empire) would soon be over.” (Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again)

So, Paul urged early Christians to focus on the coming of God’s Kingdom. So, he told them not to marry, unless you are burning with lust. Then Paul would give permission to marry. Today we would certain say that is a very poor reason for marriage. But Paul was preaching to the early Christians that whatever they do – do to the glory of God. Paul believed that sex was a gift from God and Christians are to use it responsibly.

So when Paul found that Jesus wasn’t coming back in his (that is) Paul’s lifetime, Paul was discouraged. Paul urged that the believer should follow the law of the land. Now by the law, Paul did not mean the Torah but rather a system of requirements set by Romans.

Let me give you a few examples.

Because Paul wanted the Christian community to stay out of trouble with the Empire, he took some stands that surprise us today. Paul believed that slaves should be obedient to their masters.

Paul believed that wives should be submissive to their husbands. (Colossians 3: 18) Today we believe in equality in marriage. Paul says that women should not speak in church, but should ask their husbands after they get home. (I Corinthians 14: 34-35) Paul says that women should not pray or prophesy in church with their heads unveiled and their hair therefore exposed. While Paul does not say that women should not pray in church, only that they should be veiled when doing so. Today’s believers no longer agree with Paul on these issues.

It is interesting to note that Paul grew up in a city Tarsus in which women wore the complete chador in public, completely covering them from head to foot (including their faces). Thus it is possible that Paul found unveiled women rather shocking. (Borg)

To me Paul reached the highest point of his theology when he wrote “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3: 26-28)

“Of course, people continued to be Jew or Gentile by birth, and slave or free and male or female, but within the community of Jesus these distinctions were not to matter. Life in Christ involved an egalitarian social vision. In the context of Paul’s world, it was a new social reality.” ( Marcus Borg)

In Romans Chapter one Paul sets forth a number of rules by which he wants the believer to live in this world. He was calling each believer to live responsibly and to live for the glory of God.

Many of you have asked me to talk about Paul’s writings in Romans Chapter One Verses 26-27. “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

Peter Gomes writes about this passage in his best selling The Good Book. “The first thing to be remembered here is that Paul is not writing about homosexuality in Romans – neither about homosexuality as he would have understood it nor about homosexuality as we now understand it. He is writing about the fallen nature of humankind.”

St Paul was talking to people who knew what was right and they were not practicing responsible behavior. Married men were performing homosexual acts and not being responsible to their wedding covenant. It was the same for married women. Paul was condemning adult males for exploiting for sexual purposes young males. Paul was calling Christians to accountability to the covenant. He wanted to keep the Christians out of conflict with the authority of the Empire. Paul did not see homosexuality as a sin.

Remember that St Paul understood that Jesus was drawing those on the margin into the Christian community. Both Paul and Jesus lived in a time when one was thought to be a sinner if they were ill or outside the covenant. Jesus and Paul taught that all of us are sinners and in need of God’s grace.

I hope you have learned by this walk through the New Testament that the early church debated the meaning of the covenant. Who is in? Who is out? Community has always been struggle. That struggle continues until today. But the continuing church is left with the problem in each generation of deciding what does that mean. Each generation is called to discern what Jesus’ teaching mean in that generation.

Jesus was opening and affirming to all. In the community of Jesus, all of God’s children are loved. Just as Jesus was clear about the moneychangers making money off of religious practice and threw them out of the temple, I believe that Jesus would be equally clear in criticizing the guys that ran Enron. They put making money ahead of being responsible to their employees and their stockholders. Would Jesus kick them out of the church? I believe that Jesus would have said that they are still in the covenant but they have broken the moral code.

Would Jesus leave homosexuals out of the covenant? No, Jesus would bring them in from the margin and place them within the community.

Jesus was clear about what he was down on! He was clear about what he was up on! We are called to live in response to God’s love and to live responsible in this life. Jesus said be you perfect in this life. By setting this standard Jesus said that all are sinners and in need of God’s forgiveness. Each of us is called to live our life to the glory of God.

I take us back to the healing of the paralytic. His four friends knew that he belonged in the community of Jesus. They took him to Jesus. Jesus said: Your sins are forgiven. I say to you stand up, take your mat and go to your home. You are no longer being told that you are outside of the covenant because of your illness or your sin.

Mark shares this message in this remarkable and radical short story. The price for being healed is: you are now responsible for your behavior. Sorry, there are no more excuses. Mark’s story reminds us that all who sit at the feet of Jesus have sinned. But all of us are a part of the community of Jesus as forgiven. Stand up, take your mat, and go home. Any member of our congregation who is also a member of the 12-step movement can testify to the power of that healing. But even after the healing we all need a little help from our friends! The text ends with this statement: “We have never seen anything like this!”

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