These two stories we’ve heard this morning are about friendship and so I have been doing some thinking about the nature of friendship. In fact this last week, I traveled to Washington D.C. to see a friend whose wife died recently of cancer. She was only in her 40s and he’s still hurting. I thought as his friend, I should go see him.
We have few friends really. We have many acquaintances but few friends. How do you make a friend? Well, it’s someone you like, I guess. For me, someone who can make me laugh. It’s different from a buddy. I have lots of golfing buddies, I will admit to you that I also have poker buddies but few of them are friends.
What makes a friend? What makes a close friend? Is it just that we know someone a long time? Is it that we share interests? Yes all of those things go into it. But it doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. I’ll tell you what I think it is.
I think strong, close friendships happen when two people have something on each other and they don’t turn you in. I know this is a strange definition but think about it. How do friendships form? I tell you something about myself that isn’t obvious. Maybe it’s a preference or a habit or a quirk or an experience. If that other person makes fun of you or uses what you have told them as gossip or simply does not say anything that is similarly risky, no friendship will form. The risk always has to be at a commensurate level and over quite a long time so you can be sure you trust the other person. True bonds of friendship are formed when you really risk a lot and the other person does not reject you, or make fun of you, or tell you you’re an idiot, or turn away from you, or turn you in.
So if you tell your friend you’re having an affair, that’s a big risk. But if they don’t reject you or turn you in to your spouse or even other people, chances are the friendship will deepen. You can see why we don’t have all that many good friends. Risk and trust happen slowly. Not all people who are married to each other are friends, but when they are, the bonds are strong and the trust enduring.
I was at a meeting the other day and someone announced they were getting married. Someone shouted out, "It’s not too late," and the guy sitting next to me said to me, "Why ruin a perfectly good friendship." Marriages are made stronger when people work on being good friends. Churches are stronger when we act according to the rules of friendship, of risk and trust and they fall apart when people gossip. It wrecks the trust.
David and Jonathan were friends. And in the story we heard, their friendship was tested again. But Jonathan did not turn in his friend David to Saul. David risked a great deal by turning to Jonathan and he didn’t fail him. And so David loved Jonathan and in his gratefulness to his friend, it says, he wept the more.
In the gospel, there is another story about friendship.
Jesus has been out preaching in Galilee and decides to return home, probably the home of Peter and Andrew, though the text doesn’t say, in Capernaum. Well, he wasn’t there long before a crowd gathered, pushing in the house, people peering in the front door, and Jesus, it says, is giving them the word, probably meaning the gospel, the good news of God’s love.
Some way off, a man and four friends had heard that Jesus was in town. So they immediately loaded the man onto a sort of stretcher, one friend at each corner, and carried him toward the house where Jesus was staying. But when they got there, the crowd was so large and so tightly packed in that they had little hope of getting anywhere near to Jesus.
Now the story does not describe the nature of their friendship. But the one man could not walk. Given that people in those days thought they were sick because of sin, did he describe his feelings of guilt to his friends? One thing is for sure, as we’ll see in a minute, they discussed God and healing. They had a theological dimension to their lives that had a lot to do with their friendship.
But whatever the nature of their friendship they were a resourceful and determined lot and they came up with a plan. The roofs of houses in those days and in that part of the world were flat and people often sat on them, sort of like some seashore houses around here. The roofs had beams across them and the spaces were packed with mud and earth and straw.
So the men carried the stretcher up the outside stairs to the roof and began to remove the dirt part in between the beams. Inside, Jesus and no doubt the homeowner, who could have been Peter, at some point, must have noticed the light coming from above and looked up. And what they must have seen was four sweaty faces starring down at them. Little by little the hole grew larger until there was a command and the stretcher with the man on it slowly began to descend down into the room until at last he lay at Jesus feet.
Now I imagine that Jesus was quite amused by this and unlike the last paralytic we talked about, Jesus doesn’t ask the man what he wants. It’s pretty clear what he wants. And then the scriptures say a very strange thing. "When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven.'"
Now we have to pause just a moment here to sort something out. Are we being taught here that the man was paralyzed because of sin? Well, yes and no. Does it mean the man did something immoral and was made paralyzed? No. You don’t have a cold because you cheated on your expense report last week, you have a cold because there is disease in the world. You might have a cold if you argued with your mother who told you to take vitamin C, but that’s another matter.
Sin, death, the devil and disease are all cousins. They are all part of a fallen creation. And this man’s paralysis – his inability to function in the way God originally designed him – was in a sense due to the consequence of a fallen world. It wasn’t a particular punishment for something he’d done. But here’s the point. Jesus is saying that all people are subject to sin, disease and ultimately death. This can find expression in many ways – physical deformity, mental deformity or spiritual deformity. We are not, on multiple levels, what God intended us to be, which is fully in communion with him and with each other.
Let me put it this way. The man could have come in and said, I am having a terrible relationship with my wife. And Jesus could have said to him your faith has made you whole. It just so happened that the expression, the manifestation of this man’s ungodliness was in the fact that he couldn’t walk. That’s why Jesus says to his detractors, "Do I have the authority to forgive sins?" Sure. "Do I have the authority to make this man walk?" Yes. "Do I have the authority to heal relationships?" Yes. "Do I have the authority to make people more whole and more like God intended them to be than when they first came to me?" Absolutely. So in a sense, this man in the presence of Jesus became a living parable of what Jesus does for people. Jesus is saying by healing the man, he came to me because he knew he had a need. He believed that I could help him with that need. And I did. And this is what I (the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God) can do for anyone who comes to me. That’s the point of the story, that’s the point of the gospel, that’s the point of this church and your life.
But there’s something here you shouldn’t miss. What does Mark say that Jesus saw? When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." Their faith. Not his faith, their faith. There wasn’t one person who had faith. There were five in this case, one in the room and four on the roof. They all believed in Jesus. They believed in him so much that they did not give up when they saw the crowd, they did not give up or turn back when they couldn’t get in, they didn’t hesitate to dig a hole in the roof, perhaps over the shouts of whoever owned that house, to get to Jesus. Jesus saw their faith.
We don’t always think about collective faith. Usually in the Bible and now we ask an individual, do you have faith, do you believe in Christ? But even if you answer, yes, there are few of us who have not been carried to the feet of Jesus by other people. And I’d like to pause for a moment this morning and ask you to think about people in your life who helped carry you to Jesus – maybe it was a mother or father, maybe a friend, maybe a pastor. And then I’d like to ask you to do something this week. If one of those people is still alive, call them tell them about this morning and that you want to thank them for helping you.
I’m sure you see the point. We all have had someone who helped carry us to Jesus. But now I want to ask you this. Who are you carrying? Whose stretcher is your hand upon? And you say, "But I’m no great counselor and sometimes I even have trouble with my own faith." Yeah? So?
There’s not a person in this room who can get to Jesus or get through life without some people helping to carry you or without you carrying them. And the longer I live, the more I’m convinced that people don’t want deep spiritual advice when their hurting, or ready answers and certainly not your opinion. What do they want and need? They want someone to be there. Someone they can trust with their hurt and their confusion and their loneliness.
The other night in a Bible study at the church I attend, we got to talking about people who had helped us through hard times in life and one fellow there, whom I didn’t know very well, suddenly spoke. He said a few years earlier he’d gone through a very difficult divorce, so difficult he didn’t know if he was going to make it out the other side, he was so devastated. And then he named two or three people in the church, one of whom was in the room, who had helped him through. And even though he has moved probably 50 miles away from the church, he still attends every week and comes to choir practice and comes to Bible study because it was in that church where the friends were and are who helped him. And in telling this story he said that one of those friends had given him a post card, one of those stupid post cards, you know the kind, with a kitten hanging off a branch and the hardly original phrase, hang in there written on it.
One of those. And He said, "I’d look at that card and I’d think of my friends and I’d just hang in there" and he said, "I still have it. It’s still hanging over my desk."
So I ask you again. Who are you helping to carry? The Bible says, bear one another’s burdens. And so often, if we really want to be a good Christian that’s what we’re supposed to do. So the next time you ask someone how they are and you detect a bit of discouragement in their voice, maybe it’s they’re going through more than they’re letting on. And maybe we need to listen just a little bit harder. They may be paralyzed with fear or doubt or hurt or discouragement. And what do we need to do? We need to be there. Or make a call, or send a note, even a stupid post card.
In the end none of us come to Jesus or get through this life alone. None of us have enough faith or strength or courage. Which is why God has given us each other and this church and these people. And friends your faith will probably not get you through. But their faith will get you all the way to the feet of Jesus, the one who risked everything for his friends.
Amen.
