God’s Word for You

Mark 2:1-4 Digging through the roof

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, September 18, 2021

The second chapter of Mark’s Gospel has four stories that once again jump into the heart of Jesus’ ministry. One of the biggest questions that anyone asks is: “Who is Jesus?” This is a question that is at the heart of our faith. It’s a question that divides some Christian denominations. Its answer also seals our wonderful unity of fellowship, because we agree on this vitally important point: Jesus truly is God.

Mark shows us who Jesus is, and shows us that this is the truth, not just a spin that can be put onto a gospel story or a framework that might be overlaid on the legend of Jesus. Mark shows us that Jesus is truly God. As you read Mark chapter 2, keep that thought in front of you and imagine what it would have been like to have been there, to have seen these things unfolding for the first time. This Rabbi from Galilee had only just come onto the scene. Mark shows us the immediacy of these things with the first words of the chapter: A few days later.

In the first story, Jesus heals a paralyzed man. Since our Sunday School days we’ve sat in awe of Jesus’ wonderful miracle and of the faith of the men who carried their paralyzed companion. Notice the fascinating detail of the men “digging through” the roof tiles, which were often made of branches packed with mud (the way beavers build their dams) strung over a supporting lattice. But the real zing in the story is the question of the teachers of the law: Who can forgive sins but God alone? These men were experts in the Old Testament; especially the Law of Moses. Obviously it’s easier to say “You’re forgiven” than to heal someone, but Jesus shows that he has the authority and the power to do them both. So when they questioned whether he can forgive, he shows his divinity by also healing the man’s paralysis. Jesus can forgive man’s sins and heal man’s ailments: Jesus truly is God.

Jesus Forgives Sins

2 When Jesus again entered Capernaum some days later, people heard that he was home. 2 So many people were gathered together that there was no more room, not even by the door, and he was speaking the word to them. 3 Some people came to him bringing a paralyzed man, carried by four men. 4 Since they could not bring the man to Jesus because of the crowd, they dug through the roof above where he was. When they had made an opening, they lowered the stretcher on which the paralyzed man was lying.

In the 1950s there was a craze that went around for a while with people, usually students, trying to set new records as to how many people could be stuffed into a phone booth or a car. Can you imagine your own home or apartment so packed full of people that nobody can move? The scene in Capernaum was no stunt. The people seriously wanted to see and to hear Jesus, to be healed by him and to learn from him. He just started preaching. The Bible is filled with unusual pulpits: mountaintops, caves, battlefields, the heaving deck of a ship in a storm, the throne rooms of pagan kings and Pharaohs, the courtroom of a condemned man, the spot of the victim of an unwarranted stoning. And then there was a cross. But here the congregation came to Jesus’ home. His own living room or dining room or whatever name it had was where he was, and so it was there that he began to preach.

A group of people came with a paralyzed man. We don’t know how big the group was, but four of them were carrying this poor man on a litter, something we would call a stretcher today. They couldn’t get him into the house, and I’m not sure they really could even try. There was just no room. The simplest answer to their dilemma was to climb to the second floor of the house. Such homes usually had a flat roof with what we would think of as a patio or a deck on top of the house, reached by an outside stairway. Some of the man’s friends probably went up first, and then they pulled him up the side of the house with ropes, an action they would then reverse once they had made a hole in the rooftop. The flat roof was thatched with mud and sticks, and normally it was tough enough to hold the weight of a grown man who might live there (1 Kings 17:19; Proverbs 21:9). With some ingenuity and effort, the paralyzed man’s friends made quick work of the mud-thatch, digging through with a hole big enough to lower their friend down to Jesus with ropes.

This passage is a testimony to the good work that parents do when they bring their children to be baptized. Certainly, infants cannot yet speak or confess their sins or proclaim their faith with eloquent words. But infants can show that they trust their mothers by clinging to them, and even by crying when someone else wants to hold them, because they prefer their mother over and above all others. This is the kind of faith and trust we all should show to God, crying out in fear and grief whenever the devil would try to lure us away from our Savior’s loving arms. But if we question whether an infant can show its faith because it doesn’t, then how often do we Christians show our faith even though we might, but instead we are sleeping, or preening ourselves in the bathroom, or talking about trivial things, or the many other things we do every day that do not show our faith? Yet parents bring their child to the font just as this man’s friends brought him to the Savior. “Christ,” Luther points out, “has never rejected a single man who was brought to him through someone else’s faith, but accepted all” (Letter to Philip Melanchthon, January 13, 1522). So just as these friends did a good thing by bringing their friend to the Savior, but did not really heal him themselves, so also parents do a good thing by bringing their children to be baptized and be saved (Mark 16:16), even though they don’t save their children themselves. The faith given to children at their baptism is a gift that is theirs forever. It is nurtured and tended their whole lives, but it is theirs from their baptism onward. They are buried with Christ in that baptism, and raised up living in faith by the power of God who also raised Christ from the dead (Colossians 2:12). You may not have a crippled friend to be healed by Christ, but you can be a parent or a godparent or a grandparent who prays for the faith of a child, even if that child is now grown; even if that child now has children. We show our faith and love for one another by praying for each other and by sharing the gospel of the forgiveness of sins. What better gift is there to give? What better act or deed is there to perform than one that may help another to come to faith? Eternal life is the result. Maybe you don’t need to dig through the rafters. Maybe you just need to carve out some time.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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