The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Mark.
And when he returned to Kapenau after some days, it was reported
that he was at home and many were gathered together so that
there was no room, not even at the door.
And he was preaching the word to them, and they came bringing to
him a paralytic carried by 4 men.
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 bed on which the paralytic lay.
And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son,
your sins are forgiven. Now some of the scribes were
sitting there questioning in their hearts, Why does this man
speak like that? He's blessed farming.
Who can forgive sin but God alone?
And immediately Jesus perceiving in his heart that they fast
questioned within themselves, say to them, Why do you question
these things in your hearts, which is easy to say to the
politic, your sins are forgiven, or to say, rise, take up your
bed and walk. But that you may know that the
Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins.
He said to the paralytic, I said to you, rise, pick up your bed
and go home. And he rose and immediately
picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they
were all amazed and glorified. God saying Whenever I saw
anything like this, the gospel of the Lord.
Would you pray with me, Lord, as we come to see you this morning?
I pray that you would see us and that in response we would be
able to say to one another, to you, and to the whole world
who's listening? We have never seen anything like
this. We thank you, Jesus, that you
are a singularly unique and beautiful vision for human
beings to behold and we pray that you would be visible to us
as we open your gospel in Jesus name, Amen.
Oh, please be seated. Good morning.
Good to see you missed you all last week.
We had a wonderful time away. We're continuing on in our
series simply Jesus from the Gospel of Mark.
If you're not familiar with with the what we call the Gospels,
they are essentially they're, they're the earliest biographies
of Jesus Christ. Mark is one of the earliest
biographies of the four scholars believe, and they're based on
eyewitness accounts, especially from one of his closest
disciples, Peter. Peter was able to give his
account to John Mark, who recorded it.
And it is one of the most widely read pieces of literature in all
of human history. We're studying it this season in
the life of our church to to get a vision of Jesus and we should
just ask the question, why is Jesus Christ after 2000 years,
one of the most fascinating figures in all of human history?
You think about like from the perspective of even just.
You don't have to be a Christian to wonder at how interesting of
a person he is for people in every culture and people in
every era. Some of you may be familiar with
author and historian HG Wells. HG Wells.
He was a British author and social critic, both a historian
as well as a novelist, and he was standing on the sort of the
gate between the ancient world and the modern world.
And they called him the father of science fiction because
looking at the grand sweep of history and looking into the
future, he was actually in his novels, predicting things like
wireless technology, voicemail, e-mail, Believe it or not, he
wrote books like The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and
The Time Machine, writing in the early 1800s.
Here's what HG Wells said about Jesus Christ.
I am an historian, not a believer.
I am not a believer. But I must confess as a
historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is
irrevocably the very center of history.
Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all of
history. Now, about 200 years or so since
HG Wells wrote those words. Do you know what's happening
now? In the year 2025, Bible sales in
the United States have seen about a 22% increase since
COVID, especially among Gen. Z young adults, many of which
had no religious upbringing whatsoever.
According to a 2025 study published by the Barner group. 3
in 10 people who do not identify as a Christian churchgoer in any
way. 3 in 10 of that group have themselves made a personal
commitment to the person we're studying this morning.
Isn't that amazing? That's the highest percentage on
record since they started keeping track.
There are anecdotes from the most post Christian countries in
the world, such as France and Sweden, that churches are
filling with young people, with college students who are not
just interested in, but giving their lives to Jesus Christ, a
friend who's been involved in college ministry said this week.
He told me, he said campus ministry is fun.
Again, we have to ask, like, OK, when all of the promises of the
modern world, all of the promises of technology have
failed, why is Jesus Christ still of great interest and
still of great influence 2000 years after his time on earth?
Whether we're a believer in Jesus or a skeptic, whether
we're religious or irreligious, we owe it to ourselves, at least
intellectually to investigate why he is such a compelling
figure to so many people of such diverse backgrounds and
interests. And actually, as I was studying
this account from of healing from Mark chapter 2, the
interesting thing is that there's a mass of people seeking
out Jesus out of curiosity. We'll get to some of the
motivations why, but the same dynamic was happening in his
life and in his early ministry. And one of the things this
people find out about what it's like to seek Jesus is that when
they seek out Jesus to see him, he sees them.
He sees not. He doesn't just see them, He
sees something that they almost can't even see themselves.
He sees into the depths of their being, something that he can
heal, something that he can address, something he can
transform forever. And This is why he's the perfect
incarnation of what Daniel 7 prophesied.
Her Old Testament text, The Son of Man who's like the Ancient of
Days, who's with the Ancient of Days.
And the books of history are open.
The books of every tribe, tongue, people and nation are
open. And he's able to perfectly judge
and perfectly heal and perfectly set forward a Kingdom.
When we come to see this fascinating man, he sees us.
Would you be willing to let him see you?
Would you be willing to be as persistent as the people in this
text war to see him? Let's look together at the quest
to see Jesus in the first part of Mark chapter 2.
And you can turn there in your bulletins or Bibles begins this
way. When he Jesus entered Capernaum
again after some days, it was reported that he was at home.
So there's a buzz growing in Capernaum.
You know, word spreads quickly in these small towns that Jesus
Christ, who has electrified this area of of of Palestine is
nearby and you can actually go see him in person.
Verse 2, so many people gathered together and there was none more
room, not even in the doorway. And he was speaking the word to
them. So here's Jesus packed.
I mean, these houses were so small that if you got 40 people
in there, there was almost no room to breathe.
So you can imagine about three dozen people surrounding Jesus.
Maybe there's a foot or two in between him and the closest
person, and he's speaking the word to them.
We don't know exactly what he's saying, but he's probably
proclaiming that forgiveness that he is about to display,
that only God can ultimately forgive our deepest sins and
ultimately heal our deepest needs.
He's probably preaching about the Kingdom of God that is
available to everyone who would come to God in the Son of Man.
He's preaching the word to them. It's a message that we still
need to hear, quite frankly, but interacting with them and, and,
and they're really, really close to him.
And there's no more room even for people who wanted to get in
the door. It's so jam packed.
You can't even like open the door.
You think about who's made, who's making up this crowd here.
It's probably a mixed bag of people.
We know from other parts of Mark and other parts of the biography
of Jesus that there were different motives driving people
to go see Jesus in person. Some people wanted to be
physically healed or had a family member who needed
physical healing. And if you and I lived in that
time, there would have been very little help from medicine.
We did. They did not have modern
medicine, but there were plenty of physical ailments as there
always are in, you know. You know, after the fall, like
human beings experienced a lot of sickness and suffering.
And so some of them are there probably for a healing.
Other people are probably there because they have been fighting
a spiritual battle with a dark, oppressive force that the gospel
calls demons. And they knew that Jesus could
liberate them from demons because he's done it for other
people. Now somewhere there because they
just needed hope. They had lost hope for
themselves, for the nation of Israel.
And they've heard rumors that Jesus is Elijah come back from
the dead, or he's Moses come back from the dead, or, you
know, that he's a prophet, that he's God's chosen one.
Some people think he could be the next son of David, king of
Israel, to overthrow the Romans. He'll be our deliverer.
He can deliver us nationalistically.
Finally, there were some people there, quite frankly, that just
suspected Jesus. He's a threat to their power.
And these were the professional religious who like the scribes
of the Pharisees that were really concerned.
They thought they needed to gatekeep people like Jesus from
their, you know, from, from their area of domain, from their
power center. And so they're there to
investigate. They're there to trip him up.
So this is a very complicated, probably mix of people who have
come to see Jesus. There's so much fascination
about him. There's a lot of mixed motives
about him. And so you just feel the crush
of people trying to get to him, shoving, craning their necks,
pushing their way forward. And he's likely having to speak
loudly as he's preaching the word to them.
But as he's talking, there's these clumps of mud falling on
people's heads. There's a there's a noise and,
and they look up and there's these men or women, there's four
friends. And what are they doing?
They're they're digging their way through the roof above
Jesus. Not only is he surrounded on all
sides, people are trying to get to him from the top.
In this era, homes were built with a roof that you could
actually do work on. You could be up there, You could
dry goods up there. You could take baths up there.
You could, you know, hang out up there.
You could even sleep up there. It was made of beams of wood.
And then you would have these plants, these really thick
plants laid very thickly. And then there would be mud that
would be kind of like caked like cement over the whole thing.
And you do layer upon layer of this.
You would have to constantly sort of like re roof your roof
to make it sturdy enough to be up there.
And So what happens is that these there's four friends and
they have a man who is paralyzed.
They want to bring this paralyzed friend of theirs to
Jesus. And the only way they can get to
Jesus is by unroofing the roof. And so they really have to kind
of dig in there. And as Jesus is talking, you
know, how disruptive would that have been?
Some people think that this could have taken about an hour
of digging for them to actually get through the roof and lower
their friend down. And so, you know, what a
disruptive time. I think in Ash Wednesday, some
of you were here for Ash Wednesday.
Matt Osterkamp was trying to preach at our old worship center
while they were in literally installing showers in the floor
above. And you couldn't hear Matt
because the drilling was so loud.
These four men, these four women, these four friends had
such a deep love for their friend.
They were willing to do that. They're willing to dig through
the roof just to get him to Jesus.
And as they do, they maneuver somehow their friend through
those wooden slats and they gingerly lay him down at the
feet of Jesus. And there he is right there
standing or, you know, laying before Jesus, who stands before
him. And I think at this point in the
the narrative, Mark has us primed just to expect that, like
with every other healing up to this point, that's the climax of
the story. They go through all that
trouble. The man standing there,
everyone's watching. Jesus will do the healing and
his ministry will continue as it has before.
Why wouldn't he? Why wouldn't Jesus heal this
man? Clearly, from our perspective as
readers, paralysis is his biggest problem.
On the surface, that's what it looks like.
That's the presenting problem that he brings to Jesus.
And yet it is at this very moment when he's come to see
Jesus and everyone else has come to see Jesus.
They get as close to him as they can to see him, to know him, to
experience his power. The tables turn and Jesus sees
them. And some of you are familiar
with how a black light works, familiar with how a black light
works, that you turn on a black light and it reveals things that
you couldn't see otherwise. And Jesus has a a sort of grace
filled black light as he's looking at this man and the
friends and the people around, there's things that he's going
to reveal that only he can heal, that only he can forgive, that
only he can transform. And he does that not to judge
them, but to to help them and transform them.
It's as part of the power that he brings.
And we just need to know this about Jesus, that as we come to
him, you know, he knows everything about us.
He can see into the depths of our heart and soul and our
history. And when we come to him with
whatever presenting issue, we, we come to him and he sees that.
He understands that, but he sees something far deeper.
He's see and he looks with eyes of compassion.
And this is the, this is that Son of man from Daniel 7.
This is the Son of God that is revealed in all four gospels.
This is Jesus seeing us moved with compassion and forgiven and
forgiveness, not with condemnation.
This is actually one of the best ways to see him is just to
experience how He sees us. Now in the Gospel story, Jesus
first sees the faith of the friends.
Do you notice that in verse 5? Jesus sees the faith of the
friends seeing their faith. Jesus noticed that the roof
digging was a tangible act of trust in his power to heal the
paralyzed man. Someone once said this faith
always works through the fingers, right?
In the western world, we think of faith as a belief that we
have in our heads. I believe in God the Father
Almighty. It's good to say and it's good
to believe that in our heads, but our but, but if we really
trust something, it's going to work its way through the
fingers. That means that it's going to
impact our obedience. That faith shows itself in
obedience and tangible acts of trust.
And for these, for these four friends, their faith, their
trust that Jesus could heal their friend worked its way
through their fingers as they unroofed the roof for whatever
an hour because they were willing to, they were willing to
do anything it took to get their friend to Jesus because they
trusted him. And Jesus saw it.
Jesus took notice of it. Jesus called it faith.
Just to pause here for a moment. Anytime we take, we move and
intentionally to do anything that we can with our time, with
our reputation, with our money, with our schedules, to allow
Jesus to be close to people in our life.
That's an act of faith. So let's say that we are just
choosing to pray for people in our life that are not yet
Christians, but we care about them.
We're not trying to to force them into a conversion.
We want them to have a personal encounter with Jesus Christ
where they can see him in a way that is unforced and filled with
grace. Any prayer that we pray for
years, you know what? That's an act of faith and Jesus
sees it. Or what about this?
What about taking a risk and inviting someone to your
Citigroup, or inviting someone to Lessons and Carols, or
inviting someone to Coffee and saying, hey, tell me, what's
your spiritual story? I'd like to hear it.
That's an act of faith or sharing your spiritual story.
What has Jesus done for you? That's an act of faith.
It's not a guarantee that anything big's going to happen
in their life. Faith works through the fingers,
through the schedules, through the conversations, through the
way we use our money, through the way we use our time.
Jesus sees it now. Jesus also sees the second-half
of verse 5, the unforgiven guilt of this man who comes paralyzed.
Jesus said, Son or child, it's a very tender word.
Your sins are forgiven. And this is a a bit of A twist
in the story because we're all expecting the healing.
Why would Jesus say your sins are forgiven for someone who's
so obviously has a, a very debilitating literally problem?
And it's worth saying that like Jesus does see the paralysis.
He notices that he knows how it's impacted this man's life.
He understands the deep pain that this man is carrying
physically and emotionally. He sees how devastating it is
for this man. But Jesus also sees something
deeper, as God always looks upon the heart.
He looks upon what is at the core of this man's life.
And he sees that at the heart of this man's life is unforgiven
sin, and that there's a sin in his life that goes so deep that
only God, or only God's chosen Son of man has license to
release him from this guilt and from this pain.
We don't know the memories that this man was carrying with him
wherever he went. We don't know what memories
replayed in his mind or what he carried with him and how heavy
that was. We don't know what spiritual
danger this man was in if he were to have died and gone face
to face with the living God that very night.
We don't know. But Jesus did know and he knew
that that was the most vital, the most important, the most
life giving act that he could do for this man was to forgive his
sins on the spot. He didn't even have it.
This man didn't know to ask him for it.
Jesus saw that he needed the forgiveness and Jesus gave him
the forgiveness. Son, child, putting him at ease,
your sins are forgiven. What a tender savior pardoning
this man. And here's the final thing that
Jesus is going to see as he looks around, and that is going
to be the the judgmental thoughts of the scribes.
Jesus's action of forgiving this man's sin sparked judgment from
the scribes. Verse 6 describes it.
Some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their
hearts, why does he speak like this?
He's blaspheming who can forgive sins but God alone.
Verse 8 right away Jesus perceived in his spirit that
they were thinking like this within themselves and said to
them, why are you thinking these things in your hearts now?
What a what a shock this must have been for the scribes like
Jesus is reading their minds instantly and he's calling them
out and he's surfacing it. He's not letting them hide in
their judge mental thoughts. And here they were professional
teachers of the law. They'd always been able to hide
behind a veneer of godliness and religious sophistication.
They're they're not even standing, They're sitting like
scribes might do. And now Jesus is not intending
to humiliate them, but I believe he is there to reveal himself,
to reveal his mission. And the pushback, even the
mental judgements of the scribes is an opportunity for him to
describe why he's come on this earth.
That he is a son of man, meaning that he's identifying himself
with people. He is with us in our human
condition. And yet at the same time, he's
uniquely set apart. He's uniquely set apart.
The Son of Man is also from God, and He has the unique
opportunity to forgive the sins of the entire human race, anyone
who would come to Him because He himself is sinless and would
give what no one else could give, which is a perfect
offering to God of His life on the cross.
Now back to the crowded house. All eyes are on Jesus.
He's just called out the Pharisees and He's about to
reveal Himself to all who would come to him and see Him.
So he asked all of the skeptics this question.
It's a in the rabbinic style. We'll unpack that.
Verse 9 He says, which is easier to say to the paralytic, your
sins are forgiven, or to say get up, take up your mat and walk.
Here's kind of the rabbinic method Jesus is using.
He's saying this, Hey, look, any old fraud can claim that
someone's sins have been forgiven.
You wouldn't know it. I could declare everyone sins
here or forgiven by God and and it's it's invisible.
No one's going to know whether it's true or not.
There's no proof that it happened.
But it takes real spiritual authority to heal a paralytic
man on the spot. And so as one commentator noted,
as Jesus will perform the miracle that they can see, which
is physical healing to confirm that he had performed the
miracle that they could not see, which is forgiveness.
He performs the miracle of healing this man's paralysis to
prove that he had already performed the miracle of
forgiving of sins. Verse 10 so that you may know
that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive
sins. He told the paralytic, I tell
you, get up, take your mat and go home.
Now all eyes dart from from Jesus, who's speaking to this
man and they watch And immediately verse 12, he got up,
took the mat and went out in front of everyone and how the
how the crowds messes like gasped and sort of like backed
up and watched him, you know, take up his mat and March his
way through beaming, smiling in wonderment through this crowd.
What an amazing thing this must have been, how his four friends
who had spent an hour on roofing the roof must have wept with joy
at the great miracle, the double miracle of this man's forgiven.
And he's also healed physically. He's here.
He is this, he's like this walking picture of what the Son
of Man came to do on this earth. He's restored.
Yet the Son of Man came to restore everything that God had
created, restore creation from the nests, restore human beings
from suffering and sin like to to establish a new Kingdom, to
establish God's Kingdom here on earth.
And here this man is. He's like just one small
picture, one powerful, powerful parable, one man healed by the
Son of man, showing the world. This is just a taste of what
Jesus is intending to do for anyone that would come to him.
Verse 12, the second-half of verse 12 says this.
As a result, they were all astounded and gave glory to God
saying we have never seen anything like this.
We've never seen anything like this.
And when you get a picture of Jesus, when you come to see him,
that's what usually what you end up saying.
Like there's no one on earth that gives us this same picture
of hope and healing and restoration.
There's no one on earth that can make promises like Jesus.
There's no one on earth that can keep promises like Jesus.
You know, we all like, whether it's from Mark chapter 2, these
people or all of us or anyone, anyone who comes to Jesus, we've
all got mixed motives. I honestly, I do, you do.
We've all got mixed motives. We've all got little problems.
Things were like, if only Jesus would fix this, then I would be
happier. And when we come to him, one of
the things that he does is he thrills us and he and he raises
our vision and our perspective and our hope by doing things
that we wouldn't have even thought of that are much larger
than our little world. And he gathers us together in a
community of people who all of us have mixed motives and all of
us need our vision raised and all of us get to stay together.
Glory to God in the highest. Glory to God because we've never
seen anything like this, because his promises and his hope and
his power is so much grander than any of the promises that
any of us could take hold of in this life.
And we all see that like a new day is dawning, that all of us
have these pictures like like this man.
But but for us, it's like, maybe it's like the college students
of our day. We're like, look at what Jesus
is doing with Gen. Z who came out of COVID with
such trauma and such anxiety and they were falling apart and now
they're turning to Christ and like they're becoming the
leaders of the next generation. Is that incredible?
We can say, well, we none of us saw that coming and none of us
could have made that happen. But glory to God in the highest.
We've never seen anything like this because the Son of Man,
whether it's 2000 years ago or today, is rolling back the
tyranny of evil, and he's rolling back the tyranny of
death. And he's rolling back all of the
threats that would threaten our life and threaten our world.
And he's telling us that we don't need to panic about the
biggest problems that we face. And he's saying there's a new
day dawning and I'm coming to make all things new.
And he's bringing glory to his father.
The Ancient of Days, we're going to keep walking through Mark,
guys, and we're going to see Jesus go to the cross that he's
going to make it there and he's going to be lifted up.
And it's not going to be a throne like we expected it's
going to be. It's going to be a throne of
suffering. The king is going to go to a
cross and and then he's going to draw people from every tribe and
tongue and people and language and culture and era and
continent and generation. And like the centurion in
chapter 16, we're going to say, surely this man is the Son of
God. And that's why Jesus Christ is
endlessly fascinating to the human race.
You know, Swiss thinker Philip Schlaf said this.
Jesus is Nazareth, he says, without money in arms, conquered
more millions than Alexandra the great Caesar, Muhammad and
Napoleon. Without science and learning, he
shed more light on things human and divine than all the
philosophers and scholars combined.
Without writing a single line, he set in motion more songs of
praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern
times. So, friends, as we think about
putting ourselves there with the Capernaum crowd, what would have
brought us there? What would have brought you
there? What would have brought me
there? If you if you know Jesus was
close enough to see with your own eyes and hear with your own
ears and ready to help you with a problem that you are currently
facing, Would you elbow your way into the crowd to get a glimpse
of this man and get a shot at asking him your question?
Would you tear out the roof to get to him or allow others to
get to him? Would you see if he looked you
in the eye? Would you?
Would you, would you allow him to name and help you with a
burdensome, hopeless, broken issue that you could give to
him? And what if Jesus were to look
you in the eye and say, What do you want me to?
What do you want to trust to me? What can you trust to me to fix,
help, heal, transform? What would you tell him?
What would you give him? See, HG Wells was right.
Jesus Christ is at the very center of history.
But it's also true that he's, he's at the very center of of
your story and my story. He's the key that unlocks it and
heals it and resolves it. And he's here this morning,
friends, through his Holy Spirit.
He's ready to see us. He's ready to heal us.
He's ready to invite us to get up and be forgiven and gather at
His table and taste of the Kingdom to come.
And we have never, ever seen anything like this.
So let us give glory to God in the highest in the name of the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.