DAILY BYTEThe last reminder about healing that this story brings to us is pure Good News:
That in a world of brokenness and hurt, because of God’s grace and love, there can always, always, always be a triumph of the human spirit.
If you want it to be so, for EVERYONE CAN BE MADE WHOLE. Or as Jesus put it so often to the people he healed: “Your faith has made you well.”
The ancient world was big into physical perfection. To the point that at stages during their history, both the Greek’s and Romans encouraged the immediate killing of any deformed newborn babies. In the movie ‘300’ there is a harrowing scene of the Greek tribe of Sparta violently doing so.
Today, we often carry similar prejudices. Those with physical defects are sometimes treated as not quite capable as the rest of us, as being less than fully human. Jesus showed when he walked this earth, that on this issue God could not disagree with us more!
Although he often physically healed people, Jesus always seemed more interested in them becoming whole within. Within counts most to God not without!
We see that in this week’s Bible reading. The man on the mat was lowered through the roof, his four friends having gone to tremendous effort to get him there, and Jesus says what to him? What is the first thing Jesus says to him?
“My son, your sins are forgiven.” This particular line is the centrepiece of the whole passage, it is the hinge on which the rest of the story hangs: That for God wholeness is about souls more than bodies. Your body can be crippled and broken, blind and deaf but you can still soar higher than people who are physically perfect.
As Moltmann once wrote: “Our society arbitrarily defines health as the capacity for work and the capacity for enjoyment, but true health is something quite different. True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer and the strength to die. Health is not a condition of my body, it is the power of the soul to cope with the varying condition of that body.”
Jesus is most interested in healing the pain within – because it is a wholeness of human spirit that makes us whole.
That is also why everyone, absolutely everyone, can be made whole.
PRAY AS YOU GO
Gracious Father, as you heal our inner pain, may you open us up once more to real love and life and feeling and meaning. Begin us on our journey of wholeness, give our spirits the strength we need to triumph over any adversity. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
FOCUS READING
Mark 2. 5 NRSV
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
