Internal Healing

Mother's Day. Jesus knows something the man doesn’t know— that he has a much bigger problem than his physical condition. Jesus is saying to him, “I understand your problems. I have seen your suffering. I’m going to get to that. But please realize that the main problem in a person’s life is never his suffering; it’s his sin.” If you find Jesus’s response offensive, please at least consider this: If someone says to you, “The main problem in your life is not what’s happened to you, not what people have done to you; your main problem is the way you’ve responded to that”—ironically, that’s empowering. Why? Because you can’t do very much about what’s happened to you or about what other people are doing—but you can do something about yourself. When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do. It’s not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be—it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it’s rebelling against him by living without reference to him. It’s saying, “I will decide exactly how I live my life.” And Jesus says that is our main problem. Jesus is confronting the paralytic with his main problem by driving him deep. Jesus is saying, “By coming to me and asking for only your body to be healed, you’re not going deep enough. You have underestimated the depths of your longings, the longings of your heart.” Everyone who is paralyzed naturally wants with every fiber of his being to walk. But surely this man would have been resting all of his hopes in the possibility of walking again. In his heart he’s almost surely saying, “If only I could walk again, then I would be set for life. I’d never be unhappy, I would never complain. If only I could walk, then everything would be right.” And Jesus is saying, “My son, you’re mistaken.” That may sound harsh, but it’s profoundly true. Jesus says, “When I heal your body, if that’s all I do, you’ll feel you’ll never be unhappy again. But wait two months, four months—the euphoria won’t last. The roots of the discontent of the human heart go deep.” Why was forgiveness the paralytic’s deepest need? Why is it our deepest need? What other “needs” do we feel are deeper than our need for forgiveness?