Mood:
rushedTopic: Sermon Staging Area
Primary text for this weekend is Mark 2:1-12, the account of the paralyzed man whose friends dug a hole in the roof. I'll be drawing heavily from John Ortberg's sermon "Fellowship of the Mat." I always struggle with what I should do when I am drawing material from someone else's message. On the one hand, I want to be honest, letting people know that I'm using thoughts from someone else. On the other hand, aren't all thoughts in sermons "from someone else"? Plus, it's distracting when a preacher says every few moments, "As ____ says in _____ ... ." What's worse, there are people in the pews who---if you state that you're drawing ideas from someone else---respond by assuming that, as a result, the pastor isn't doing anything. What they don't see is that, even if I draw some thoughts and illustrations from someone else, the sermon was no less difficult to create---adapting each part for my specific audience, creating the PowerPoint, etc. Additionally, even if I draw ideas from someone else, I still always read every commentary I own on the text and, usually, translate the text from Greek to English, looking up each significant word. The dilemma is basically this, "How do I footnote a sermon?" I've thought about putting small "footnotes" at the bottom of PowerPoint slides, but I'm afraid that that too would be a distraction. If anyone else has any ideas on this, please email me or post a comment.
First thoughts on the text ...
This was Simon Peter's house. When Jesus first moved in, he was probably a bit proud of the fact that Jesus had chosen his home. ("Oh yeah, me and the Messiah? We're tight, man, tight. In fact, he's staying at my place right now.") But WHENEVER YOU INVITE GOD, YOU ALSO INVITE ALL THE PEOPLE THAT GOD LOVES. When you invite God in, you may get more than you expected.
How do I know if Jesus is inside? When people show up broken and leave dancing.
Do people tear off the roof to bring their brokenness here? If not, why not?
At first, the paralytic must have been disappointed: He comes for a healing and Jesus says, "Your sins are forgiven"---then it looks like a theological fist-fight is going to break out! But all of this occurs to show that it is indeed the power of God at work in Jesus Christ.
This house seems to have been found in excavations of the area. "The house was built at the very end of the Hellenistic period (first century B.C.). In the second half of the first century A.D. some peculiar features set apart this building from all the others so far excavated in Capernaum. Here, in fact, the pavements received floors of lime several times. Interesting enough, many pieces of broken lamps were found in the thin layers of lime."
"When Jesus saw their faith": This does not imply---as this is often interpreted---that it was strictly the friends' faith that led to the man's healing. It includes the friends' faith and the man's faith! It took faith for the paralytic to come to Jesus, to give in to this crazy plan. Faith is a shared event.
Close exegesis: 2:1: en oiko = "in home" or "at home"---presumably, Simon and Andrew's home, in light of Mark 1:29-34.
2:4: apostegazo: "unroofed"
krabbatos: "mat," rather than "bed" or "stretcher"
2:5: "Son" in its vocative usage always refers in Mark to persons that trust in Jesus with childlike trust (cf. 9:36-37, 42; 10:13-16, 24).
2:7: Release from sins is domain of divine: Exodus 34:6ff; Isa. 43:25; 44:22. Cf. Isa. 33:22, 24: "Yahweh is our judge, Yahweh is our lawgiver. ... No one living in Zion will say, 'I am ill,' and the sins of those living in Zion will be released." Priests could pronounce forgiveness, but only when there was repentance, restitution, and sacrifice. A thought ... God always heals those that trust in him, because sickness is something less than God's creative intention for the cosmos: Sometimes it's miraculously (as here), sometimes it's through medical treatment (as in the man beaten by robbers in the Good Samaritan parable), sometimes it's by God giving the grace to endure it to the end (as in Paul's thorn in the flesh). In every case, God can heal it or share it because---on the cross---he already bore it. The same God works in medical healing as in miraculous healing. In truth, isn't even medical healing a miracle?
2:11: Church father Peter Chrysologus said in a sermon on this text, "Carry the bed that once carried you so that the proof of your sickness becomes the proof of your soundness, your bed of life's pain a signpost of life's pleasure, the weight of the mat a sign that you are now free."
2:12: existasthai: "Standing-beside-themselves," perhaps---colloquially, in English---"surprised-out-of-their-skin."
Paraphrased from Ortberg: This man had an "AS IS" tag that was three feet wide and six feet long, a mat.
Everybody comes with a mat.
The management guy in the group---the one with the MBA---holds a brainstorming session: "Remember there are no dumb ideas." Then, one of the younger guys in the group says, "Dude! Why don't we dig a hole in the roof!" At which point the management guy says, "Okay, there is at least one dumb idea."
Peter thinks he's just hosting a Bible study---what he gets is a skylight. The rest of the people are staring in awe; Peter's checking his State Farm policy.
"Jesus is here! Does that qualify on insurance as an 'act of God'?"
What sins can a paralytic commit anyway? Jesus knows that the deadliest sins---anger, judgmentalism, resentment, lust, arrogance---can occur without the body doing anything.
