Mark 2:1-12 “A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. 2 So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. 3 Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. 4 Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." 6 Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, 7 "Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?" 8 Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, "Why are you thinking these things? 9 Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? 10 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . ." He said to the paralytic, 11 "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." 12 He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this!"
There is a basic rationalization we make in our minds when we come across human tragedy. If it is us personally who have experienced the tragedy, we instinctively cry out, “Why me?” If the tragedy has happened to a stranger, however, at some level in our heads we think, “He or she must have done something to deserve this.” An accident, a financial crisis, an addiction, the loss of a home or job – we sympathize but we also rationalize. At the most basic level we are no different than Job’s friends, who counsel him to plead to God for forgiveness for the sins that surely must have caused his unbearable suffering. This was the rationalization that the scribes had made in their own minds. Elsewhere in the Gospels, we see a man born blind who appeared before Jesus (cf. John 9). The common logic was that the man or the man’s parents had done something bad and God punished them by taking the man’s sight at birth. But Jesus boldly states that this happened not because of sin, but so that God would be glorified.
And that’s just it. We may think people simply get what they deserve, but people don’t. Yes, bad things happen to good people, but people don’t get what they deserve, because in the eternal picture, what people deserve is death. Jesus came to forgive sins, not to give people what they deserve. As we have all sinned, we all deserve death, but Jesus, who didn’t deserve death, died for us, taking our place. So we don’t get what we deserve, because it would mean the end of the human race. God loves us too much to allow us to become extinct, even though that is exactly what we’ve got coming to us.
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