in love is not about reason. In the other Gospel accounts there may be a hint that the sudden leaving behind of everything by certain disciples necessitates that they already know about Jesus and who he is. Mark’s Gospel is more like a love story in which these disciples are simply swept off their feet by this new man’s preaching about a coming kingdom that is going to change everything.
Peter, Andrew, James, and John are like slaphappy boys who hear the marching band calling new recruits to the glories of fighting for a noble cause. All they hear is the music. They do not hear the distant sounds of guns. Scenes of wounded comrades and lonely nights away from home are drowned out by the sound of joyous music.
“Follow me, now, this instant, and I will have you catching people.” The song sounds too good to pass up. Maybe fishing has grown too ordinary for these full-blooded men. Jesus sees something in their eyes that is worth fishing for—and Jesus is quite a fisherman. He has these young boys hooked before they know what is happening.
He does not bother to tell them that day about a cross. At this moment he wants their enthusiasm. They will need that zeal. Jesus will need that zeal, though he often does not get it from his small band of disciples. The first smell of the battle softens these boys real quick, but the tales of softening come later.
For now, the scene is of an old man standing in a boat shaking his head as his boys and two of their friends walk into the sunset and away from the boats. “What fools they are,” this father thinks ruefully. He is right.
Chapter Two
Mark 2:1–12 Jesus Heals the Paralytic in Capernaum
In compiling his Gospel, Mark puts a number of traditions together. What we have in Mark is a mosaic. He uses different tiles to create his mosaic. These tiles come from various sources that Mark has in his possession. Biblical scholars would lick their chops to be able to look over Mark’s shoulder as he puts together his mosaic.
If Mark has different buckets of tiles, which bucket does he pick from in order to place Jesus “at home” in Capernaum, as he is said to be in this account? Everybody knows that Jesus’ home is Nazareth, right? Maybe one of Mark’s buckets has Jesus’ home located in Capernaum. In Mark’s telling of the story, Jesus does seem to spend a lot of time in Capernaum. Does Jesus’ family move to Capernaum later? Tradition has it that Joseph dies while Jesus is young. It is possible that Mary moves to Capernaum to be with or near relatives. Go ahead, reach into your own bucket and imagine.
One never knows how much weight to put on one piece of tile. It may be that Mark simply puts in a tile that he is given, or that he is making a theological statement. It is important to remember that the Bible is a rich mosaic and not a simple paint-by-number, one-dimensional picture. We must honor the nature of how our Scriptures are put together. Since no one is looking over Mark’s shoulder, there will be different opinions as to what Mark is doing as he tells the Jesus story.
Theologically speaking, maybe we are not to know where Jesus’ home is. Jesus’ home is where the works of God happen. Jesus is at home where people believe in the Son of Man.
Whatever home means, and to get back to the story, Jesus is there when four people show up carrying a paralyzed man. The four men cannot get near Jesus because of the crowd that has gathered. Mark has already made Jesus a star by the end of chapter one, with his brief mention of how Jesus’ fame is now established throughout all of Galilee. Remember, he is telling the Jesus story with a sense of urgency.
Mark simply states, “It was reported that he was at home,” and that is all it takes for a crowd to gather. One can imagine the scene of people packed into the tiny dwelling. Jesus does not hang out with wealthy people nor does he come from rich stock. Home is a one room, hut-like dwelling with a thatched roof. Stairs are placed on one side of the small house for perhaps climbing onto the roof to catch the cool evening breezes. Air-conditioning is a few centuries away, and creativity is the order of the day when it comes to getting cool.
Mark wants us to really see this scene. The clue to this is that he takes so many verses to describe the picture. Mark has evidently put two scenes together. Those who study such things tell us that Mark takes a healing story and puts it with another theme that he wants to portray, that of Jesus’ forgiveness of sins.
Healing stories usually take the form of a description of the person to be healed, an action by the healer, a pronouncement of the healing, and a proclamation by the person healed. Mark inserts into this standard formula the added element of the forgiveness of sins. Even the original language betrays an interruption in the text. Mark puts in another tile in order to tell his story. Mark knows that it is the fact that Jesus is going around forgiving sins that gets him into real trouble with the scribes and authorities. Mark wants to get this into his story early.
For those of us in the present day who read Mark’s words, his mosaic creates questions. Does sin cause illness? In Jesus’ day many people believe that it does. The old Deuteronomic ethic teaches that if something is physically wrong with you, either you or your parents must have committed a terrible sin. Jesus appears to be participating in this ethic.
Stepping back from the mosaic pieces and seeing the total picture allows us to see that while Jesus probably does understand the intricate relationship between psychological health and physical well-being, he definitely does not believe in the causal relationship of sin and sickness that his peers share.
The scribes, conveniently, are present in this crowded scene. It is crowded literally and theologically. The scribes do not get that Jesus is bringing in a new kingdom in which sins are forgiven by the Son of Man. All the scribes can think about is that their old kingdom has no room in it for some upstart to be forgiving sins.
Jesus “perceives in his spirit” that the scribes are questioning his actions and asks them if it is easier to say, “Get up and walk, you are well,” or, “Your sins are forgiven.” Jesus is a good reader of faces. He does not even have to wait for the scribes to raise their hands at this first-century press conference. Jesus notices their whispers and their looks of disbelief as he deals with this bound-up man struggling with paralysis.
Jesus perceives a lot of things. He knows what the scribes are thinking, and he knows that sin did not cause this man’s legs to be paralyzed. He may also know that the man on the pallet likely believes that sin is his captor. Remember, Jesus is dealing with people who are living around him at that time. We sometimes think that Jesus is talking only to us—”Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”—True, but Jesus loved the people in the Bible first. We often forget to honor who they are. Probably this man believes that his sin or his parent’s sin caused his illness. Jesus here frees him from both the bindings of his erroneous past beliefs and the physical bondage of paralysis.
Jesus has the ability to deal with whatever comes up. The poor old scribes are one-dimensional in their view. They simply cannot handle this man whose difficulties are both physical and spiritual. That is part of the scribes’ problem. The scribes have made religion one-dimensional and empty. The people are, as one song puts it, “standing knee deep in a river and dying of thirst.” Jesus comes to give people some much-needed water. He does it by opening up the gap between the physical and the spiritual world and showing the relationship between the two.
Mark puts these two worlds together in this one story. Jesus’ whole life is a story of helping people see the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, but after all, papyrus is a rare commodity and Mark has only so much time. Mark puts a number of elements together; those of us who read his words can step back and look at the total picture.
Jesus calls himself “Son of Man” here for the first time. The people of Jesus’
