Obedience and Healing
If the paralytic hadn't stood up, would he have ever walked?
This standalone reflection for subscribers comes in the midst of our household adjusting to the addition of a third newborn child. It has been a huge blessing, but the energy and time for writing is lower until we get back into a more regular groove. I have several pieces in the cooker to publish as a new full issue of Priestly Reading. Until then, I hope this blesses you.
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Obedience and Healing
If the paralyzed man had not stood up when Jesus told him to, would he have been healed anyway? Or would he have remained paralyzed, unable to walk for the rest of his life?
As a part of our Lenten family devotions, I was reading a passage from the gospels where Jesus heals the paralyzed man. Jesus is teaching in a house when four friends tear a hole in the roof and lower their friend into the midst of the meeting to be near Jesus. Jesus sees their faith and forgives the mans sins. The religious leaders, the Pharisees, they get worked up and angry because it is blasphemous to flat out pronounce forgiveness of sins as if you are God. “No sacrifice was offered, this man is sitting there under a curse, and this teacher is not God. How can you forgive sins,” they might have asked.
Jesus then shows them that he has authority to forgive sins by healing the mans legs. He tells the man to get up, take up his mat, and walk home. The man does so and everyone is amazed.
When I read this story, I asked my little daughter, “Isn’t that awesome?” She said, “Ya, he obeyed him!”
I was caught off guard, because I was referring to the fact that Jesus just did the miraculous and healed this man. But my daughter, who is in the midst of learning what it means to obey, was not surprised by Jesus healing the man. She was surprised by the man obeying the command to get up and walk. The longer I thought about it, the more insightful I realize this is. Let me explain why I think so.
This passage comes in all three synoptic gospels (Matthew 9:6, Mark 2:11, Luke 5:24). There are slight variations in the telling of the story, but the language around the command of Jesus and the paralytic’s response are nearly identical.
The point of the story is pretty clearly to show Jesus’s authority and power as the Son of God. Jesus says so before he gives the command. “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” Then he tells the man to pick up his bed and walk. He does so. Matthew reports that the people were afraid and glorified God because he had given such authority to men. Mark and Luke emphasize the response of awe and wonder, with subsequent worship of God. Jesus is vindicated.
However, another significant factor in this story is the response of the paralytic. From the worldview of faith, Jesus is acting perfectly in line with his own prerogatives and power. When reading the Bible, or any story, we can do so from multiple different perspectives, and inhabit the stories from those perspectives. Someone standing around Jesus in that very moment was amazed at Christ’s power. This is the focus of attention in the narrative, and rightly so. But as we just said, what of the man?
In the chaos and awkwardness of the situation, this man encounters and is, frankly, confronted, by Jesus. The image above shows well what I think the scene would have really felt like. Crowded. So many eyes and murmurs.
Imagine you pause the frame, like a movie, and there is a close up of the face of the paralytic. Then you have a narrator’s voice come in. “Tom didn’t know what to do. Was this man crazy? How embarrassed would he be if he tried to stand up and nothing happened?” And truly we have no idea. But if we allow ourselves to go to that imaginative space, we can think of what any human would probably feel in a moment like this. Does he think God can heal him? How long has been stuck on a mat? How is he going to learn how to walk immediately? How will he be strong enough if he hasn’t used the muscles for decades? Does he start to feel something happen in his legs, strength returning and sinews reconnecting in new ways? How does he know to obey?
And what if the man had not obeyed? What if he had stayed on the mat? Would Jesus have healed him anyway, only for the man to find out later when he tested it out in the quiet and solitude of his own home?
This is speculative, but I hope to show this is based in the logic of Scripture itself: If the man had not obeyed and stood up, he would not have been healed. Said differently, it was in rising that he found Christ’s strength in him to stand.
Further on in Mark and in Matthew, this is made more explicit. Jesus goes to visit his hometown of Nazareth and his ministry is met with hostility. They take offense at his teaching. They know who he is and who his family is, so they have a hard time believing anything spectacular about him personally. At the end of the short episode we hear from the gospel writers that he could not do great works or miracles there because of the lack of faith.
The language is very clear. He was unable to do work there and the reason was he was not met with faith.
This should not surprise us if we believe that we are saved by God through faith in Christ. We are counted righteous on account of our faith as we are taught in Genesis 15, and all throughout the New Testament. Our allegiance to Jesus Christ, our obedience to him, demonstrates a kind of faith that justifies before God.
For the paralytic, the faith even of his companions prompted Jesus to pronounce forgiveness of sins over him. But the healing that came after was between that man and Jesus alone.
Obedience is the response of a heart that has trusted in the goodness of the one who commands. Jesus commanded this man to do something that he had never done before and didn’t think he had the strength to do. He would never have had the power to do it unless he obeyed Jesus’s command to stand. When he decided in his heart to obey, he was filled with strength. His faith made him well, as Jesus often said. 1
It is at this point that our theology informs our reading of the text. It is actually heretical to say that in ourselves we have the power to come to God, and that God then would be finally able to give us what he desires. The heresy of Pelagianism asserts that humans are born with the spiritual ability to believe in and obey God. This was condemned and it is the faith of Christians across the world that the grace of God always precedes the response of the human to God. God must be the first one to move. Because of this, the first miracle God ever does in a person’s soul is heal their wills and give them ability to believe in the first place.
As we said before, the healing of the man’s body, and his response to Jesus is subservient to the greater point of the story: Jesus has authority to forgive sins. The forgiveness of sins does however point to the healing of the will. And this spiritual regeneration is the greater miracle vindicated by the healing of the man’s body. What we are meant to see in this passage about Jesus, we can also see from the perspective of the man. In his own strength, and in a state of sin, he would be spiritually unable to obey Jesus and to truly, with faith, receive the intended bodily healing. The real miracle of this story is that Christ, having forgiven his sins, healed his will and enabled him to believe and obey. He made him alive so that he might make him to stand. The paralysis of the legs was nothing compared to the corruption of the soul, but Christ healed both.
The obedience of the man therefore is itself a healing that takes place before the healing of his body.
Several various theological distinctions need to be made:
How is obedience different from or related to faith?
Did the grace of God move the man or cause the man to obey, or just simply enable him to? What is the relationship between God’s action in us and our response to him? Is it different for God to act in us and for us?
In what manner is Christ’s power limited by lack of faith, if at all?
When does faith gain the miraculous work of God?
These questions are too much for this post. My hope would be to answer them in my next issue. Keep on the lookout.
It is not lost on me that I have conflated faith and obedience somewhat in this discussion. Here is where it is important to see faith expressed in obedience as a dynamic and organic whole orientation of the person toward Jesus Christ. Obedience demonstrates faith, and in this case, quite obviously so.
When you were in 8th grade and getting ready to go to high school we held you back a year because you were a year ahead of everyone else and socially you were not ready for high school. We met with a couple of school officials and they questioned you about the whole issue. I can't remember the exact words you used but I do remember you telling them that you trusted us i.e. had faith in our decision. I felt a couple of emotions in that moment but one was love for you. Without your faith in us to do the right thing we would not have been able to do it. There were forces that did not want that to happen. So by obeying because you had faith, it was done. It's hard to compare our Lord's works to this human example. But it made me think of it. Our faith in Jesus is required without question.
Love how clearly and simply you have put this: “Obedience is the response of a heart that has trusted in the goodness of the one who commands.”
Obedience can be a fraught word sometimes, for many reasons. This definition reclaims it from some of the fraughtness.
Thank you :)