title="English

What Would Make You Happy?

Mark 2:1-12

Aladdin is an old Middle Eastern folk tale set in China in which a young man grabs a wonderful oil lamp from a magical cave of wonder. When Aladdin’s mother tries to clean it, a powerful genie appears, who is bound grant the wish of the person holding the lamp. Aladdin takes the lamp over and, with the aid of the genie, he becomes rich and powerful and marries the Emperor's daughter. The genie builds Aladdin a wonderful palace – far more magnificent than that of the Emperor himself. There are some struggles but, in this fictional story, all the good people live “happily ever after”. The idea behind the story is that, if we could get our heart’s desire, have our greatest passion granted, we would find happiness.

That’s a folk tale, of course. In most real life stories people who get their heart’s greatest wish – that one thing they think can bring them happiness -- discover that the thing doesn’t deliver “ever-after” happiness. In fact, someone in our church left me an article a few weeks ago written by Mark Crane, the executive director of a counseling firm that works specifically with physicians who have worked their whole lives to be doctors, thought that doing medical work would be fulfilling and discovered that their careers didn’t satisfy them the way they had always imagined. Here’s a part of it:

The physicians in our classes are successful by traditional definitions; they have status and high income. But they're unhappy. The biggest obstacle physicians face in making a career change is psychological, according to consultant Celia Paul. "Once you've become a doctor, you're supposed to have it made," she says. "Our exercises make people look inward and dig deeper to find out what's important to them," she says. "What do you really want out of life? What price do you place on your happiness? Would you give up a high salary, say, to get what you say you want – or, is the high salary really what you wanted but, having it, find it insufficient?"

Mark Crane, Executive Director, Celia Paul & Associates

Jesus takes on this huge issue of seeking happiness in Mark 2:1-12. The event takes place on a day during which a paralyzed man looking for healing confronts Jesus. It’s a beloved story in which four friends carry the man through the crowds, up onto the roof of the house, and then down into Jesus’ presence. As we come to it, Jesus is developing a huge following. People are flocking into the town of Capernaum to see this amazing miracle worker, healer and exorcist. Just like people today, everyone loved the wow factor. Jesus was great entertainment. But, we will see that Jesus had come to do more than short-term healings and entertaining miracles. In today’s text, Jesus will make his mission clear. When he does, opposition against him begins. So, let’s see what the paralytic man was looking for.

 

The Man’s Wish – Heal me and I’ll have a good life.

This story couldn’t be more dramatic. A man helped by his friends will stop at nothing to get to Jesus. They’ve surely heard about Jesus’ healing power and knew he was the one who could change things for this man. What did the man want? His heart’s wish was obvious. Everybody who saw him knew what he wanted. Everybody but one: Jesus didn’t seem to know because, when Jesus saw the man, he didn’t say, “Rise up and walk! Be healed!” Instead, Jesus addressed the man’s need for forgiveness.

Can you imagine this happening here in southern California? If a person comes to a pastor with a physical or financial need and the pastor says, “Let’s talk about your sins,” most people would be offended. They would say, “Forgiveness of sins. That’s not cool when I can’t walk. That’s the way you people in organized religion are. You call us all sinners and then ignore our real problems because you don’t want to deal with us. I have a more pressing problem here than talking about my sin.”

But, essentially, Jesus said to him “No you don’t! You think you know the real problem of your life but you don’t. I know you’re suffering physically and I’ll get to that. But you need to realize that the biggest problem in any person’s life is never their suffering -- but something much deeper.”

Try that out here in our neighborhood. This message isn’t palatable to people in our world. I wonder whether many of us find hard to stomach what Jesus did. I imagine we jump quickly to the end of the story to tell people that Jesus did heal the man’s paralysis. And, let’s not forget that followers of Jesus should care about the physical needs of people. One of the things I love about LAC is that so many of us are involved in the social, financial, and educational needs of those our neighborhood. I get a lot of compliments about that – even from people who never go to church. “Oh,” people say when I tell them I’m the pastor here. “You people really care about people. You mentor kids, support our schools, feed people, and try to help the homeless.” And we do – and we should. But the Bible teaches us that we are more than just physical beings so our real needs are much more comprehensive than we often imagine.

 

Jesus Response to the Wish: He Goes Deeper

What Jesus does here is that he goes deep into this man’s life. When we think that our main problem is something that’s happened to us, we haven’t gone deep enough. You’ve underestimated the depths of our human longings. I recently saw a play entitled "Lovin' Chocolate" written and performed by Kelley Williams from our church. In it, she probes the issue of human identity, particularly when we think we can identify all we are simply by one physical characteristic. As she reflects through poetry and music on whether it's sufficient to identify ourselves solely by the color of our kin, she writes with great passion on a sheet of paper, "Not enough!" Skin color is a real and beautiful part of who we are and what shapes us. But, to see that as our entire identify is "not enough." That's what Jesus saw in this man in Capernaum. He was more than his disability. He was a man made to know and walk with God... If he would be whole, simply healing the paralysis would not be enough. Jesus knew that even though few others did.

This paralyzed man had a physical limitation. Any one of us who would have had the kind of paralysis that he had would have wanted to have it eliminated. It’s only right. But, surely, this man would have been resting all his hopes on that one thing. He was surely tempted to think, “If only I could walk again, then everything would be good in my life. I’d never be unhappy. I’d never complain.”

Essentially, Jesus is saying, “My son, you are mistaken. What I must teach you may seem irrelevant to you now but, if I only heal you physically, you will be euphoric – but only for a little while. Everyone who sees you will be amazed – but only for a little while. Wait a few months. They will forget and want more amazing entertainment. And, you’ll see you need something more. The reason for this is that you are human. More than anything else about you, you were made to know God. And, there is something keeping you from God. You long for physical wholeness – and your paralysis is not what God made you for. But, as you long for shalom, you truly are longing for something much more than a temporary healing.

Consider how this same longing usually plays out in our world: Most people have never been able to get that big thing they most want so most people keep living thinking that some big thing happening in this world would make them happy in a lasting way. If they had a genie’s lamp they could rub it and say, “If only… if only they could win the lottery, or get that big acting role, or become partner in the firm… The word I hear on countless lips is this, “That’s my passion. If only I could have my passion, then…

We look all around us at those who have somehow gotten the big thing they wanted: They won the lottery, they got were awarded the Oscar or Grammy, they got the coaching job… Fill in your greatest wish and think of those who have achieved it. What you almost always find is that those who have gotten what they longed for find they are left disillusioned. Tom Brady achieved what many, many men dream of every football season. He had won multiple Super Bowl rings, league MVPs, and even married a super model. In an unforgettable interview on 60 Minutes, this is what he said,

Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there's something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, “Hey man, this is what is. I reached my goal, my dream, my life.” Me, I think, “God, it's got to be more than this. I mean this isn't, this can't be what it's all cracked up to be.”

Tom Brady, 60 Minutes Interview with Steve Kroft

Jesus was not going to deal only with a part of this man’s need. Fundamentally, Jesus says to him, “You cannot have what is truly your deepest wish until you replace what you think is your deepest wish with something much, much bigger. Truthfully, we look to those things we think would give us abundant life as our “saviors”. We think they will rescue us from boredom or from anxiety or from countless others things. So, this is how most people live: If they don’t get what they most want, they’re frustrated. And, if they do get them, they’re more frustrated.

Specifically, Jesus spoke of the man’s need of forgiveness. The forgiveness he needed was forgiveness from the sin that kept him from God. Forgiveness in Mark 2 has the meaning of needing God to pardon whatever wrong the man had done to damage his relationship with the holy God who loved him. For Jesus to forgive was for him to declare that the debt owed for the sin would be paid for. Jesus is saying that he will take care of the debt. There is an important point being made here: The Bible is consistent in teaching that all sin ultimately is against God. “How is that true?” we ask. “We hurt other people too and need their forgiveness.” And that’s true too. But, ultimately, when we do wrong, we fail to live in the way our Maker, whose image we bear, created us to live. When we seek forgiveness, we first go to God as David did in Psalm 51 and say, “Against you have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” When we get that relationship right, then we are at last in a place to deal with other relationships. So, all sin is ultimately against God. Therefore, God is the one who can forgive.

The Basis for our Forgiving: Receiving God’s Forgiveness

The religious authorities would complain when Jesus claimed to forgive sins, “Who can forgive sins except God?” They were right. They were getting at the point that all sin at its root is against the way God created human beings to live. Let me tell you what happens when we see the seriousness of our sins and then bring our sins to God. We find him full of grace and ready to cast our sins from east to the west. Those of us who experienced God declaring that all is right with him are overwhelmed by God’s grace. This overwhelming gratitude is what provides the basis for and motivation for going to others to seek forgiveness – and to offer forgiveness to those who have wronged us. When we know how great God’s mercy is to us we can never be proud. We simply must be ready to forgive those who seek it. So you see it? Getting things right with God sets the foundation for getting other things right.

This is why Jesus would say, in his Sermon on the Mount, “Forgive us our sin as we forgive those who sin against us… Matthew 6:14-16: If you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. The basic principle is this: You will know that you have truly received the forgiveness of God when you forgive. Those who have been shown mercy, show mercy. When we cannot forgive, we almost certainly have never appreciated how deep the grace of God is toward us.

There is nothing greater in all of life than when we truly grasp that God declares us forgiven and right with him. The only thing that is even close to it comes when we grow in our faith to the point that we can forgive those who have wronged us. Lewis Smedes put it so well in his book, Forgive and Forget, "When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut a malignant tumor out of your inner life. You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself."

So, Jesus asks one of his Jesus-like questions in vv. 8-9: Which is easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?”

This is a brilliant stroke. Which of the two is easier? From a human perspective, pronouncing forgiveness of sins would appear to be much easier: If it doesn’t happen, what mortal would ever know? But then, to forgive sins truly demands the power and authority that only the Maker of all human life possesses. So then, healing a crippled man must be easier than forgiving sins. But no, that’s not “easy.” True healing would demand empirical verification. What at first seemed to be a question easily answered, on further reflection appears to be unanswerable. Of course, Jesus knew what it would take to forgive sins. And, out of love for this man, he was ready both to forgive and to heal.

As everyone was thinking about the question, Jesus just cut to the chase. He proclaimed that what he was about to do would demonstrate that he “has authority on earth to forgive sins (v. 10).” With no further rationale given, in one stroke, Jesus both forgave sins and healed the man. He turned to the man and commanded, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”

To frequent churchgoers: Make Sure You Seek the Giver More than the Gift

I find that we must come back to the point of this text again and again. It becomes so easy to long much more for what God might give than to long for God. You know how it is: When we first go to church, we often do so because we believe in God and we hope we can get God to give us our “saviors” – those things we think are most important. Sometimes, it hardly occurs to us that we’re really going to church looking to get something beside Jesus to save us. I want to have a child – I want to pass my bar exam – I want to get well. In our prayers, we say, “This is my problem and this is what I need to solve it.” We may get four friends to carry us in prayer asking God to give us that thing we want. But, let us learn from this text – Jesus will almost always say, “I have to go deeper than that. You need to change the thing your heart most longs for if you will truly find life.” Never forget that God cares about that thing you need more than you do. But, he also loves you more than you love yourself. Sometimes, we ask God for what we want but we must always learn to seek our Giver more than the gift. We must learn to pray as Jesus prayed: “This is what I long for, Father. But your will – not mine.” By the time we see the end of the story, we will know his way is better than our own.

To those still seeking: Seek the Beautiful and Aggressive Forgiveness of Jesus

Jesus is ready to receive you – to forgive you – to deal wonderfully and deeply with you. So, I don’t want you to miss v. 5 when Jesus forgave the man. One thing that has troubled people about this is how it seems Jesus forgave the man without the man repenting. It actually makes some people angry to think that anyone – even Jesus -- would forgive someone who will not ask for forgiveness. And, it’s the only place in the Bible that this happens. Jesus said we must both repent and believe. “Where’s the repentance here?” some ask.

But I think it’s here. If I’m right, the Bible is teaching something beautiful about the heart of Jesus. In v. 8, we’re told Jesus could see into the hearts of the hardened and critical religious leaders. With this man placed in contrast to those leaders, I think the Bible is suggesting that Jesus could see something different in this man’s heart. Jesus could see a heart knowing it needs to change and ready to change. Again, if I’m right about this, then what we see in Jesus is what I call an aggressive grace. Jesus does not need us to say perfect words or pray prayers with theologically trained words like the Senior Pastor. If you know you have things in your life that need to be forgiven and you are ready to turn your life over to Jesus, I tell you he is ready to forgive you and start a new life with you.

In the Bible, sin ruins our lives and our worlds. Jesus came to make things right – and that starts with making forgiveness possible. Is it easier to say “be healed” or to say “your sins are forgiven”? Now, we will do what Jesus told us to do so that we would never forget how hard it is to forgive sins. But, although it took his death on the cross, his love and grace are greater than our sins.

 

 

To His glory,

Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor