GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 5:17-19
Jesus Forgives Sins
(Matthew 9:1-8; Mark 2:1-12)
17 One day while Jesus was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. The power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal.
One of the most common verb constructions in any language is when some form of the verb “to be” (such as “was,” etc.) is attached to a participle (an “-ing” word) to show continuous or regular activity. This is known to folks who study grammar as periphrasis, and here we have a couple of periphrastic phrases in a row. Jesus’ teaching was not infrequent. It was something he did wherever he went. So here we have a typical scene: Jesus “was teaching” and the people “were sitting there.” This could have described the scene on almost any day or evening, but in this case, on this day and in this house, something very strange happened.
Luke doesn’t leave verse 17 without telling us that “the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal.” Not that the power of the Lord was ever distant or not with Jesus at all, but Luke wants to remind us of who Jesus was, and what he could do.
This is the first time Luke has mentioned the Pharisees, here paired with the “teachers of the law,” also known as the Scribes. The Scribes were men who studied, copied and taught the Law of Moses as well as the oral traditions of the Jews.
The Pharisees had their origins in the last 150 years or so before Jesus’ birth, during the Hasmonean or Maccabean period. One of four or five sects of Judaism at this time, the Pharisees wanted to re-interpret the law. They built a kind of hedge around the law of Moses with customs and laws of their own. For example, in a desire not to break the Second Commandment by taking the Lord’s name in vain, the Pharisees chose not to use the name of the Lord at all—with the result that people lost touch with the proper use of God’s name altogether (which also breaks the Second Commandment) and with the additional result that the original pronunciation of God’s name, Yahweh (יְהוָה), was lost altogether. Jesus had run into the Pharisees in Jerusalem previously (Nicodemus for one, who had become a Christian, John 3:1). Now some Pharisees were coming up to Capernaum to listen to this Rabbi more carefully, and to question him.
18 Some men who were carrying a paralyzed man on a stretcher tried to bring him in and lay him in front of Jesus. 19 Since they did not find a way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him down through the tiles on his stretcher into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.
Here in America, and especially in the parts that get lots of snow, we slope our roofs to keep the weight of the snow from breaking our houses. In Israel, this wasn’t a problem. People were in the habit of making a flat roof, usually strong enough that the roof could become an extra room. “The people,” Luther comments, “built houses so that the roofs were flat on top, like streets paved with stone…. For there people gathered together, played, and ate, just as we do on our porches” (LW 9:220-221, commenting on Deuteronomy 22:8).
Here came some men with a paralyzed friend. Luke, the physician, doesn’t call him by the noun paralytic (παραλυτικός, Mark 2:3-4), but uses the verb paralyomai (παραλύομαι) to show that this was a thing that had happened to the man—it didn’t define the man. This is the way all ancient physicians talked about paralysis.
Finding no way to get the man in front of Jesus in the crowded house, the man’s friends took him upstairs, dug through the roof tiles (Mark 2:4) and lowered their friend’s stretcher down on ropes. This incident is one of the Bible’s best illustrations of the kind of faith Jesus was describing in the parable of the pearl (Mathew 13:45-46). They did everything that they could to get their friend to the Savior for healing, because they believed that Jesus could heal him.
Since faith comes by hearing the message or through the miraculous working of the gospel in the sacrament of baptism, it is likely that they had already heard Jesus preaching. Cut to the heart by the law, they had been born again by the preaching of the gospel. “True faith exists in the heart,” Pieper writes, “if only a spark of faith has been kindled, if only there is a longing for the grace of God” (Christian Dogmatics Vol II p. 460).
God touches our hearts with his word. In fact, he does more than touch our hearts; he breaks them! Then he draws us, the brokenhearted and despairing, the terrified and the agonizing. He draws us to himself with the beauty of the gospel. This touches our hearts and heals what is broken. He soothes our terrors and fears, and he lets us know the truth: He has provided salvation for our sins. He brushes aside our notions of contributing anything at all and assures us that everything is already accomplished in Christ.
Put your trust in Jesus, and do everything you can to tear through the tiles that might keep your friends away from his grace.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota