Mark 2 v 1 - 6

When we read about Jesus and His character, we read and find more about God for He is the exact representation of the Father God-Colossians 1 v 15. Here we are shown that God is inclusive, rather than exclusive; that is to say that He will do whatever is possible to do to bring people to Himself and to heal body, mind and soul. It isn't as if there is this very tight opening, where, if we fulfil all the different criteria we may get to experience His presence: no! He has made it as simple as possible, so that even a child can know Him! This is a beautiful and well-known story: Jesus returns to His home town and stays in some kind person's home. The news spread that He was there and, before long, the house had filled to capacity with people wanting to see Him. At this time, the door of the house would be opened early in the morning and would remain open all day, so that anyone could go in or out. Into this crowd, which would by then have been flowing out onto the street, came four men carrying their paralysed friend on a stretcher. They couldn't get through the crowd, so they decided to go up on the flat roof, which would have had an outside staircase ascending to it. The roof of the house consisted of flat beams laid across from wall to wall around one metre apart and the spaces filled with brushwood packed tight with clay and the top made watertight. They dug out the material pushed in between the beams without greatly damaging the house and passed the man down to the feet of Jesus. Now, the first thing Jesus says to the man is: ''Your sins are forgiven'', rather a strange thing to say when the man clearly needed to be physically healed. However, the Jews connected sin and suffering completely; in fact the Rabbis would state: ''There is no sick man healed of his sickness until all his sins have been forgiven him''. For a person to be sick, God had to be angry with him, the Jews had surmised, and the suffering invalid would have known that too- a type of vicious circle. Jesus declared to him that God was not angry with him, that the pathway to knowing God was open to all and that it was He, Jesus, the man-God, who was calling him to Himself!