Daily Devotional • July 15
A Reading from Mark 2:1-12
1 When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. 2 So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door, and he was speaking the word to them.3 Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. 4 And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” 6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, 7 “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 8 At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves, and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? 9 Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? 10 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— 11 “I say to you, stand up, take your mat, and go to your home.” 12 And he stood up and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”
Meditation
The NASB translation of this lessons says that the people heard Jesus was “at home,” a charming choice of phrase, reminding me of the old-fashioned custom of receiving visitors during specified hours when one was officially “at home.” But in this case, there was no invitation. The people simply heard and came.
Unlike those people, I have the benefit of knowing just who Jesus is. And yet, if I heard he was at someone else’s house, social convention (and inborn introversion) is so strong that I think I would still hesitate to just show up there without being invited, much less to push through a crowd—much less to break a hole through the roof! I suspect there’s something about modern life—the comforts of air conditioning and electricity, the pseudo-connectivity of the internet, and even how we think about crowds given recent politics and media coverage, that lulls us away from the natural instinct to go and see for ourselves, that has numbed us to the kind of hope and love that would have us destroy someone else’s roof for the sake of a friend—or maybe it’s just perennial human smallness.
But if we can find somewhere in ourselves the part that would gladly ignore the want of an official invitation, that would disregard the crowd, the part that would overthrow the convention against property damage for the sake of getting to Jesus, perhaps we’ve also found the part that he would see and say, “Your faith has made you well.”
Elizabeth Baumann is a seminary graduate, a priest’s wife, and the mother of two small daughters. A transplant from the West Coast, she now lives in “the middle of nowhere” in the Midwest with too many cats.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
San Jose Episcopal Church, Jacksonville, Florida
The Diocese of New Westminster – The Anglican Church of Canada
