The Power To Clean

Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralyzed man, “My child, your sins are forgiven.”

Mark 2:5

Imagine Jesus on the day he saw the paralyzed man. At the peak of his popularity, he was mobbed wherever he went. Jesus had generated a lot of buzz. The stories of his miracles had, in today’s language, “gone viral.” Everyone wanted to have the Jesus experience.

The word was out about this new rabbi who spoke with authority and taught with such power that people sat spellbound for hours. But the best thing—the thing that made people do whatever it took to reach him—was that he healed. On this particular day, he was teaching to a packed house.

Out on the edges of all this energy and excitement were five friends—one who was paralyzed and restricted to a mat, and four others who were determined to get their friend to the Healer. You may already know the famous story of their never-say-die plan to work around whatever stood between them and Jesus; how they dug through the roof and lowered their friend to Jesus’ feet.

Jesus has a way of seeing past secondary problems right to the heart of a matter. The man had a bigger problem than his paralysis, and Jesus responded to the disease, not the symptom. I have heard some speculate that the man must have been very disappointed to have been expecting to be healed, only to hear that his sins were forgiven. But I believe that in those words, this man received more than he had imagined or thought to ask for. The healing of his legs must have seemed anticlimactic. Who would have imagined that Jesus could touch someone and wash that person clean on the inside?

A dear friend of mine came to know Jesus in her adult years. To look at her life, you would likely not have thought her awfully sinful. She didn’t think of herself as very sinful. She was a good and kind person. I still can’t understand how one day this seemingly together, in-control person had an encounter with the living Jesus that changed her completely, but I know that when she told me, through her tears, she said, “I just feel so clean.” Before, she had felt self-satisfied and self-confident. Now she feels clean.

Jesus, scrub my heart and disinfect my thoughts.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

Dag Hammarskjold(1905–1961), Swedish diplomat, economist, and author