[Robinson proposes the range ‘c. 45-60’ as a date for Mark: this reflects both the difficulty of pinning it down more exactly, and also the likelihood that Mark drew on sources that predated his writing.] Mark is the gospel of immediate action: in rapid sequence we run through brief mentions of John the Baptist (Mark 1:4-8), the temptation of Jesus (1:12-13), his early preaching (1:14-15), his first disciples (16-20), and healings in the Capernaum synagogue (1:21-28), at Simon’s house (1:29-34), and throughout Galilee (1:39, 40-45).

Then we get a question from the scribes: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (2:7). It has always seemed like a reasonable question to me (though the attitude behind their query was not pretty). After all, as an individual, you can forgive me for that time I did that thing that hurt you; and maybe you are even gracious enough to forgive me for all the other times I have done you wrong, too. But your authority stops there. You can’t forgive me for my sins against other people: it would be up to God to do something like that. No mere human could have the authority to forgive all my sins against everyone with a blanket statement like, “Son, your sins are forgiven” (2:5).

To grasp the heart of the story, we need to notice that the healing of the paralyzed man was not part of Jesus’ original agenda. The four friends brought the man to the meeting; it was too crowded to get inside; they found a ladder and somehow got the paralytic up on top of the house, opened up the roof, tied their belts to the corners of the stretcher and swayed him down to the floor of the living room, in front of Jesus (2:1-4). Everyone was watching Jesus, expecting they were about to see a healing: but instead Jesus provided forgiveness. The paralyzed man and his friends, the leper (1:40) and the crowd at Simon’s house (1:32) – we’re all after Jesus to heal our bodily ills. But it looks like his priority is to heal our souls by offering forgiveness.

The basic sequence works like this: there’s something that’s real, and then one way or another we come to recognize that it’s real, or to learn about it or connect with it. We saw that yesterday in Galatians, and here it is again in Mark. The objective reality is that Jesus is the one with the authority to forgive sins; that’s just the way it is. The secondary thing is how we find out about this. In this instance, the man got healed “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (2:10). So we might be wise to draw the lesson that maybe I’ll be healed of my illness, or maybe I’ll die of it: but live or die, the critical thing is to know that I’m forgiven.

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What is it like, Lord, when we ignore you until we get sick, and then ask you to heal us so that we can get better and go back to ignoring you once more? Change our hearts, O Lord: and teach us to seek you day by day, for forgiveness, repentance, and virtue.

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