GREAT DEEDS, STRONG FAITH,
NLT
12In one of the villages, Jesus met a man with an advanced case of leprosy. When the man saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground, begging to be healed. “Lord,” he said, “if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean.”
13Jesus reached out and touched him. “I am willing,” he said. “Be healed!” And instantly the leprosy disappeared. 14Then Jesus instructed him not to tell anyone what had happened. He said, “Go to the priest and let him examine you. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy.[*] This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed.”
15But despite Jesus’ instructions, the report of his power spread even faster, and vast crowds came to hear him preach and to be healed of their diseases. 16But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.
17One day while Jesus was teaching, some Pharisees and teachers of religious law were sitting nearby. (It seemed that these men showed up from every village in all Galilee and Judea, as well as from Jerusalem.) And the Lord’s healing power was strongly with Jesus.
18Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a sleeping mat. They tried to take him inside to Jesus, 19but they couldn’t reach him because of the crowd. So they went up to the roof and took off some tiles. Then they lowered the sick man on his mat down into the crowd, right in front of Jesus. 20Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the man, “Young man, your sins are forgiven.”
21But the Pharisees and teachers of religious law said to themselves, “Who does he think he is? That’s blasphemy! Only God can forgive sins!”
22Jesus knew what they were thinking, so he asked them, “Why do you question this in your hearts? 23Is it easier to say ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or ‘Stand up and walk’? 24So I will prove to you that the Son of Man[*] has the authority on earth to forgive sins.” Then Jesus turned to the paralyzed man and said, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and go home!”
25And immediately, as everyone watched, the man jumped up, picked up his mat, and went home praising God. 26Everyone was gripped with great wonder and awe, and they praised God, exclaiming, “We have seen amazing things today!”
[5:14] See Lev 14:2-32. [5:24] “Son of Man” is a title Jesus used for himself.
“Your God is too small!”
Those five little words graced the plain, blue cover of a book by the late British author J. B. Phillips. They tumbled onto my conscience like a barrel of bricks. I was a seminary student at the time, and after nearly four years of
preparing to present the Word of God to others, my world had become much too small—about the size of a syllabus—encompassing no more than a campus and a three-room apartment. I was married, with one child in the crib and another on the way. My solitary purpose in life: to graduate in a couple of weeks.
When your world becomes that small, the God you worship can’t be that much bigger. And I didn’t realize just how tiny He had become until Phillips’s book enlarged my vision. Little could I have even imagined all that God had planned for the next fifty years!
By the time of Caesar Tiberius, Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas, Israel’s God had been shrunk to the size of a petty, pathetic legalist, scrupulously counting good deeds and deducting points for bad behavior. He seemed to care for neither people nor their suffering, only what they could do to please Him. In many ways, the Almighty Creator had become fashioned like Israel’s rulers. To make things even worse, those trained and commissioned to teach the nation about God no longer saw Him as bigger than their problems.
But Jesus came to earth to change all of that. He began with small demonstrations of His power and then gradually revealed the full extent of His authority. On this particular day, God grew bigger for some people.
Sadly, however, not for all.
— 5:12-13 —
After recruiting His first disciples, Jesus continued His ministry of teaching and healing. His location is unclear. He could have been far south in Judea or just a few hours’ walk from the site of Simon’s miraculous catch of fish (5:11). Regardless, something changed. His ministry—at least as presented by Luke—took on a completely new dimension, illustrated first by His encounter with a man “covered with leprosy” (5:12).
The man could have suffered from what we now call Hansen’s Disease, or any one of a dozen other skin ailments called leprosy by the Greeks. All the same, we understand skin diseases to be a localized condition. Ancient
people, however, considered leprosy a symptom of uncleanness emanating from somewhere within. And for Jews especially, this physical uncleanness merely accompanied the deeper problem of sin. Therefore, a person was not healed of leprosy; he was cleansed.
The man presented his request to Jesus in the form of a conditional clause, which Greek grammarians describe as a “third class conditional clause.” This type of conditional statement indicates that the speaker doesn’t presume to know whether the “if” is true or not. The leper didn’t doubt Jesus’ ability; however, past experience with people—especially religious authorities—caused him to doubt the Lord’s willingness to cleanse him. He asked for help with a sense of “I don’t blame You, either way.” He expected nothing. He didn’t bargain with God or try to justify his condition.
He merely presented his need to the Lord and remained open to receive whatever Jesus might offer.
Jesus was not only willing; He did the unthinkable. He reached out and literally touched the man society had rejected as untouchable. In other instances, Jesus merely spoke a word and the miracle took effect. In at least one case, He healed from a distance of twenty miles (John 4:46-54). But in this situation, He chose to touch the leper’s diseased skin, as if to say, “Your disease doesn’t prevent Me from accepting you.”
A touch. A miracle. And the man’s life changed forever.
— 5:14-16 —
Jesus had to balance His ministry very carefully between miracles and teaching, or He would draw all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.
While Jesus didn’t try to maintain total secrecy, He did want the man to maintain his focus on what was important. The Lord’s two explanatory phrases reveal His intentions. “Just as Moses commanded” shows that He wanted the former leper to follow the mandate of scriptural Law (Lev. 14:1- 32) and then reenter society as a whole man. In the phrase “as a testimony to them,” Jesus urged the man to allow his healing and his restored life to do the talking. Furthermore, this would send a message directly to the
temple leadership that something special was happening. A tradition among the rabbis held that curing leprosy was as difficult as raising the dead,[50]
perhaps because they saw the disease as the physical manifestation of sin’s consequences. Therefore, in their minds, to remove the consequences of sin was to absolve the person of sin.
Whether or not the man followed the Lord’s instructions—I happen to think he did—the news about Jesus “was spreading” (imperfect tense, Luke 5:15) and great multitudes “were gathering” (imperfect tense, again).
Consequently, Jesus found it necessary to retreat from public life to rest, reflect, refresh, and recharge.
— 5:17 —
The message Jesus sent to the temple via the testimony of a healed leper had reached its target. This set the stage for Jesus to add an important dimension to His ministry of teaching and healing. Up to this point, you may have detected a pattern:
Authority in teaching (4:14-32)
Authority to cast out demons (4:33-37, 41) Authority to heal illnesses (4:38-40)
Authority to command nature (5:1-11)
This particular day was like most others in Jesus’ ministry. Multitudes thronged to hear Him teach and to see Him heal the sick. On this day, however, the crowd included teachers and clerics from all parts of Israel.
Even the foremost religious authorities of Jerusalem, Israel’s political and religious elite, came to see the man who had undeniably cleansed a leper.
— 5:18-19 —
As He taught from the beloved scrolls of the Jewish Scriptures—the Law of Moses, the oracles of the prophets, and the wisdom writings—a small band of men strategized on behalf of their paralyzed friend. They had heard of Jesus’ ability to heal the sick but were disappointed to find Him seated near
the center of a large house and surrounded by a crowd of Pharisees and religious teachers, none of whom would yield for someone supposedly suffering divine judgment for sin.
The band of men did some creative thinking. They climbed the outside staircase, located the ceiling directly above Jesus’ head, and started pulling tiles. Within a few moments, a stretcher slowly descended, bearing a
paralyzed man.
— 5:20-21 —
Jesus decided to help the paralytic patient in response to his faith and that of his friends. The men had gone to extraordinary lengths to place their friend before Jesus because they believed He possessed authority over illness.
Unlike the scribes and Pharisees, those unnamed friends had a big God for whom no disease or dysfunction was too difficult to cure.
Many had seen Jesus heal before. A brief word, perhaps a touch of the hand, and the sick immediately received perfect health. But on this
occasion, Jesus stunned the crowd by saying something different.
Surprising words; outrageous words: “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.”
The teachers and religious officials immediately understood the
immense implications of Jesus’ declaration and called it blasphemy—any manner of speech that disregards or disrespects the value of another. This could include curses, slander, or other statements that treat someone with contempt. Jewish leaders reserved the term for those who reviled God. C. S.
Lewis explains why the religious leaders had good reason to be upset:
Now unless the speaker is God, [forgiving sins] is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on another man’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we
should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He
unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.[51]
In this way, Jesus added “authority to forgive sins” to His growing list of divine prerogatives. It’s worth noting that He waited until he had a houseful of Scripture experts and religious authorities to do it!