Overheard in Church

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Welcome back to me too.  I took a little break, but I am fired up to start again.  I have been thinking about all the stuff I could put into this blog, as well as how political I want to be.  Since evolution is inevitable, I suspect this ongoing public comment I write will change in accordance with my own personal and technical growth.

In Sunday School last Sunday, we began the second chapter of Mark's gospel, verses 1-12.  Our teacher asked what relationship existed among sin, healing, and disease.  

That engendered a lively discussion.  Some sins, like eating or drinking too much, can cause disease.  No one believed God gave cancer to someone as a punishment for sin.

Does prayer heal people?  No one came out firmly on that.  I said that God's healing success rate has increased substantially since the germ theory and evolution of medical science.  Another church member, named Charlie, replied that since creation God has been a God of love moving humanity toward healing.

An excellent idea that.

This is a class of interesting faith people.  Just about everyone has a MA; at least three received theirs from a seminary.  Everyone truly expresses a nuanced variation of just about any topic.  

After the opening discussion, we read the text.  There was a lot of discussion about the paralytic who was lowered through the roof to Jesus.  Who was he?  How did he lose his ability to walk?  Was it because of an accident or a sin?

What did Jesus mean when he healed him because of "their" faith?  Who were these people who lowered this man to see Jesus?  Were they friends?  Relatives?  Passersby who decided to be Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts?

I think a terrific question is what the writer meant by including this passage from the text.  The story of the paralytic seems quite generic.  A man in need of healing is brought to Jesus.  He could have been a leper or a hemorrhaging woman or a blind man.  The details of the story are rendered to set up the theological discussion between Jesus and the scribes.

Mark is very deliberate in how he crafts his narrative.  This particular pericope (passage) derives its purpose from the discussion that follows the healing.  It is a question about Jesus.  Does he have the authority to forgive sins?  

In fact, considering that Mark imagines a living Jesus of the present, and not of the past, the theology of the passage concerns an argument that may well have existed between hostile Pharisees and early Christians of Mark's day.  

Christians were telling people that their sins were forgiven by Jesus. The authority to do this was passed on to them by Jesus.  Mark, by this passage, and others, demonstrated the source of their authority.  

It seems likely to me that any antagonism between two rival Jewish sects within Judaism might include charges of blasphemy, so Mark has scribes charge Jesus of the same offense.  

We really do not know for certain the interaction between Jesus and the Pharisees since the latter were not as prominent in Jesus' day as they became after the destruction of Jerusalem.

Also, it hardly seems blasphemous to forgive sins.  Any charge of blasphemy in this case seems trumped up to serve a larger antagonism.

Indeed, Jesus may have been acting on God's behalf, but he could just as well have been articulating what everyone should know:  we are forgiven and we are expected to forgive as well.

Forgiveness is an extension of our God of love's nature.  I think I read somewhere once that forgiveness of sins would not have been considered blasphemous within Judaism.  That would not surprise me since Judaism is quite diverse.  It is the first source about our God of love.

Blessings…