A Faithful String Quartet
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
January 8, 2017
How would you feel this morning if instead of beginning the sermon from the place we always stand—right here in the middle of the stage—I began by standing on this side over here? And what if, instead of standing here, I began the sermon over here?You may be wondering many things (like, “What’s going on?”), but I know this: you’re uncomfortable, aren’t you? You’re especially uncomfortable if I begin to read Luke 5 by standing on this chair. I know this, too, the closer you are to me, the more uncomfortable you are.Well, don’t worry. I’m not going to preach from anywhere but our normal spot. But I’m trying to give you a sense of something that I didn’t know how to put into words, and that is this: there is nothing comfortable about this passage. For sure, there is a beauty and wonder and amazement to it. But that doesn’t mean it was comfortable for anyone there. And the closer you were to the action, the more uncomfortable you would have been.We are going back to Luke’s good-news story about Jesus, what we call his gospel. When we began to study this book several months ago, I mentioned that Luke was a follower of Jesus who never met Jesus while Jesus was alive.1 Instead, Luke made a decision to become a Christian later, perhaps a decade or so after the resurrection. Then he spent his life researching and interviewing eyewitnesses, traveling with the apostle Paul, and then writing an orderly account about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He wrote this book so that you can I can know with certainty (1:4) who Jesus is and then live our lives for Jesus with passion and joy and hope.It’s been over a month, but when we were last looking at this gospel, a man named Peter was on his knees crying out to Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man” (5:8). Picking up in the very next passage, we find a man full of disease who also falls on his knees before Jesus and cries out. How will he be treated?
Scripture Reading
If you have a Bible, please follow along with me as I read Luke 5:12–26 (page 977f). It’s actually two stories, two healings. Because of the similarities, we are taking them together.12 While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” 13 And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him. 14 And he charged him to tell no one, but “go and show yourself to the priest, and make an offering for your cleansing, as Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” 15 But now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. 16 But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.17 On one of those days, as he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with him to heal. 18 And behold, some men were bringing on a bed a man who was paralyzed, and they were seeking to bring him in and lay him before Jesus, 19 but finding no way to bring him in, because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the midst before Jesus. 20 And when he saw their faith, he said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” 21 And the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, saying, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 22 When Jesus perceived their thoughts, he answered them, “Why do you question in your hearts? 23 Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? 24 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the man who was paralyzed—“I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home.” 25 And immediately he rose up before them and picked up what he had been lying on and went home, glorifying God. 26 And amazement seized them all, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, “We have seen extraordinary things today.”
Introduction
Life is full of decisions. Some of them, perhaps, are small. What should I wear today? What should I eat, and where should I eat, after church? That’s a good question, right? But you need to stop thinking about that now and focus on my sermon.Other decisions are larger than this, though. Schooling. Relationships. Jobs. Buying a car. How to treat a significant health challenge. Where to live. These are larger decisions because they affect more of life. They have risks involved.Among the more significant decisions in life is the decision about what to make of Jesus. I’ve told the story about when I became a Christian a few times at church, sometimes in more detail during Sunday school, but let me just give a piece of it again.In college, I attended a Christian sports camp where I heard about Jesus. It was certainly not the first time because I grew up in a good Christian home. There at the camp, however, the story of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus started to become real to me. It was no longer a cliché to me. When I left the camp, I remember reading over a small booklet that explained the message of Christianity and I remember the decision before me. If I followed Jesus, I was potentially going to lose a close relationship I had. And because I had grown up in the church, there would be this certain shame about owning the fact that I had been phony perhaps for all these years. It was no small decision.This passage in Luke—like so many of them—forces us to make a decision about Jesus, that is, if we are going to interact with authentically with this passage. This passage forces us to make a decision about what to do with our sin and with the Savior. Either, we can risk public shame by bringing our sins to Jesus for healing and clinging to him as our only hope, or we can deal with our sin on our own. If we risk, we are forgiven and healed. If we deal with our sin on our own, we won’t ever be healed and forgiven. It’s no small, comfortable thing we are considering this morning.To see this decision played out in the passage, I want to approach it in three brief questions: 1. What happens (in this story)?, 2. What does it show us about Jesus?, and finally, 3. What should we do?
1. What happens?
Let’s start with the first question. As I said in the opener, and you likely noticed as I read the passage, this is really two different stories. But they share a common theme: humility and courage and boldness and faith on the part of those who need healing.Let me just go back over some of the details so that they are clear.First, there is the story about a man with leprosy. In biblical times, leprosy was something of a “catch-all” for a host of deadly skin diseases. And when I say deadly, that’s what I mean. If you got leprosy, it was terminal.And not only was it lethal, but there was also something of a social death to it as well. Leviticus 13 and 14 are strange chapters to our modern ears. They prescribe how the community of faith was to relate to this disease (and others like it) and what might be done—if anything—should someone one contract it.In Leviticus 13:45, we read, “Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’” In short, self-inflicted isolation, community enforced isolation—a painful, slow physical and social death.Today, when someone gets cancer, their community will often rally around the person. In fact, I hope the community does rally around the person. But not so with leprosy.Again, this Leviticus passage seems strange to our ears, but we need to consider that the health of the whole community was at stake. You can’t have people with highly communicable (that is contagious) and highly lethal diseases not be marked out in some way. You had to know how to avoid lepers. You couldn’t just, I dunno, be touching them. It was dangerous.Ah, now you see why this passage is so uncomfortable. Look again at v. 12.
12 While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.”
Notice the words, “full.” Think of the humility and courage and risk involved for this man in this decision to come to Jesus. What if this doesn’t go well? What if the community pelts him with rocks?Well, what does Jesus do? He touches him. He touched the untouchable. There would have been an audible gasp from any bystanders. You just didn’t do that. You risked contracting the disease, as well as becoming ceremonially unclean yourself for a time.In v. 14, Jesus then sends this man to the priest to document the healing. In fact, this is part of the requirements in Leviticus 13 and 14, as well. It was a lengthy, involved process. Later in Luke’s gospel, Jesus heals 10 lepers at one time and does the same thing; he sends them to the priest to document the healing (17:11–19). I’m not sure if Jesus did this every time or not, but I picture some poor priest who, in his job description almost never had to deal with lepers (or I should say, former-lepers) but now his guy has a line out the back of the door! It’s like a shopping line at Target on Black Friday—except everyone in the line is happy and sings hymns about amazing grace. It’s no wonder, as it says in v. 17, that the word about Jesus was spreading.So, that’s that first story. What’s going on in the second story? It starts with a crowd gathering to hear Jesus. Look at v. 17
17 On one of those days, as he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with him to heal.
Note the scope: “every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem.” Jesus is going viral, and the professional theologians are going to inspect him. But they are not the only ones there. There is a crowd of people who are desperate to hear Jesus, many who want to be healed.Among this crowd is a man who is paralyzed; he can’t walk. Fortunately for this man, he has friends who loved him so much that they would risk bringing him to Jesus. But because they can’t get in through the door, they make the decision to climb onto the roof, and this quartet lowers him down.Again, there is nothing comfortable about this. You’re in the room. You hear the noise overhead. You see the dust falling down. With everyone else, you look up. A hole opens. “Who is going to pay for that?” you wonder. “Who is going to fix it?”The men lower him down, and Jesus and the leaders exchange some words. I’ll talk about those words in a moment. Then Jesus says, “Rise, pick up your bed and go home” (v. 24). And the man does. Amazing!How many of you know the name Matthew Crawley? You don’t have to put your hands up. You can just nod your head. No, Matthew Crawley doesn’t go to this church. He’s one of the main characters from the show Downton Abbey. We were recently given the complete set. So—slight spoiler alert—in season two, Matthew becomes paralyzed, we think permanently. But then he starts to feel his legs tingle a bit. And then, when his fiancé stumbles over a table, Matthew leaps up out of the wheelchair and catches her. When that happened, I wanted to leap off the couch and yell, “Yes! Woo-hoo!” You can make fun of me later, but whatever you do, don’t tell me what happens after season two in the next four seasons.But Sir Matthew Crawley was just misdiagnosed. The man in this story, however, was never going to walk again. Oh, there must have been fear and wonder and amazement and shouting: “Yes! Woo-hoo!”
2. What does it show us about Jesus?
Let’s talk very briefly about what this passage tells us about Jesus. The answer, of course, is many, many things. I’ll mention a few of them.First, Jesus is able to heal people that, left to themselves, would never be healed. But not just that he is able to heal, but that he loves to heal. And when he heals, he does so by touching us in the most broken places, places that no one else would dare touch.In the healing of the paralytic, we also learn that Jesus’s ability to heal is meant to show us more than Jesus’s ability to heal physically, isn’t it? Look at verses vv. 19–24.
19 . . . they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the midst before Jesus. 20 And when he saw their faith, he said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” 21 And the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, saying, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 22 When Jesus perceived their thoughts, he answered them, “Why do you question in your hearts? 23 Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? 24 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the man who was paralyzed—“I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home.”
This can be a tricky passage to understand. What is meant by these statements about “which is easier”?On the one hand, both are impossible. It’s impossible to heal and it’s impossible to forgive sins. But it’s certainly easier to say, “You’re forgiven,” because it doesn’t require proof, at least immediately. If you say, “You’re healed,” the person actually has to be healed. So it’s easier to say, “You’re forgiven,” because no one knows if it’s true or not.So Jesus says what he says and does what he does in a very particular order so as to make a point. “Yes, I can heal, but when I heal this man’s ability to walk,” he says, “I want you to also know that I have authority to forgive sins.”Over and over in the gospels, we see that the signs Jesus does are meant to point people to the deeper realities of who he is. This is, after all, what a sign—any sign—does; it points somewhere. Jesus fed 5,000 to show he is the bread of life. He healed a paralytic to show he can forgive sins.Now, the professional theologians are not pleased with this. Rightly, they note that only God can forgive sins, and to say that you can forgive them, is to assault the majesty of God himself. They rightly call it blasphemy.And it would have been. Unless it was true. You see, there was a decision that needed to be made. Jesus was forcing the issue. In fact, this passage is the first of five consecutive accounts in Luke’s gospel where the tension between the religious leaders and Jesus begins to mount. The preverbal storm is gathering, if you will. Here, they just rattle their swords a bit, but make no mistake, this kind of talk—I forgive sins—is why they sought to kill Jesus, and eventually did. They made their decision about him.
3. What should we do?
Let’s go to the final point: what should we do? Now that we know what happened in the story, what decisions do we need to make? How are we supposed to live differently? It starts with a decision.Author and pastor, Timothy Keller put it like this,
Jesus then demands a radical response of some kind. You could denounce him for being evil, or you may flee from him because he’s a lunatic, or you can fall down and worship him for being God. All of those reactions make sense; they are consistent with the reality of his words. But what you can’t do is respond moderately. You must not say to him, “Nice teaching. Very helpful. You are a fine thinker.” That is simply dishonest. (Timothy Keller, Encounters with Jesus, 46)
In the passage, they made their decision about Jesus; we see their radical response. They believed that Jesus was able to heal their brokenness, and they took great risks to get to Jesus, and we can also say, they took great risks to bring others to Jesus.In verse 20, it says that Jesus “saw their faith,” this is, the faith of these four (perhaps five) men. They made a decision about Jesus and that decision gave rise to risky actions. The passage calls this “faith.” Seeing Jesus as savior and responding in action, that’s called faith. Do you have this faith? I’m not asking if you prayed a prayer 20 years ago or signed your named in a Bible or raised your hand at church camp. I’m asking if you have faith in Jesus.If we are to wrestle honestly with this passage, what might the decision to follow Jesus look like for us? I want to mention two ways and give a few examples of each.First, a humble, bold, faith will cause us to bring our brokenness to Jesus. And I don’t just mean the clean, acceptable sins. Gee, I’m not a very good person because I don’t return emails fast enough. No. This leper had real problems, and he was risking public shame to be healed.We don’t ask questions like this every week because they can be uncomfortable, but like I said, this passage isn’t comfortable. So I ask, are there secret struggles you might be struggling with? Are there sins that you will never conquer by yourself, that you need to bring to Jesus, but you fear because bringing them into the light will mean risking shame. I’m telling you, it will be worth it, to get healed and forgiven.I heard the story the other week from another pastor (not around here). He has a young woman in his church whose mother forced her daughter to have an abortion when she got pregnant. Now the young girl hates herself for it. And she’s dying in shame and guilt. And she’ll never get over it alone. She need to bring it to Jesus to be healed and made whole again—which Jesus would love to do! But coming to him is risky. How will she be treated if this gets out?Perhaps others have struggles with prescription pain killers, and no one knows. But to get help is risking a certain shame. Perhaps others might have wronged people in business and need to come clean. I know a young man who couldn’t overcome an addiction to pornography, but he took risks to get help and bring his sin to Jesus and now he’s doing so much better. He’s not living a double-life.And there are other who haven’t necessarily done anything wrong, but like the men in this passage, the decision to follow Jesus might mean a risk. For example, for some who begin to follow Jesus, and to continue to follow Jesus, it means doing so when the person you’re married to won’t do the same thing. You decided to follow Jesus and they don’t. That’s hard. That’s risky.But this passage reminds us that it’s worth it. Jesus takes away shame and sin and brokenness, and he heals. When no one else will touch your pain, Jesus is offering to you his healing touch.So that’s the first thing we should do. Come humbly to Jesus for healing no matter the risk (which, by the way, was precisely the thing that the religious leaders were unwilling to do).The second thing we are to do is be like this faithful quartet who brought their friend to Jesus. Their faith was creative (they climbed a roof). Their faith was bold (they climbed a roof!). Their faith was sacrificial (they cut a hole in a roof and one of them had to pay for it).2 Perhaps if we had asked the four men about this they might have said, “Never mind the expense. I’ll give you three times what this is worth. I just have to get my friend to Jesus because no one else can make him well again.”My oldest son is named Hudson after a missionary named Hudson Taylor.3 Taylor is best known for his missionary work in China in the 1800s, but especially this detail: when he and his team were making almost no progress in telling people about Jesus, he got rid of his White, Western clothes and started to dress like those he was ministering to. This might not feel like a big deal to us, but at the time it was crazy; he took all kinds of flak for it. But he had to get people to Jesus.Perhaps this kind of bold, creative, and sacrificial faith could compel us to move church buildings to a place where there are relatively few churches and a great need for Jesus. I could talk a lot about that, but I fear if I do, I’ll get us off topic. Perhaps another day very soon. We could talk about how we should be doing this as individuals too.
Conclusion
There’s a line in the Christmas hymn, “O Holy Night” that says, “long lay the world in sin and error pinning.” That is, we were alone and isolated and broken and experiencing death, something of a spiritual leprosy. And what do we celebrate at Christmas? We celebrate that God came down and touched this world full of spiritual leprosy. When he did, there was an audible gasp from the angels. The shepherds heard it, the wise men saw it, and Mary treasured it up in her heart. May we do the same. May the “weary world rejoice” in the healing power of Jesus to touch our brokenness and forgive our sins.
1 “This History is For You; This Record is True,” preached by Benjamin Vrbicek, September 11, 2016 at Community Evangelical Free Church. click here.
2 Kent Hughes, “Healed Indeed” from Luke 5:12-16 on September 4, 1994, click here.
3 To listen to a great message about Hudson Taylor, check out this one by John Piper: click here.
