Let’s take our Bibles and turn to the gospel of Mark. Mark chapter 2. And that can be found on page 837 in the Bibles located in the pew in front of you. Mark chapter 2.
What would you say, or what would others say about you if they were asked what you are all about? What if their beliefs were different from yours? What about if they really wanted nothing to do with Christ, nothing to do with the church, but what would they say? What would they say about you that you are all about? Do you remember what the Persians said about Daniel? They were out to get him, for sure, but they said, “We can’t do it. We can’t find any ground for complaint against Daniel unless it’s in connection with the law of his God.” You see, they knew what Daniel was all about. Even those who were most against him knew that he was so committed to being faithful to God’s Word that they would have to find some way that his obedience to God’s law set him at odds with the law of the Persians. And that’s what they did. And it ended up, Daniel found himself in a den of lions. But you see the point, don’t you? It’s that even Daniel’s enemies recognized his commitment, and if even they recognized it, then surely that was what he was all about – faithfulness to God’s Word.
Well tonight, we’re going to see what the Pharisees, the group that was opposed to Jesus, we’re going to see what they had to say about Jesus. They were against Him, but it was also clear to them what He was all about. He was making claims to deity. He was all about forgiveness, and they couldn’t stand it. But if that much was clear to the Pharisees, and if those who were opposed to Jesus could tell what Jesus was all about, then shouldn’t it be clear to us as well? And tonight we’re going to listen to the words of the Pharisees. We’re going to hear what they have to tell us about Jesus and about forgiveness. But we’re also going to find out something of what it means to follow Jesus when not everyone likes what He’s all about. So we’re going to see two things from these verses tonight. We’ll see first, good news according to the Pharisees, and then secondly, discipleship among the Pharisees. Good news according to the Pharisees, and discipleship among the Pharisees.
Before we read God’s Word, let’s pray and ask His blessing.
Our Father, we come before Your Word again this evening at the close of the Lord’s Day. And just as we heard at the beginning of the day, we come with an expectation to hear good news tonight. Good news about Jesus, good news about His authority, good news about the forgiveness of sin and life in His presence forever. And so we pray that You would give us Your Spirit tonight. Help us to see Jesus. Help us to trust in Him, to follow Him more closely, to feed at the table that He has provided for us to strengthen our faith so that others, so that those, the watching world around us, might see that we are all about Jesus and how we might follow Him better and closer and love Him more every day. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Mark chapter 2, verse 1:
“And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And many were gathered together, so that there was no more room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them. And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, ‘Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, ‘Why do you question these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—he said to the paralytic—’I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.’ And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, ‘We never saw anything like this!’
He went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them. And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and followed him.
And as he reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’”
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God endures forever.
First, good news according to the Pharisees. Now the first time that we hear the Pharisees speak is in verse 7. And they say, “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And you see, Jesus had just said to the paralytic man in verse 5, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” You see, that was the man’s greatest need. And for all of the urgency, for all of the urgency to get to Jesus – and there was a great sense of urgency, wasn’t there? Because we find here that there were four men, four men carrying this paralytic, and when they could not get near to Jesus because of the crowd, they began to disassemble the roof of the house. They did all of that so that they could get the man down to Jesus so that he could be healed.
Now that’s the most fun part of the story, isn’t it? And surely there’s a joke in there somewhere. And this is, no doubt, prime material for a children’s Sunday school lesson, to tell this story about them breaking through the roof and getting to Jesus, to imagine them removing the thatchwork from the roofing on top of the house and the debris falling down on everyone, to think about the reaction of the owner of the home as this was happening to his roof. But really this is only one verse. It’s only one line in the story. And yet, it shows something of their sense of urgency, doesn’t it? It shows their faith even; their faith that Jesus can heal. And this man, he needed healing. He needed healing from a condition that left him at the mercy of others’ care. He needed healing from a condition that made it difficult, it made it burdensome to do the most menial task. Even to sleep at night would have been a challenge for this man. And more than that, this was a condition, a disability that would have been viewed most likely with scorn and derision on the part of those in the first century Roman world.
And yet, for all that, it was a condition that was not his greatest need. His sin was. And you see, Jesus was preaching or teaching the Word here, and when Jesus preached, when He taught, He always preached to the heart. He said, “Murder begins with anger in the heart. Lust, or adultery begins with lust in the heart. Prayer is a matter of the heart and not just the words that are coming out of our mouths.” In fact, in the sermon on the mount in Matthew chapters 5 to 7, Jesus said that, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” What does James say? James writes that, “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” You see, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.”
There was a headline of an article recently that read, the headline read, “Why Couples’ Therapists are Sick of Therapy Speak.” Therapists, couples’ therapists are sick of therapy speak. The reason why is because people have become so fluent in therapeutic language that all of their problems have an aim. You can call it something. And yet a lot of the time that’s not actually the true problem. It may be hiding or shielding the problem in some way. The article said staying married to a narcissist is hard to imagine; staying married to someone who is not always considerate is how much of America gets the mortgage paid every month. Now that may seem a bit crass, but the writer’s point is that therapy speak tends to shut down the conversation and it doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. In other words, calling a problem or a sin an “issue” or a “disorder” or a “maladaptive behavior,” that can be a technique either to lessen our own accountability or to shift the blame to the other person. You see, therapy speak, it can be a way of avoiding the problem of sin. It can be a way of avoiding the burden of guilt. And we all do it. We all do something like that to some extent.
I came across a comic strip, a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from the 90s. Some of you may remember those comic strips, about a six year old boy and his stuffed tiger – Calvin and Hobbes. And in this one comic strip, Calvin is talking to his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and he says, “Nothing I do is my fault.” He says, “My family is dysfunctional and my parents won’t empower me. Consequently, I’m not self-actualized. My behavior is addictive, functioning, and a diseased process of codependency.” Those are big words for a short comic strip!
But we all would like to say that there is some condition or there is some circumstance that is our biggest problem. We would all like to say that someone else is our biggest problem. It’s not true, is it? Sin is. My biggest problem is me. My biggest problem is my sin and what to do about it. And so Jesus, in this encounter with the paralytic, He shifts, He shifts the encounter from being about a physical condition to being about a spiritual condition. He makes the heart of the matter in this story a matter of the heart. And He says in verse 5, “Son, your sins are forgiven. Your sins are forgiven.”
And the Pharisees are right, aren’t they? That only God can forgive sins. Verse 7, “Who can forgive sins but God alone.” And isn’t that the first step? Isn’t that the first step to a solution to a problem, is to identify, to acknowledge the severity of the problem and to know where to look for help? And what we see here in these verses is that sin is such a serious problem that only God can do anything about it. It is that deep and it is that offensive to Him. “The wages of sin is death.” And, “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” And there is nothing that you can do about it. What do you do about a guilty conscience? “What can wash away my sin?”
I think it was Francis Schaeffer who said once that, he imagined, “What if we all carried around some device that recorded everything that we said. Our phones are probably already doing that for us as we speak! But what if that device was recording what we said and it recorded every time we said the word “ought” – “You ought to do this.” Or, “He should have done this.” And then at the end of our lives, it takes all of those “oughts” and all of those “shoulds” and we’re judged and held accountable according to our own standard – what would we find? We would find that we all fall far short of our own standard, to say nothing of the standard of God, to say nothing of the standard of God’s perfect righteousness. We all stand condemned. We all stand guilty.
And there are all kinds of ways, there are all the usual ways that we try to deal with it. There may be the self-justification of success or a moral life of keeping all the rules and looking good to those around us. There’s the numbing effect of drink or drugs or constant distraction. There’s the defense mechanism of blameshifting or rationalizing. We all do it. But does it work? Of course it doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work because only God forgives sin. And every God-substitute is futile; it’s pointless. You see, the good news actually starts with bad news, and the Pharisees know the bad news. They know the bad news about the severity of sin and that only God can do anything about it.
But there’s another part. There’s another part of the good news, and that is that God has done something about it. And it’s what the Pharisees tell us in these verses. What else did they say? Not only that God forgives sin but they also tell us that Jesus is a friend of sinners and tax collectors. You see, first Jesus demonstrates that He has the authority to forgive sin. He says to the paralytic in verse 11, “Rise, pick up your bed and go home.” And what does the man do? He rose, he picked up his bed, and he went home. And you can say a lot of things, you can say your sins are forgiven, you can say, “Stand up and walk,” you can say, “I can fly and I can move mountains,” but it doesn’t mean anything, does it, if it’s all words without action. And so Jesus shows us that He’s not all talk. He’s not all talk when it comes to healing the lame, and He’s not all talk when it comes to forgiving sin either. Verse 10, “That you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins,” and He heals the man and the man stands up and walks out.
And then what does Jesus do? Jesus goes out and He passes by Levi. Levi is sitting at the tax booth. And He says to Levi, verse 14, “Follow me.” And Levi rose and followed Him. And then later, we find at his house, Mark tells us that “many tax collectors,” verse 15, “many tax collectors and sinners were there with Him.” And what do the Pharisees think about that? “When the Pharisees saw that He was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to Jesus’ disciples, ‘Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?’” Why was it? What was the reason? Well the reason, the reason that He ate with tax collectors and sinners is because He came for tax collectors and sinners. It says, verse 17, the last verse that we read, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” The reason, the reason, you see, the reason Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners is because He is a friend of tax collectors and sinners. And we probably don’t have to go into a lot of detail about the reputation of tax collectors in these days. It was not good, you may know very well.
There is a collection of Dutch paintings on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art at City Park. And one of them, in a number of these paintings, the people are, they’re really ugly, like almost intentionally grotesque! But one of them from 1545 is called “The Lawyer’s Office.” And you have in this painting, a man is emptying this bad of money and the lawyer in question, in kind of the center of the painting, is this man, he’s dressed lavishly with a ring and with furs and with bright red clothing, and on the wall behind them there are some documents that are posted up on the shelf behind them. And actually, it is, the details, if you look, if you could read it, the details are actually an actual case that had taken place some years before. The details are about a lawsuit that had dragged on for twelve years without any kind of real resolution. And you see, the point of it, the point of the painting is all about a satirical criticism of greed and dishonesty in those days, which was the reputation of tax collectors.
We find here, it’s a tax collector named Levi of all things. Isn’t there something jarring about that? There’s something jarring about this man named Levi. Remember, the tribe of the Old Testament priests, a Hebrew of Hebrews, and here he is, he is working for and profiting from the Roman empire and at the expense of his own people. That is offensive. It’s offensive, isn’t it? You see, the Pharisee is no friend of tax collectors. The tax collector was a thief. The tax collector was unclean. The tax collector was a sinner. But really the Pharisees had no idea. The Pharisees had no idea that the tax collector was actually a whole lot worse sinner than they even realized. You know why they didn’t realize that? Because they didn’t realize that they were a whole lot worse sinners than they realized.
There’s a former US congressman who was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And he called it a death sentence. But he wrote recently that while he had been given a death sentence, he already had a death sentence. He already had a death sentence before his diagnosis because we all do. And it’s those who realize that, who realize that they’re sick, that we’re sick and we have a death sentence, that we are actually dead in our sin, it’s those who recognize that who recognize the need of a physician. And those who think themselves well have no need of a physician, as Jesus tells us. But Jesus didn’t come for those who are well. No, He came for those who are sick. He came to call not the righteous, but sinners. He came to call sinners and tax collectors, in other words.
Sometimes we forget that, don’t we? Sometimes we think that Jesus came to call those who have everything together. Sometimes we think that Jesus came to call those who act like us and think like us and who fit into a certain mold. And maybe you’re here tonight, and maybe you need to hear nothing more than those words again in verse 17, that those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. And Jesus came not to call the righteous but sinners. But in some ways, the Pharisees even got that much. It was that clear to the Pharisees. It was that clear to those who were most opposed to Jesus that Jesus was a friend of sinners and tax collectors. Shouldn’t we recognize the same thing?
This is good news; it’s good news according to the Pharisees – that sin is such a problem that only God can deal with it. Only God can forgive. And Jesus calls sinners. Jesus is a friend of sinners and Jesus offers true and lasting forgiveness. That’s the Gospel. It’s the Gospel in a nutshell. Sin and guilt before God, grace, grace and forgiveness in Jesus, and it’s all right here in Mark chapter 2. The Pharisees saw it all, and yet they meant it as a rebuke. And yet what Mark wants us to see, Mark wants us to see that this is truly what Jesus is all about. Mark wants us to see that with Jesus there is forgiveness for the chief of sinners and there is a place with Him for all who recognize that they are sick, desperately sick and in need of a physician, if you would just turn and follow Him. That’s the invitation before us in this passage tonight.
But there’s also something else. There’s something else we need to see here. And we need to see what it means to follow Jesus among a hostile audience, because not only is there good news according to the Pharisees, we see secondly, finally, discipleship among the Pharisees. And we’re being put on notice here already in Mark chapter 2 that Jesus is on a collision course that will lead to the cross. These are charges, charges that we find in these verses, that are going to stick – blasphemy and treason. Verse 7, “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! He is blaspheming! He is putting himself in the place of God in granting forgiveness to this man!” Do you know what the Old Testament says? Leviticus 24:16 says, “Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death.” Those are the rules. That’s the law. They shall surely die. In fact, in the Hebrew it’s emphatic. It’s the same root word repeated twice, so it’s almost like the Hebrew is saying, “You shall die die. You shall surely die.” And here, they are accusing Jesus of blasphemy. It is a capital offense.
And then there’s treason. Verse 16, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” You see, to pay taxes is slavery. It’s basically acquiescing to the Roman occupation, to Roman rule. Do you know who did not pay taxes? Insurrectionists, revolutionaries, the resistance. Messiahs did not pay taxes. And yet here is Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners. “This is no patriot! He is no friend of the cause! Surely He is no loyal Jew. He is a traitor!” Now fast forward. Fast forward to the end of this Gospel, to the end of Mark, to Mark chapter 14. Jesus is being questioned. And in chapter 14 verse 61, He’s asked, “Are you the Christ? Are you the Messiah?” “I am,” He says. “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power.” What happened? The high priest tore his clothes and he said, “Blasphemy! It’s blasphemy! What more do you need to hear? What more do you need to make your decision right now? Blasphemy!” And they all condemned Him as deserving death, Mark tells us in chapter 14. They spit on Him. They covered His face and struck Him. They delivered blows against His body.
And then, Jesus is sent to the Roman governor, to Pontius Pilate. And what did Pontius Pilate say? Pontius Pilate called Jesus – what? King of the Jews. King of the Jews. “Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” And how do they respond? The chief priests, they stirred up the crowd to have Him released instead of Barabbas. It was Barabbas; he was the revolutionary. He was the insurrectionist. Jesus was no King of the Jews. Jesus was no Messiah. “No, crucify Him! Hang Him up on the beams of the cross! Have Him executed at once,” they say. Mark 15:15, “So Pilate released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified.” Blasphemy and treason are the charges against Jesus in Mark chapter 2, and it is for blasphemy and treason that Jesus will die an excruciating death.
Now when Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. That’s discipleship among the Pharisees. This is discipleship in the way of Jesus. It will call into question your allegiances. It will set you at odds with the acceptable, cultural practices of our day. It will or it should challenge even your own presuppositions and the longings of your heart sometimes. And let’s just say, there are associations, there is a co-mingling oftentimes between politics and Christianity on both sides of the aisle; it’s a co-mingling that has no mention of being mentioned in the same breath together. And we could say that there are popular, there are mainstream forms of entertainment that are completely at odds with the way of a Christ-like life. We are all called – maybe some in more difficult cases than others – to make ethical choices that may be completely acceptable to our peers. They may even be completely acceptable to those in the church, and yet they are not the way of Christ. And to speak against them, to go against them might even bring charges similar to blasphemy and treason.
But these verses in Mark chapter 2 and this Table to which we come tonight, it teaches us that we follow one who was condemned and He died for just those things – for blasphemy and for treason. We follow one who did so because His kingdom is not of this world. It’s not about worldly power or success. It’s not about worldly pleasure or popularity. No, it is about grace and about forgiveness and about healing for those who are truly sick and who know it. And Jesus demonstrates His authority. He demonstrates His authority not only as in this episode in healing the paralytic, but at the end of Mark’s gospel, dying and rising again on the third day. Rising again in power as the Messiah, the Savior, the great Physician.
And as we come, we turn our attention now to the Lord’s Table. This Table, it displays for us good news, good news not according to the Pharisees but according to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. And this Table is given for us to strengthen us, to help us to persevere in our discipleship in following Jesus even in hostile or difficult circumstances because this is what He has done for us – He’s gone to the grave, He’s gone to the cross, He’s gone to the grave, He’s gone in victory and resurrection power for us that we might also enjoy that same victory in the last day. “Those who are well have no need for a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous but sinners.” And you know what? Those who are forgiven much, love much and forgive much.
Let’s pray.
Our Father, we pray as we come before the Table to remember again Your sacrifice and victory for us, that You would again impress upon our hearts the good news and the call to follow You, to take up our cross and to serve Jesus with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. We pray this in His name, amen.