So Chapter 2 begins with Jesus performing another healing miracle. I suppose on the one hand you’d want to say that a healing miracle is never boring. It is a miracle, after all. But it does seem to be a rather ho-hum way to start Chapter 2. Chapter 1 was full of healing miracles. A woman was healed of a fever; a man was healed of leprosy, a man had an evil spirit exorcised from him and the Chapter speaks in general terms of Jesus healing various diseases and driving out many demons. So – haven’t we basically heard this story before? It seems a bit anti-climactic in a way to start this week by talking about yet another healing miracle. But that’s just an immediate gut reaction. This actually isn’t like the healing miracles in Chapter 1. The differences are important and give this miracle a different purpose in the story, so I would say that there’s actually a very legitimate reason that this healing miracle shouldn’t be included with the account of the various healing miracles in Chapter 1.
The story starts with the note that Jesus has returned to Capernaum. Remember that he had left Capernaum because too many people had heard about his miracles. So he essentially went on what we today might call a healing and preaching tour and then returned – but the story tells us that the same thing happened. People still remembered what he had done when he was last in town and perhaps they had heard more stories of what he had done on his “tour” and once he arrived he was once more surrounded by crowds. The crowd in this story is important. They’re all there because of the notoriety Jesus had gained with his miracles – but it’s not an entirely adoring crowd, because in the crowd you have some “scribes” as they’re called. So, who are the scribes? Specifically, they’re people who copy documents. We don’t really have scribes anymore. They essentially disappeared with the advent of the printing press. But thousands of years ago scribes were important people because their work was the only way written knowledge could be passed on and scribes gained a lot of knowledge of the subjects of the works they copied. They were among the most educated people of their day. The scribes talked about here were those who would copy the Scriptures onto scrolls, and they were usually priests, although sometimes the priests would essentially sub-contract and bring others into the business of copying Scripture – but even those sub-contractors as it were became very familiar with the Scriptures, and especially with the law. It’s a long and kind of complicated story but for various reasons sometimes the scribes would actually edit the documents they were copying to further a particular agenda, so that what was passed on by the scribes wasn’t exactly what had been given to them to copy. These edited documents were known as the Tiqqun soferim – which basically means “the scribal corrections.” Sometimes the corrections were just editorial, to clarify the meaning of a text (although that in itself invites the bias of the particular scribe), sometimes they were political (they were used to enhance the authority of certain groups over society) and sometimes they were to defend the honour of God if something was written that seemed to dishonour God. In any event, the scribes were very personally invested in the copied documents. This was “the word” – even if it was Tikkun soferim. And the scribes were watching Jesus.
For them, what’s significant in this encounter between Jesus and the paralytic isn’t that the paralytic was healed. It was what came before the healing. There were two things actually that make this scandalous to the scribes and different from the earlier healing stories. The first is that Jesus doesn’t actually heal the man’s paralysis at first – he declares the man’s sins forgiven. The scribes were outraged. Only God can forgive sin after all. For those who like to insist that in the New Testament Jesus never claimed to be divine (never claimed to be God) that in fact isn’t true. He never said “I am God” or “I am divine” outright, but there are several occasions when he does or says things that only God can do or say. This is one of those examples. As the scribes note, it’s blasphemy in this society for any mere person to say to another “Son, your sins are forgiven.” That’s crossing a line. By those very words Jesus is challenging the scribes – and by extension, the Pharisees, with whom the scribes are closely aligned. I cannot believe that Jesus would have done this innocently, with no intention of offending the scribes. I believe he must know that they’re there and what their reaction is going to be. He’s deliberately provoking a reaction in them. Knowing that, he takes the challenge to an even higher level.
"Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Stand up and take your mat and walk'? But so 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, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them."
It’s interesting that by Jesus’ own words, this healing isn’t so much out of compassion toward the paralyzed man – it’s a shot across the bow of the scribes: this is done “… so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins ...” In this exchange (in just a handful of verses very near the beginning of Mark’s Gospel) Jesus is, in fact, claiming equality with God. This is going to set up in a way the rest of Mark’s Gospel, as Jesus comes into conflict with those who have claimed the authority to interpret the Scriptures and to insist that the people accept their interpretation.
The story goes on briefly to the calling of yet another disciple, which is also a way of Jesus shaking up the establishment in a way and showing that his way would be more inclusive. There were four disciples called in Chapter 1 (Simon, Andrew, James and John.) None were particularly controversial. Many itinerant preachers and teachers had followings. There’s nothing about these four that would have brought Jesus to anyone’s attention. All four were Jewish fishermen – typical citizens of the area who likely didn’t stand out in the crowd. But now, suddenly, you have the call of Levi. Levi is better known as Matthew. Levi is not a fisherman. Levi is a tax collector. Tax collectors are not especially popular at the best of times – but in the context of 1st century Judea they were especially despised because they were seen as collaborators. They worked for the Romans who occupied the country and oppressed the people. They were shunned by society. Having angered the scribes by healing the paralyzed man, Jesus now invites the wrath of the Pharisees simply by calling Levi the tax collector to be his disciple – and he doesn’t even deign to “forgive” Levi. He simply accepts Levi. This one example of Jesus accepting a “sinner” into his company horrifies the Pharisees. First, it’s a scandal that someone named “Levi” would be working for the Romans. The name implies that he was a member of the Levite tribe – that was the priestly tribe; the temple priests and officials came from the tribe of Levi. For a collaborator to come from the Levites was shameful. But there was perhaps also a symbolic element here. A Levite (a member of the priestly tribe that serves God) is now following Jesus. But even if this weren’t a Levite, respectable Jews (as defined by the Pharisees) would not associate with those who were collaborating with the Gentile Romans. Jesus apparently had no such qualms. The scandal grows worse because Jesus apparently accepts an invitation from Levi to go to Levi’s home for a meal to which Levi invites many of his friends – who were also “tax collectors and sinners” in the eyes of the Pharisees. Aside from the tax collectors, we don’t know what other types of “sinners” were represented at this meal. In general, sinners were simply those who lived in ways that the Pharisees disapproved of, and the Pharisees (often with the help of the scribes who engaged in Tiqqun soferim) opposed anything that might lead to their top spot in the hierarchy being called into question. So Jesus accepting a person like Levi into his company is once again directly challenging the elites of the society; he’s proclaiming by his actions a new way of ordering society – which is never a safe thing to do because those on the top of the existing hierarchy don’t like their positions to be challenged.
What happens in the rest of the Chapter can really be summed up fairly easily. We now know from these first two stories that Jesus seems to have almost deliberately provoked opposition from the scribes and Pharisees. He knows what he’s doing; he knows how those two groups are going to respond to what he’s doing. This is more than a challenge he’s offered to them – he is clearly telling them by what he’s doing that he wants to inaugurate a new understanding of God and of God’s ways – a new understanding that’s going to completely undercut the positions of prominence that the scribes and the Pharisees enjoy in society and that’s going to undermine their authority over society. Jesus is now going to be put in the position of answering questions on two subjects that are going to further enflame his opposition.
The first subject is fasting. In some ways this is the more innocent of the two. Fasting was a tradition but not particularly a rule. The Jewish law didn’t command ritual fasting, but fasting was nevertheless a common practice among Jews. So much so that the point gets made that both the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees (who aren’t exactly allies) engage in ritual fasts. Spiritually, the practice of fasting is supposed to be an exercise of self-denial that helps a person come closer to God. While we can’t be sure about how John’s disciples treated fasting we do get the impression from other parts of the Gospels that the Pharisees engaged in the practice as a way of showing off their piety. They fasted and they made sure everyone knew they were fasting. They denied themselves and they made sure that everyone knew about the sacrifice they were making. Jesus seems uninterested in the whole concept of fasting. He makes the point that (at least at that moment) his disciples had neither need nor reason to fast. In and of itself that might not have been too much of a challenge to the Pharisees, except that he follows it up with these words: “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment” and “no one pours new wine into old wineskins.” We think of these as wonderful images; to the Pharisees they were a threat. The Pharisees would have understood that Jesus was saying that they and their ways were things of the past; that the new way Jesus was inaugurating and the new understanding of God that Jesus was bringing would result in the destruction of the old ways – of the way of the Pharisees. This was a revolutionary statement in a sense. The whole world is going to change. And he followed that up with his comments about the Sabbath.
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” Of all the Law, the observance of the Sabbath was perhaps the most visible and the most important. The Pharisees controlled the Sabbath; their understandings of the Sabbath governed the people. Jewish society in Jesus’ day almost completely shut down on the Sabbath. The Pharisees went far beyond the requirement of the Law. The Fourth Commandment (which instituted Sabbath) simply spoke of no work being done on the Sabbath. It was a concept that really promised freedom to the people. There were no restrictions commanded except not to work. The people were to keep the Sabbath “holy” – but what that meant was never defined. It could be anything from a day of intensive prayer to a day of leisure to a day of family fun. Essentially the people were freed from their daily obligations. But the Pharisees used Sabbath as a means of social control. Instead of giving the people the freedom seemingly promised by Sabbath, the Pharisees used it to restrict the people’s freedom. This was an abuse of the Law by those who claimed to represent the Law. When Jesus’ disciples picked grain on the Sabbath – presumably for their own use – that in itself was a challenge to the pharisaic understanding of Sabbath, but what must have really infuriated the Pharisees was Jesus taking a story of David and using it to show that the Pharisees’ understanding of the Sabbath could be shown to be wrong from the Scriptures themselves. The words “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” were Jesus’ way of affirming that the idea of Sabbath was to grant freedom to the people and not to oppress them; it was to release them from some of their obligations rather than to replace their normal obligations with more stringent ones. But the ultimate challenge to the Pharisees was this: “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” The phrase Son of Man goes back to the beginning of the Chapter – Jesus’ encounter with the scribes when he forgave and healed the paralytic man. Then, he declared that he, as Son of Man, had the authority to forgive sins (to do what only God can do.) Now he declares himself “Lord of the Sabbath.” So, to paraphrase, “This Sabbath – that God has commanded – is under my control, not yours.” That is his message to the Pharisees. Since their tyrannical control of the Sabbath is the most visible sign of the authority the Pharisees have over the people, once Jesus redefines the purpose of Sabbath and by declaring himself to be “Lord of the Sabbath” he is saying flat out to the Pharisees that they are the enemies of God; they are the ones who are keeping others from enjoying the life and freedom God desires for the people. He’s saying that he – Jesus – is the one who knows what God wants to achieve with the concept of Sabbath, and that it isn’t to empower the Pharisees. From this point on the relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees has nowhere to go but down.
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