should look for another. Jesus responds very simply. "Go tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them." (11:2-5) When God comes in this Jesus, the Son of man, he comes in power. That power does make a difference "upon earth." Things cannot remain as they are, not even for the dead, not to mention the sick or the poor or prisoners or publicans or prostitutes.

We in Chicago owe much to the renowned architect, Louis Sullivan, who is quoted as saying, "Make no small plans." To my fellow-preachers of this text I would say, Make no small promises. So don't spare the physical.

RWB: So then you include the physical because that is included in Jesus' promises, his goal, his Good News. How about the Law, God's Bad News? I suppose you're implying, though you didn't say so, that physical ailment is important also because it's part of human sinfulness. Though creatures of God, we still get sick and die -- together we do -- because we're fallen. Yet it's tempting to mute that, isn't it?

I know. As a modern, I would've sworn that something as physical as paralysis, if it is curable at all, does not first need the patient's sin to be forgiven. And that may in fact be true. Yet we would never guess that from this gospel lesson. Jesus' first priority seems to be getting rid of the paralytic's sin, as if that were the pre-condition. Only then, almost as an afterthought, does he attend to the medical symptoms.

Pr. Arndt Braaten, authorized "on earth"

In fact, so preoccupied is Jesus with the problem of sin -- and not just the forgiving of it but also the exposing of it -- that he seems to let that problem distract him from the paralytic's paralysis, yes, and even from the paralytic himself. Instead Jesus' attention suddenly shifts to someone else in the crowd altogether, a very different patient, "the scribes." "Jesus, perceiving their thoughts, said, 'Why do you think evil in your hearts?'" (3,4)

Notice, "in your hearts." The "heart" is the biblical "organ" where faith takes place. But so does its opposite, unfaith. If as you said, Jesus' "goal" in this text is faith ("that you might believe") then I suppose the corresponding "malady" which obstructs that goal is the opposite heart condition, unfaith, "thinking evil [about Jesus] in your hearts," suspecting him of "blasphemy," disbelieving his right to forgive sin. What do you make of Jesus' diagnosis of the scribes?

ABB: What prompted the scribes to "think evil in their hearts" is that Jesus had presumed to forgive the paralytic's sin here "upon the earth," as if by this human absolution of his he was accomplishing the man's very absolution before God. I don't think the scribes are offended that God -- God in heaven -- is forgiving. That's how we're tempted to misread them, as grumpy legalists who think that God can't or won't forgive. We imagine: Don't they know, as we presumably do, that God forgives anyway, that it is God's "business" to forgive, virtually automatically? That probably is the way the scribes thought, just as we do. And just as mistakenly. And we in turn are tempted to think as they do, namely, Nothing anyone of us does has anything to do with bringing that forgiveness about. We might announce that there is such a thing as divine forgiveness. But we earthlings certainly don't, can't make that forgiveness happen. So we suppose, like the scribes.

We suppose that just because you and I forgive each other it doesn't follow that our forgiving is honored in heaven, as God's own. Thus we diametrically contradict Jesus' promise to the contrary, "Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." (Mt. 18:18) Of course, we don't deny that we -- anyone -- can say "I forgive you." What we do deny is that anything happens as a result of that -- namely, that