In a scene reminiscent of one from the movie City Slickers in which Billy Crystal’s character is trying to explain to one of his fellow weekend cowboys how to pro-gram a VCR while the two are herding cattle, I found myself sitting on the sofa this week trying to do the same with Nancy.  Two clickers in hand, one for the TV and one for the VCR, trying to explain how it is that the TV has to be on channel three but it doesn’t matter what channel the VCR is on when you are trying to play a tape or program to record something as long as, first, you have properly switched the system from television to video before attempting to re-cord or play something.  Looking back on it, a couple of things stand out.

For one, it’s a little intimidating trying to explain anything technical to a neo-natal intensive care transport nurse.  That’s true in part because, once I’ve explained how to program a VCR, I’ve exhausted the limits of my technical know how.  It’s also true because it says something uncomfortable about who spends more time playing with the clickers.  But, I think I may have also inadvertently stumbled on-to a good premarital training exercise.  At the end of a long and exhausting day a couple considering marriage should be put in a room alone with a television, a VCR and two clickers.  If the man can patiently explain how to program the VCR to his fiancé without sounding condescending or in any way hurting her feelings then those two people will likely have a good marriage. 

Learning essential marriage skills, like how to program a VCR, is something nearly anyone can do given time.  It is the spiritual work of staying in love long enough to do the learning that is the real challenge.  All these details of daily living tend, in time, to be nothing more than proving grounds for how well we’re handling the real work of relationships. 

When I first got the call a couple of weeks ago from a man who was in the youth group of a church in which I was youth minister years ago what he told me was that his wife of fifteen years wanted out, in part, because he’s done a bad job of being a good husband.  That’s an extreme oversimplification, but that pretty much covers it.  At some of the most basic skills in marriage, to his surprise, he is just now finding out just how miserably she rated him a failure.  Professionally and financially he has been extremely successful.  It’s the matters of the heart, the spiritual stuff, that’s about to get them.  When I sat down to talk with them this week I tried to remember, before I said one word, that what they were facing was not something that logic or reason alone could resolve.  While they both have some work to do on skills the bigger task they face is spiritual.  Their marriage is paralyzed and near death because something inside both of them has been paralyzed much longer.  Without some spiritual resources to sustain and empower them through the dry, passionless days and until they can get up and walk again they’ll never know how well skilled they could have become. 

Don’t you think that is why Jesus said what he said first to this paralyzed man whose friends tore a hole in the roof so they could bypass the crowd and lower him at Jesus’ feet, “Son, your sins are forgiven,”?  There is much we don’t know.  We don’t know for sure, for one thing, how badly this man was paralyzed.  From the sound of things, he was at least a paraplegic if not a quadriplegic.  Obviously, if his friends hadn’t carried him on a stretcher he would have never gotten close to Jesus much less gotten the healing he needed.  And, it wasn’t just their physical act of carrying him that made the difference because the first thing of which Jesus took note was “their faith.”  They brought him to Jesus as much on their faith as they did a stretcher. 

So, the more obvious sermon within the sermon is the one most of us have heard but need to hear again from time to time.  Where would we be if we didn’t have friends who did some believing for us when we couldn’t do all the believing we needed on our own?  And, where would some of our friends be if, from time to time, they didn’t let us carry them in the arms of our faith when had little or none? 

But, aside from the more obvious, it’s worth noting that what this man apparent-ly wanted most from Jesus he didn’t get first.  In time, he got more than he came looking for.  But, not at first.  Word had spread about this teacher, Jesus, who could heal all kinds of sickness and disability.  Most certainly they brought this man to Jesus so that Jesus would heal his physical condition.  But, the first thing Jesus does is forgive his sins, which at least implies that, whether Jesus believed there was a direct connection between his physical and spiritual condition, He did know that the condition of this man’s heart was worse than that of his body.  We have no proof that this man’s paralysis was due to some sin he had committed.  Maybe he was driving drunk and had a camel wreck or maybe he was running from his girlfriend’s husband and fell out of a second story window and broke his neck.  We don’t know.

What we do know is that “the scribes” were pondering all of what sounded like spiritual mumbo jumbo to them, this teacher pronouncing a forgiveness that is only God’s to give, when Jesus proved to them that, just as He could see beyond this man’s most apparent need to what he really needed, He is always able to see beyond any man’s silence to what He is really thinking.  We tend to size people up by what we see and what we hear them saying.  Jesus always sizes people up by what He knows is in their heart.  Or, what isn’t in their heart.  Thus, He is always more interested in getting to the heart of matters rather than just to what appears to matter most to us.  That’s why this man came for one kind of healing and ended up getting another, at least at first. 

Now, the primary reason this scripture is even in the Bible is because Mark was recording an incident in which Jesus was trying to prove to the Jewish community that He was more than just an itinerant rabbi.  The scribes were incensed that Jesus would claim to be able to forgive a person’s sin.  “Why does this fellow speak in this way?  It is blasphemy!  Who can forgive sins but God

alone?” they wanted to know.  So, in order to accommodate their lack of faith, Jesus demonstrated something on a physical level that would prove His power on a spiritual level and the paralyzed man got healed.  Jesus could have just healed the man.  In other situations, he seems to do that.  But, in this case, Jesus re-leased this man from his physical paralysis in order to have opportunity to re-lease those who looked on from their spiritual paralysis.  If He had just healed the man without first announcing the forgiveness of his sin’s those who were watching and listening would have never known of His ability to heal them of an illness that threatened their souls.  All said and done, the physical was nothing more than a proving ground for the spiritual.  God is up to that work all the time.

When I sat in the north Dallas home of my friend this week I realized that a big part of what must make his troubled marriage so troubling to him is that it makes no sense compared to the rest of his life.  He has worked hard and his hard work has paid him handsome rewards.  Nice home.  Nice cars.  Great job.  Incredible investment and retirement portfolio.  Perfect neighborhood.  The best schools.  Beautiful children.  Lousy marriage?  It’s the one part of his life that isn’t working.  He’s coming to learn how painfully cold the mildest February can be when a couple is better at building a house than building a home.  He wants to know what he can do to “fix” the broken part of his life.  He thinks there is something he can do.  What he may discover is that there isn’t one thing he can do to “fix” what is broken any more than this paralytic could have gotten up on his own and walked home. 

What he may also discover is that sometimes God brings us, yes, brings us to these miserable points in our lives for the sole purpose of finally having our attention and proving to us how desperately we need Him.  In John 9, Jesus’ disciples ask him about this man they encounter who has been blind from birth.  “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  We think that way, don’t we?  When something goes wrong if we can just find the right place to affix blame then we are on the road to recovery, we think.  But, Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”  (John 9:1-5)

The real issue in this man’s life was not his moral failure, according to Jesus, but God’s moral purpose.  Before it was all over, more people were able to see Jesus because of this man’s lifelong blindness than ever would have had he always been sighted.

Right now, if God just answered my friend’s prayer to make His wife love him, the spiritual work that only happens on the backside of discovering how much you aren’t loved by those whose love you think you can’t live without would go undone.  This man in Mark’s gospel has some growing to do that he won’t do until he lays paralyzed at the feet of Jesus and helpless to do anything unless God intervenes. 

Have you ever marveled at how it is that the only language God can sometimes use to demonstrate His power to heal our souls is the language of a broken body or a broken heart or a broken life that we can’t fix?  God does not owe us any-thing.  In particular, He does not owe us our solution to our problems.  What He wants to give us is an opportunity to see and experience what only He can do when there is nothing left that we can do and faith in Him is all we have left. 

Sometimes we don’t get from God what we ask because what we want and what we need are so vastly divergent that God knows that, if He gives us what we want first, then we might not have ever be open to what we really need.  Some-times God puts roadblocks in our paths to keep us from walking on down the road without Him.  I often wonder what kind of life I would have now if God had answered my first prayers and had fixed my life according to the designs of my own solutions to my dilemma.  What kind of life would I have if He had fixed my life the way I wanted before He took me on a journey that taught me more about Him than I would have ever known otherwise.  What kind of life would any of us have if God had to behave the way we think He has to in order to be God? 

This man didn’t get what he apparently first wanted from God.  His sins were forgiven first and then his body was healed.  Had Jesus not pronounced His forgiveness before He healed the physical paralysis then those who doubted that Jesus was God would have missed the point.  Every trial we face when we fumble with what is broken in our lives is nothing less than an opportunity for God to make Himself known as who He is to us.  In fact, the trial “the scribes” faced was the way in which Jesus was asking them to consider an idea about God that, to them, was unthinkable, even blasphemous. 

Few in this room, if given a true-false test, would disagree that Jesus was God.  In fact, we would probably scorn those who argued that He was not.  But, whether our knowledge of Jesus has moved from something we acknowledge as true because it is written in scripture to something we know is true because He has become personally known to us is probably a matter of whether or not we have come face to face with our own inability to fix our miserable lives without Jesus stepping in or have come to the place where our limited thinking about God was finally challenged by life’s impossibilities.  If you have never needed your faith for more than what just what happens at church on Sunday it probably isn’t very valuable to you, yet.  It probably won’t become very valuable until, paralyzed in your own inadequacies, it’s all you’ve got left. 

The other day when I was trying to show Nancy how to work the VCR, without realizing it at the moment, I was proving more to her about my character than I was about my skill.  She now knows me better than she probably ever wanted to.  The real test, looking back on it, is not whether or not I am a good teacher of how to program VCR’s.  The real test is how well we know and love each other now that it’s all said and done. 

It’s one of the strangest mysteries of relationships that only what tests them ultimately proves them.  It’s strange how those things that test us ultimately prove us and how only those things that test us ultimately prove God to us. 

You’d think He planned it that way!