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Our sense of justice often causes us to insist that grace
should not be dispensed too cheaply. At least we demand a price
when we are the dispensers of the good things that are available.
Faith is the free gift of God, we confess to believe, but we
usually insist that the recipient pay up. Similarly, in response
to evil, we tend also to want the perpetrators to pay up. Perhaps
not so much when it's our own neck on the block, but with others
we tend to want the sin and evil to be punished. It may even be
this sense of righteousness that causes our bitterness when
trouble befalls us. Because we are so exacting in our insistence
that good comes as a reward, and that evil be punished, it often
backfires when we experience trouble. Believing ourselves to be
innocent, we painfully wonder, "Why me?" and "For what wrong am I
suffering?"
Along comes the concept of forgiveness and we demand that it
be deserved, if only by appropriate confession. Quid pro quo. We
come clean before God, and God keeps the judge's part of the
bargain almost as if obligated by some kind of contract. If you
plead guilty, the offer goes, you get a lighter sentence. It's
our sense of justice. At least it is our misguided sense of what
grace means. So much of our ethics, and even our spiritual system
of how faith works, is based upon fairness and what outcome is
deserved.

The paralytic lowered through the ceiling to get across to the
Lord's healing power got more than any of us bargained for. His
sins were forgiven. Then without a word from him but only on the
complaint of those who resented the first gift he was given
another, the health he had come for. There are many remarkable
aspects of this incident but the most striking for me are the
undeserved, totally unmerited benefits to the paralytic that are
accomplished on the basis of the faith of the friends. The
paralytic doesn't say or do a thing. He's at the center of the
whole event, but in the drama of how the results come about, he's
almost a bystander. We have no idea what grace he merited or
deserved. And yet he gets it all.
Picture the friends taking the roof apart to get their friend
into the room where Jesus was teaching. Imagine the way the whole
lesson or conversation must have come to a stand-still as this
descending bed demanded everyone's attention. How could I go on
with this sermon if over your heads someone chopped or sawed
their way through the roof. I suppose there might be quite an
uproar. Then, if no one managed to prevent the destruction in
time, imagine our growing amazement if a bed came down through
the hole. Even more remarkable than all of that is that Jesus
responded to the faith of the friends on the roof. Jesus reacted
to the faith of the friends and not to the faith of the fellow
they delivered up to him (or delivered down).
Notice that the fellow on the cot uttered no confession to get
his absolution. Jesus went even one step further: it was not the
sick fellow's faith at all that impressed Jesus and got the man
healed, but the faith of the man's friends. Would that we all had
friends like that! There wasn't even a conversation between Jesus
and the victim who was brought to be healed. We know only his
physical condition. In some ways we know more about the friends.
It seems that the sermon was interrupted by the lowering through
the ceiling of the cot -- certainly an impressive statement of
bold perseverance in its own right. But without any verbal
interaction at all our Lord, Mark tells us, saw their faith and
forgave their friend. Not that

Jesus saw the victim's faith and forgave him; Jesus responded to
the faith of the friends.
At once, any ideas that you and I might have about meriting
God's forgiveness on our own right are dispelled. There is no
repentance on the part of the paralytic. No confession,
contribution or amends. Apparently in paying the price for our
sins, Christ earned the privilege of forgiving whomever he
pleases; how and whenever he pleases. The criteria is at his
pleasure and his pleasure is grace. He who was neither a
participant in the sin of human nature or the misbehavior of the
resulting sins became sin and took upon himself all sins. In
doing so he must have received authority to forgive whomever he
pleased. In this case he was pleased to forgive the sins of one
from whom he had heard none of what he might consider the
prerequisites.
Now that may not have been what the friends had in mind. For
all we know the forgiveness of their friend's sins didn't
interest them so much as his physical condition. We might assume
that they had substantial and significant reasons to hope that
the whole encounter would have resulted in the man's health. But
about his spiritual condition and the need for wholeness
represented by forgiveness, about that maybe they hadn't thought
at all. Christ is clearly seeking to make a point about what is
most important. We miss the point just as often as the original
onlookers. If you can forgive someone's sins their physical
ailments would be no major hurdle. Most of us would put it the
other way around. Deal with the physical demands and needs first
and look into the spiritual benefits later. On the contrary,
Christ looked beyond the obvious condition of the man and
ministered to the not-so-obvious. First things first -- and first
is the health and well-being of our souls.
Even then, the man did not make his own request for Jesus'
healing ministrations. Nor did the friends speak up. While the
story assumes that's what they went through all this trouble to
secure, still there was no conversation between them, their
friend and the Lord. Seeing their faith Jesus forgave the sins of
their friend. Then seeing the contempt of the faithless Jesus
healed him.

How frequently might we serve in the role of those friends to
accomplish the health and salvation of those around us? Is it
possible that we have a greater potential role to fulfill in the
spiritual life and health of others than we might have known? I
think so. And I know a couple of people whose lives made this
same point in a convincing way.
Jack was a young man who lived life with enthusiasm and joy.
He was a fairly well-liked participant in a number of extra-
curricular activities of the local high school. Of modest
scholastic ability, he made up for it with hard work and teachers
recognized his potential for doing a good job when he made it his
goal. What he lacked in some ways he more than compensated for
with his out-going personality and his endearing eagerness to be
helpful and supportive to people and causes.
Jack had a good time with his friends and was a safe and
responsible driver. You could count on him to be the designated
one. He liked to party with the best of them, but he was
responsible even about that.
The call from Jack's father asking that the pastor meet them
at the hospital was the kind of call you most dread. It soon
became clear that Jack was not going to survive. He had been
driving when a drunk driver crossed the median and hit them head-
on. One of the four was relatively sure to live; two were in very
serious shape and then there was Jack. He was alive, technically,
but that was all and that couldn't last.
This incident could appear as an illustration in any number of
sermons; from why bad things happen to good kids to a whole
series on the quality of life -- Jack's and ours. But there was
more to the story than how Jack lived. Even in death, Jack served
people and gave life to people he never knew. Even in death Jack
lived out his friendship with people. Jack had talked with his
family once or twice about organ donation. It came up when he
first got his permit, as he thought through whether he wanted to
check the organ-donor box on the form. His parents didn't like
the idea either for him or for themselves. It just didn't feel
right. But now, in his death, they sought to allow Jack the
maturity and responsibility for his own choice. So they agreed,
and Jack became an organ donor.

Three people lived even though Jack died. His parents still
grieve, but it is a grief that is comforted some by Jack's
profound act of friendship to anonymous people who will never
know him but live because of him. Jack's parents now have a
different message on the back of their own driver's licenses. If
their son could be a donor and live out that kind of friendship,
perhaps they could as well. Many more unknown and anonymous
friends may live also because of their friendship and Jack's.
Then there was Gloria. Her husband died from a heart attack
suffered from the trauma of arriving home to find their home
completely ransacked. Many things had been destroyed as the
burglar looked for something of value. Important things were
gone, but Gloria's husband was probably upset most by the
stupidity and intrusion of it all. The police seemed to think
that he had interrupted the crime in progress. Frank had a heart
condition for years and his blood pressure could be expected to
hit the ceiling if his team lost, not to mention if his house was
burglarized.
Gloria, also, had every right to be angry and to demand the
full extent of the law's punishment -- and then some -- when the
young man was caught. Who could blame her for our outrage at him?
Most would cheer her on and demand a punishment worse than the
law permitted. The young man who did it was tried and convicted,
of course. But there was no way to punish him for what felt like
murder to everyone who knew Frank. At least some sort of
manslaughter, people seemed to hope. The young man couldn't be
made to pay. There could be no evening-up. As if taking another's
life in execution ever repays a family or society for the life
that was taken. No punishment of the young man would repay
Gloria. But perhaps he should at least know about what he had
done. She considered trying to communicate with him the full
extent of his actions. For weeks she thought about whether that
would somehow bring her any peace.
She had to know it would not. But she also came to know that
she had to get to know the young man. She was haunted

by whatever it might have been that would lead him to a life of
such violence, that would cause him to do such a horrible thing
to her. It was part of her grief and she worried that it was
revenge instead of justice. But she wanted the young man to know
about her generous and caring husband, and what his death meant
to all the people whose lives would be diminished by his absence.
She went to the trial. She knew she had to. What she discovered
was a young man all alone. What she was able to learn of his
family was a pity. He would have been served better to have been
orphaned, she thought. There was no family to support him and
what Gloria learned of his family was a disgrace. As his humble
defense tried to put it together; trying to get the least
possible sentence -- his guilt not really being in question -- she
found herself coming to his defense in her own heart and soul.
Here was a young man she had every reason to hate, but she
couldn't. Here was a young man who had proven to be her worst
enemy but she wanted to be his friend. The result of the trial
was a foregone conclusion: he was guilty of course and sentenced
to several years. And it was then that their friendship started.
She couldn't tell him who she was at first; she posed as someone
just wanting to see if she could help. He was suspicious and
resentful as if she were just some liberal do-gooder trying to
make him her current crusade. Nor was it easy for her. She just
sent him simple things he needed at first. She was thrilled when
he even confided in her some simple feeling or request.
There's no dramatic finale to the story. She wasn't able to
get him a job when he got out. It was rewarding enough that he
even kept in touch for a few years. When he ultimately found out
the real connection, he was angry and resentful all over again,
thinking she had been doing it to make him even more guilt-
ridden. He stormed off fearing she was playing some kind of mind-
game with him. Surely it felt like it. He had grown up not
knowing how his emotional abuse as a child had affected him. But
he was starting to learn and the lesson drove him away from the
good Gloria was trying to

do. As a result she had to do some soul-searching of her own. She
finally admitted to him that she didn't understand all of what
was going on in her that made her want to care about him and do
what she could for him. For whatever reason she was doing it, she
finally simply asked him to accept her friendship for what it was
-- a simple need on her part, a need to want him to be whole and
happy, not to be hurt further by life in a world that would only
hurt more. A need to be in relationship with him in order to
recover herself.
I think she was his friend and earned the right to befriend
him. In some ways she was acting the part of the friends who
lowered the paralytic through the roof. Without asking for
forgiveness, forgiveness was granted. Without deserving it -- or
even desiring it -- healing was granted. That's grace: God's
grace.
When you most wish people would get what they deserve, ask if
that's what you would want for yourself. When you want others to
be fair with you and the outcome to be just toward you, consider
what you would face yourself if the system were fair, just and
such an open-and-shut case. We are on the receiving end of a
salvation that does not give us what we deserve but what God
desires for us. Ours is a case that would long ago have been
closed if the only factors were what we had done, followed by
punishment that we deserved. Instead, our case is dismissed by a
God who has become our sin and taken what we deserve upon
himself.
Now that's a friend!
Like a person who gives his organs to extend the lives of
others, Christ sacrificed his body for our health. Like the
recipient of a transplant who gets a second chance, we are
granted wholeness when the disease of our souls receives a whole
new beginning. The divine donor provides not what we have earned
or have the right to expect. God has simply given new life
through his own death.
Now that's a friend!