crutchlessness

"I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home."
Mark 2:11

An interesting component of Jesus' healing ministry is that he tended to ask for things of those to whom he was ministering. In other words, he was not going around offering blanket healings as magical cure-alls. Instead, he healed as one aspect of an overall ministry to guide people along in their faith and to combat the forces of darkness that run loose in his creation. The passage quoted above demonstrates this approach as Jesus calls to the paralyzed man to stand up. We could probably envision Jesus going over and standing the man up himself, but that is not the point of the overall mission.

Perhaps there was a mental or emotional component to this man's suffering. It might have been more that just a muscular disability to move. One can almost hear Jesus' tone: "Get up, you can do this. Stand up!" It was the original Nike ad: just do it. Along with whatever physical cure there was in this moment, this man who believed so much in Jesus finallly had someone who believed in him. As he gazed the mile between his life on a floormat and Jesus' face standing over him, these words of challenge and assurance sent chills down his spine - perhaps the first chills he has ever felt. Jesus assures this man that despite his insecurities and inhibitions he can go his own way.

Jesus never treated people like passive objects. He never regarded individuals as a means to an end. He never told someone that their malady occured because "everything happens for a reason" or that it was part of "God's unknown higher plan." Jesus never tried to minister through the painted-on smile of "Well, just remember, God loves you." And not once did he tell a sick person that they had ticked God off by not having enough faith. He healed.

If we want to model ourselves after Jesus, we need to start here. We are not called to walk people through faith by theological practices, liturgical rites, or methodical traditions. To follow Jesus is to challenge and assure people so that they might be empowered to greater depths of faith and perhaps feel - for the first time - the chill that is at once fear and blessing that overcomes those who stand before the Almighty.

"Offer your leprosy, your paralysis, your blindness, your exhaustion to Jesus. Talk to him about your illnesses. What happens to you then?" *



*Anselm Grun, Images of Jesus (New York: Continuum, 2002), 53.