We are very early into the story of Jesus and already there is trouble afoot. Had it been anyone else we would have immediately named him a troublemaker and created a myth where the victim is, you guessed it, guilty as charged. Everyone knows someone like this, a person who is always starting something. But this time, since it is Jesus we are talking about, the One vindicated by God through the resurrection, another aspect or side of conflict emerges, namely, the conquering of the powers.

In the popularly structured world-view of good and evil, conflict rages. Our human history is the history of our conflicts. What is it we had to learn about the past in school? The names, events and dates of the Conquerers. We say the victors write history, don’t we? Our entire historical framework is conflict based. The text today is precisely about the nature of the conflict, as Jesus perceived it. It had to do with what happens when culture does not forgive.

Jesus comes into this unforgiving world as a trickster. For evil, love is repellent, kindness is torture, light is darkness. Jesus is the trickster in that world. In him, the Kingdom of God is already dawning. His presence disturbs the logic of the mimetic process and calls into question all of its judgments.

Mimesis can be traced through several threads in this narrative. One thread has to do with the distressed thoughts of the scribes that Jesus had blasphemed. If they had uttered them aloud, Jesus would have been immediately thrust under the threat of the death penalty (usually by stoning). In the minds of the scribes Jesus had placed himself in the place of the One whose name was too sacred to be spoken. Jesus had set himself up as a rival over against God. And as the keepers of God’s authority on earth, they perceived that Jesus had also set himself up against them. His reply and demonstration point out that he is following God; he acts as God would act. His entire program of reconciliation can be summed up in this narrative and an entire theory of religious doubt can be summed up in the questions of the scribes. Who is this Jesus, anyway, that God should give him such authority? Like the villagers of Capernaum we too can say, “We have never seen anything like this!” On the one hand negative mimesis and collective violence are exposed and defeated and on the other hand mimesis is itself transformed as Jesus chooses to imitate God alone. If we can read this narrative and not walk away with the same wonder and amazement as the ‘people’ in the text, we have not yet discerned just how powerful and revelatory is Jesus’ mission.

Some form critics see our present text as a composite of two different stories. Perhaps this is so but as Taylor notes: “It seems reasonable to suggest that historical testimony would be preferred to creative invention at a time when eyewitnesses still lived. This consideration suggests that the account is historical and not Gemeindetheologie.” In addition, the internal structure in the episode and the fact that forgiveness of sins and healing are both elements of the domain of the reign of God suggest that it is not impossible that we have here a single conflict story motivated by a healing. We believe that the desire to separate the healing and forgiveness elements of the pericope come from the failure to understand Jesus' primary concern here, the exclusion of the paralytic. When the man is let down through the roof, Jesus' response is to remove the stigma attached to his disability. In Jesus' world, this is a much greater burden than the paralysis itself. Jesus addresses it first, as a teaching to those gathered, no doubt intending the conflict it creates.

This conflict can be seen in the rivalry created in the minds of the scribes (‘teachers of the Law’). Ched Myers: “The scribes are incensed and for good reason. Their complaint that none but God can remit debt is not a defense of the sovereignty of Yahweh, but of their own social power. As Torah interpreters and co-stewards of the symbolic order, they control determinations of indebtedness.” (Binding The Strong Man)

Jesus’ shift away from what Myers calls the ‘debt code’ is the same shift that Marcus Borg (Conflict, Holiness & Politics) observes when Jesus contrasts his ‘mercy code’ with the ‘holiness code’ of the Pharisees. Code, then, refers to commonly accepted ways of structuring social relationships, almost always hierarchically. Jesus’ preference for the ‘mercy’ code or ‘forgiveness code’ highlights his acknowledgement of these ‘codes’ as models of theological thought that helped to frame social relationships, but he invests the codes with ‘new teaching.’

Furthermore, Myers’ observation regarding the correlation between political and religious power is one we don’t want to overlook. It is an invisible fulcrum upon which the tension of this narrative rests. Once their God is challenged, the powers that be are challenged. The converse is also true. As we have observed several times in our look at the gospels, the principalities and powers that Jesus overthrows have both an inner and an outer dimension. Myers’ exegesis confirms what we have learned elsewhere about the structuring of mimesis in human culture.

Another observation we have made regarding the interlacing character of mimesis and its consequences is echoed in Vincent Taylor’s comments on this text: “The inference seems justified that Jesus traced the man’s plight to sin and believed that his spiritual restoration was a primary and indispensable condition to recovery. Jesus by no means believed that sin was the sole cause of affliction and calamity, but he could not fail to observe how closely mental, spiritual and physical conditions are connected…It is even possible that the declaratory word was curative in intention.”

Finally, at this point in Mark’s gospel, and we are just at the beginning of our chapter 2, the conflict is already so intense that the religious authorities are just words away from condemning Jesus to death. As in the Fourth Gospel, there is conflict with religious authority from the opening days of Jesus’ ministry. In both opening narratives Jesus seems to know his opponents’ thoughts. The world of the principalities and powers is on ‘full display’ in the presence of Jesus, they are completely exposed like department store window dressing.

We can see that there was an extraordinary challenge in Jesus mission. The consequence of the ‘exposure’ of mimetic powers produces an emperor with no clothes. What was God really like? The keepers of sacrificial theology had to wonder about all this. Jesus had usurped the right of religion to forgive sin and the right to determine judgment and thus, justice. In the system of religion there are degrees of forgiveness and justice. With Jesus’ Father, to forgive all is to be just to all, for all could just as well have been justifiably damned. We are revealed as the ones who hold the grudges, not God.

2006:

And in Jesus it is revealed that we Christians are forgiving, like God.

As much as his parables, Jesus’ healings also turned the way people thought upside down. By simply caring for others, as his Father cared for him, Jesus transformed mimesis and thus redeems each and every one of us as victims of mimetic desire and its fruit, disease and death.

However, to see ourselves only ‘as the paralytic’ would be to miss a great opportunity in the text. We are given the job now of declaring the forgiveness Jesus’ proclaimed. We may be sitting beneath them as those around us “un-roof the roof” to bring to us others paralyzed by sin. Then, too, if we put ourselves in the place of the scribes we can learn valuable lessons regarding our own theology. If indeed, Jesus’ authority should challenge our own resentments, we may find ourselves asking for forgiveness for the ways we have become mimetically entangled in retribution and vengeance.

Jeff adds:

Susan Sontag's books, "Illness as Metaphor" and "AIDS and Its Metaphors" are helpful to the preacher here. We tend to think that we are too sophisticated to attribute illness to sin, but Sontag demonstrates that with cancer (Illness) and AIDS, treatment of these diseases is often delayed or avoided because of the social stigma still attached to being "sick." Sontag goes on to point out that "illness" is an arbitrary social construct. Think of the way we use "sick" as means of demonstrating that someone doesn't fit in. "Oh.. he's just sick!" Some germs make us "sick," according to our social norms, others don't. Some physical differences render us "disabled," others don't. It is purely arbitrary. In terms of mimetic theory, "illness" creates difference, and difference generates risk of being scapegoated.

Jesus overcomes disease and disability, yes, but primarily because it is an arbitrary source of expulsion. (Think of leper colonies.) In healing, he restores us to community. In today's story, Jesus makes that most clear by dealing with the real problem first.