Thinking about dismantling a few rooftops....

I've been reading the Gospel of Mark lately, just a little bit each morning. I write it out, word for word, because that slows me down and helps me not to take the words for granted. It's a spiritual discipline, I guess. Anyway, it seems to be working for me lately. [Actually, my lovely and very smart wife, Laurie, has been doing it for a long time now. She not only reads the Bible, she writes it out! What a kook!]

But where was I? Oh yeah. Mark. So this morning the section I wrote out was the part about the men who let their paralytic friend down through the roof so that Jesus could heal him, right at the beginning of chapter 2. You'll recall that Jesus, seeing the faith of these men (their willingness to overcome any obstacle that stood between themselves and Jesus), healed their paralytic friend.

This is the kind of Scripture that provokes a healthy self-questioning. Do I have the kind of faith that would cause me to climb up on the roof and tear up the boards (or wattles, or whatever) to get to Jesus? That's what that little word, "faith," seems to mean in this context. Their faith was such that they would let nothing come between themselves and Jesus. They believed that if they could only get close to Jesus . . . then all would be well.

This is pretty close to the beginning of Jesus' ministry. At the end, people would be fleeing in all directions. All who had desired so to be near him, and those who said they'd never leave him, were nowhere to be found that bleak Friday at Golgotha.

So we have these two images, if you will. At the beginning, people clambering to get near him. And at the end, nearly everyone fleeing or denying they knew him.

Here's my theory: each one of us has something in him that deeply desires to draw near to Jesus. And something in him, just as deeply imbedded, that despises the cross and would flee from it with every bit as much zeal as we like to claim for our faith. We would have the one without the other, if only we could. One moment we're scratching a hole in the roof so we can get close to Jesus (and maybe save a friend), and the next we're denying we ever knew the man.

I could say to you that we should all be like those men who tore the top off the house to get to Jesus, but I can't help but remember that very soon after Jesus healed their paralytic friend, the Pharisees began to mutter and conspire, and the rest of the story is that of one man walking toward his cross, while all the others fall away. But of course there would be another chapter to this story. The resurrection of Jesus. And the "resurrection" (so to speak) of the men and women who had fled Jesus or denied him. The resurrection of their hope. The resurrection of their faith. The resurrection of their sense of purpose and mission.

We draw near. We flee. We want the warm fuzzies, but not the hard knot of grief in the gut that won't go away. I don't mention this so that we should condemn ourselves, or despise our small faith. Is it not amazing that small faith, very small faith, mustard-seed size faith, is commended by Jesus as something very large and consequential in spiritual terms? Lord, may we only understand this truth a little more each day.