"The Hardest Easy Thing"

You probably know by now that in all of Cass County, there are only three people who don't deer hunt, and that I'm one of them. This doesn't mean, however, that I don't kill deer. As a matter of fact, I am responsible for the demise of seven deer. I haven't gone out into the woods looking for them. No, that would be too easy. No, the deer have always come looking for me and found the front bumper of my car. It's a lot easier to kill a deer with a car when you don't want to than it is to kill a deer with a gun when you DO want to.

The number one faith in Minnesota is Lutheranism, followed very closely by Roman Catholicism. When I lived in Michigan, I discovered that the number one faith in deer hunting, followed very closely by deer hunting.

I remember the story of these two deer hunters in the Upper Peninsula who had just gotten their first buck, and they're dragging him back to their pickup. This other hunter meets up with them and he's dragging his along too. The fellow says to the two guys, "Hey guys, I don't mean to butt in, but I can tell you that it's a lot easier if you drag the deer in the other direction. Then the antlers won't dig into the ground."

After the third hunter leaves, the two decide to try it. A little while later one hunter says to the other, "You know, that guy was right. This is a lot easier!"

The other guy says, "Yeah, but we're getting farther and farther from the truck."

Some things look easy on the surface, but there's a whole lot more than meets the eye. I've often wondered what it would be like to have followed Jesus around during the three years of His ministry on Planet Earth. With the exception of a couple of instances, it looks like He could pretty much do whatever He wanted, whenever He wanted. It looks on the surface like it was easy being able to do all those things.

I once heard, however, that if you have two choices in front of you‹where one is easy and the other more difficult‹that more often than not, the more difficult one is the correct one.

In Luke's gospel, Jesus is out walking. On the surface, that looks like an easy thing. I mean, how hard is it to go out for a walk? It's one thing to go out for a walk if you're Jane Q. Public in America or Jean Q. Publique in France. It's another thing to take a walk in public if you're a celebrity, or important. When we in Maryland, one of the people in the church I served was a retired member of the Secret Service. He told me what all was involved in setting up security set up anytime the President wanted to go anywhere other than the White House or Camp David. Buildings had to be swept to make sure there weren't any spying devices; everyone in a building had to be checked and their lives gone through with a fine tooth comb; streets had to be cordoned off, and snipers had to be placed on roofs all around. If the President wanted to go anywhere, there was usually a cost of several million dollars and hundreds and sometimes thousands of man-hours involved just so he could visit an Elementary School.

Here is the single most important person in the world, and He is out and about among people. And as we see everyday, it's a dangerous world out there, especially if you are in the Middle East.

What about Jesus? Did He have a security team? Did He have bodyguards? Did He surround Himself with a big entourage? On those times that He appeared in public, did He have some guy in a suit and dark glasses walk along beside Him saying, "Coming through! Coming through!"? Probably not, but from what I read, because of the sheer number of people who followed Him, it WAS difficult to get close to Him.

But if it was difficult for an average, humdrum person to get close, it was next to impossible for another type of person to get very close. If you were a leper, you weren't allowed to be in close proximity to ANYONE, much less the creator and sustainer of the universe.

You see, leprosy was a disease of which the medical world didn't know a much at the time. There were two kinds of leprosy: one was serious, but only to the person who contracted it; the other was fatal and contagious. Anyone with leprosy was pretty much considered persona non-gratis. He was separated, cordoned off from the rest of society. If he DID go in public, he had to get someone to walk ten paces in front, put his finger under his nose and yell, "Unclean! Unclean!"

So it was hard for a leper to get close to anyone. But on this day, when Jesus is out and about and in public, the unthinkable happens: a leper breaks through the crowd, breaks through the security, breaks through any sense of social objectivity, and gets within several inches of Jesus. He immediately falls down and says, "Jesus, if You want, You can make me clean."

Now, the easiest thing Jesus could have done was to have said, "Okay, wish granted. Abracadabra. It's done!" and the leprosy would have fallen off the guy. Let's face it: Jesus brought the world into existence simply by speaking. If He wanted to overturn this cruel twist of nature by simply speaking the words, He could have. It would have been easy.

But Jesus is rarely about the easy. No, Jesus takes the more difficult route. You see, this is something that Luke, the author of the gospel that bears his name, found fascinating. Luke was a physician, a doctor, a medical practitioner. He of all people knew that it was commonly believed that leprosy was spread by contact. And it didn't take something as brazen as somebody with a cold coming up and sneezing right in your face. Medical science, such as it was, believed that leprosy could be spread by casual contact, that if you simply brushed up against someone with leprosy, you yourself would be subject to infection.

Here Jesus has already made one difficult choice: He has allowed this pariah of society to break through the force field and get within close proximity. Now, He has another choice. He can take the easy way out and speak the words and give the leper a verbal antibiotic. Or, He can reach out and physically touch the leper and heal Him.

There's something I've learned through the years that I've lived with these passages, something that's take me a while to sink into my noggin and to my heart. I always knew that touch was important to God, that whenever Jesus laid His hands on someone that it was symbolic, at the very least, of His hands being the conduit of spiritual energy and power, that healing flowed from His body, through His hands and into the person He was healing. But I've also learned that there's more to it than that. That as the healing energy is going IN to the leper or the blind man or the lame man, that all the bad stuff is simultaneously coming OUT and actually going IN to Jesus. If you want to think of it like you would a blood transfusion, He's transferring all the good blood with the antibodies and the good platelets into the sick person while at the same time, He is RECEIVING all the bad blood with the depleted red and white cells into His own. In other words, Jesus is not only removing this man's leprosy, He is, in turn, taking this man's leprosy upon Himself. He is transferring His goodness and His wholeness into this man while He Himself is becoming a leper. Which is easier, to stay at home or to get out? Which is easier, to keep the leper at arm's bay or to allow him to get close? Which is easier, to heal his leprosy by speech or to risk infection and to heal his leprosy by touch?

Jesus leaves there and goes to a home, and there He begins to teach. The pews are quickly packed tighter than a Scotsman's U-Haul. While all this is going on, very few people notice the guys who come carrying a stretcher. Even fewer notice the paralytic lying on the stretcher.

We were at the hospital in Park Rapids yesterday to help Mike and Susan bring our granddaughter Shelby home. It brought back all kinds of memories of just how difficult it is to get around when you're getting out of the hospital with a newborn. For not only was there all this fuss about bundling up the baby and putting on about 12 layers of clothing, it took a moving van to get all the suitcases and the stuff that had accumulated in Susan's hospital room. And it occurred to me that even though it was a tad chilly, I would hate to imagine what it would have been like if they were trying to do this in January, when the weather in Minnesota is just a tad cooler than it is in September.

For Mike and Susan, and particularly for Shelby, it wasn't easy getting from Point A to Point B. and it wasn't any easier for this paralytic and his friends. So they go through all the trouble of getting this paralytic friend to this house where Jesus is teaching, and once they get there, it's worse than the Community Church sanctuary in July. The place is jam-packed. Standing Room only.

Now, the easy thing would have been to simply throw up their hands and call it a day. The crowd's just too much of an obstacle. But if you have a decision to make and there are two choices in front of you, very often the correct one is the harder of the two.

They obviously cannot break through the force field here like the leper did earlier, so they do something equally difficult. The friends lay the paralytic on the ground. They climb up on top of the house. They painstakingly begin to remove a section of the roof.

Now, I used to think that this was no big deal. "This is a thatched roof," I thought to myself. This is nothing but dirt and straw up there and it wouldn't take much to clear it out of there.

But then I realized just how hot it gets in the Middle East and I remember how hardened dirt can become in the heat, and I remembered that some dirt can be just about as hard as concrete. And then I realized just how much of this roof they would have to remove and just how difficult it is getting up to a roof on a ladder all by myself and how difficult it would be to climb up on top of a roof with a stretcher. So these friends, faced with the easy way or the hard way, choose the latter and use the ladder to climb that roof. And then they lower the stretcher down. Here's Jesus teaching, and out of the corner of His eye He sees this stretcher being lowered. He looks at the paralytic and He smiles; He looks up at the ceiling and sees these friends though the opening in the roof. They are dripping sweat and heaving with exhaustion and He smiles at them. He then looks over at the paralytic and says the strangest thing.

Now, I would have thought that the first words out of Jesus' mouth would have been, "Wow! What a lot of faith! You are healed." But He doesn't say that. Not at all. He says these very odd words for the occasion. "Friend, your sins are forgiven you." So the words have no sooner left His mouth than the Pharisees and all the other ecclesiastical eggheads start jawing, "Well, I NEVER. Who does He think He is? No one can forgive sins but God alone."

Why did Jesus deem it more important to forgive the paralytic right off the bat? You've got to remember the mindset of the people of biblical times. You and I are educated people. We know why people get sick. They get sick because of infection or through genetic predisposition. They get sick through bacteria or because their veins get clogged or because their glandular systems go wacky. If one of us was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, the assumption is, "Hey, you might be having a myocardial infarction." But if a person in biblical times was rushed to the hospital (presuming they had hospitals) then the assumption would be, "Hey, you're having a heart attack because of some kind of sin in your life."

That's the assumption here. The Pharisees and most other people don't believe that the paralytic is paralyzed because he's had an injury in his spinal cord or because there is some damage in his neuro system. They believe he was paralyzed because he must have played golf on the Sabbath day or he must have coveted his neighbor's Lexus. In other words, sin equals sickness. So Jesus, being the Great Physician, attacks the illness at the root. He says, "Friend, your sins are forgiven."

So the gums start flapping and Jesus says, "Which is easier to forgive sins or to heal? So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins"--He says to the paralytic--"I say to you, stand up and take your bed and go to your home."

Which is easier? To stand and run when you've been paralyzed, or to stand and accept the love and forgiveness of friends?

We've all been this paralytic. It may have been that our paralysis was caused by something medical; it may that we had another kind of paralysis that really WAS caused by sin: some stupid thing that we did, some imbecilic word that caused so much trouble. Which is easier, to forgive sins or to heal?

In my life I have been blessed to have at least two friends who, when I couldn't pray, lifted me on the wings of prayer. I've had at least two friends who, when I was shrouded by the thick cloud of debilitating clinical depression, burrowed through to lift me above it. In my life I've had at least two friends who, when I thought Jesus had all but deserted me, brought me to Jesus.

Which is easier, to be brought to Jesus or to bring others to Jesus? Which is easier, to stay paralyzed or to be set free to get out and about in the world? Which is easier, to write a check so that others can bring relief to suffering, or to reach out and personally touch the suffering?

Would that we be blessed by following Jesus. It's the easiest hard thing we'll ever do; it's the hardest easy thing we'll ever do. And either way, it's a whole lot easier than dragging the antlers in the wrong direction.

© Rev. Duane Brown, 2003