Surprised by the goodness of God!

Introduction

Good morning. My name is Daniel, I’m the senior minister here. It’s great to have you here. We’re going to spend some time in that passage. We believe that this is God’s word, and so we want to study it and learn it and learn from it. We’re going to do some of that this morning, and I want to think a little bit about expectations.

Particularly, I think expectations become important with the recent world of online shopping and what you expect. I don’t know about other people, I suffer fairly heavily from buyer’s remorse. Susie doesn’t always agree with what I buy online, but she will know that I spent a lot of time thinking about it beforehand, immediately regretted it after purchasing it, and then have to explain to her why I bought it. It’s even more true with the world of not really sure what you’re going to get when you order online.

Years ago, I had a friend when I was in four-wheel driving. He was into four-wheel driving, buying some nice wheels for his car, and he found this great, unbelievable price for these Cooper tires online. If you know anything about tires, there’s a whole bunch of numbers afterwards, numbers and letters that mean nothing to no one. When I go to the mechanic and he says, “What size is it?” I go, “It says Goodyear.” But he saw this thing, and it had the numbers and letters, and it had these two letters that he was almost going to purchase these $500 tires, and he almost purchased it, but at the end, it just had the letters RC. He’s like, “Not I’ve heard of R, but not RC.” Of course, RC stands for remote control, which means he figured it out before he got it: very precise $500 replica tires. But you imagine that moment when you hear your tires have arrived in the photo that’s at the doorstep, and it’s this big, and you’re like, “I don’t think so.”

It’s not just a problem with Internet buying. There’s an urban myth about a church that tried to order a jumping castle for their youth group, and they wanted an adult-sized jumping castle, so they ordered an adult jumping castle, which, of course, they got an adult-themed jumping castle. I don’t know if it’s a true story. It is one of those stories. It’s like an urban church myth. Can you believe what do you do in that situation? Expectations make a big difference about whether you’re satisfied with a product or not. When you think you’re getting one thing, something different comes, it impacts your satisfaction, it impacts your impression, it impacts what you think about the product.

As we come to this passage in Mark 2, that’s precisely what’s going on for the people there, and Mark is trying to present to us, who is this man? Who is this guy that’s been called the Christ? Who is he? We’re unpacking that, and people’s expectation of who they think Jesus is all the way through Mark. We’re going to see this. People’s expectation massively impacts what they think of him when he shows up. We’re in Chapter 2 this morning, but just to recap where we are, this has been a tension that’s been going on right from the beginning of the Gospel of Mark because Mark, right from the beginning, has started to instigate that Jesus has a priority in his ministry for preaching. That’s something Jesus wants to do.

The first ministry thing that Mark tells us that Jesus does is he goes to the synagogue, and he preaches. That’s the first thing. Other gospel writers talk about the wine watering to wine as the first miracle, but Mark’s really focused here on Jesus preaching as a priority. He goes to the synagogue, he’s preaching, and his preaching is interrupted by someone who calls out, ends up being an evil spirit, and Jesus performs a miracle there. This is a pattern that starts to happen. Jesus’ priority is preaching, but he gets interrupted. He goes, we’re told, to Capernaum in chapter one. He goes to Simon Peter’s house, and Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is there. Maybe it’s her house, maybe it’s his house. They’re both there. Jesus heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever, and people just start flocking to the house.

Right in the middle of chapter 1, we have a packed house in Capernaum. They can’t move. There’s so many people there. They’re all there for miracles. You can imagine what the disciples are thinking at this point. You want to get a movement happening. You want to get momentum for that movement. You want people to show up, and that is happening. The house is packed, but the next morning, Jesus gets up early. We’re told he goes out and finds a priest, prays away from the crowds. Peter eventually finds him, and Peter says, “Where are you? Everyone is looking for you.” Jesus says, “Let’s go to other towns. Let’s not go back to those people. Let’s go to other towns to preach because that is why I came.” That’s the pattern that Mark is showing us. Jesus has a priority of preaching, but there’s an expectation people have that he’s this miracle worker, that he’s doing these things, and that’s what they’re longing for, and they’re following him for.

He goes to other towns, and we get to the end of chapter 1, where he meets a man with leprosy. He heals that man with leprosy, and then he says, “Don’t tell anyone about this.” Why? Because Jesus’ priority is preaching. He wants to tell people about the way to God and not distract them with these things that they desire in miraculous works. The leper disobeys him entirely. This is how chapter one ends. The man went and spread the word to everyone, proclaiming to everyone what had happened. As a result, large crowds soon surrounded Jesus, and he couldn’t publicly enter towns anywhere. He had to stay in the secluded place, but people kept coming from everywhere and coming to him. You see what’s happening here? We’re building this tension between what Jesus wants to do and the expectation from people, and he has a priority to preach, but people are coming to him for these miraculous works. That’s where we’re at when we come into the start of that reading we just had in Mark chapter 2.

The Clash of Two Worlds

In Mark chapter 2, we go back to Capernaum, so back to the house. We assume the same house he was in before, probably Peter or Peter’s mother-in-law’s house. He goes back to this house, and we were told we read that he’s preaching, and this time the house is packed full of people, and he’s preaching to them. He’s doing the thing that he wants to do, but suddenly, once again, we get this clash of these two worlds, his preaching priority and people’s desire for miraculous works. In fact, we get this very specific story of the very desperate desire of these friends who have a paralyzed friend, these four people who have a paralyzed friend, and they want to bring him to Jesus. We get this clash between Jesus’ priority of preaching and this desperate desire from really, we could describe these friends as desperate Desperados. They’re a bit Renegade.

Desperate Desperados

The passage tells us that this is for men. It really didn’t need to say that bit. It feels to me like maybe I’m being sexist at this point. It feels to me like the idea of getting up on someone’s roof and tunneling a hole in the roof to get down inside feels like a male kind of idea. I just don’t picture four women showing up and saying, “Oh, we can’t get into the building. Maybe we could ask people to…” No, we won’t ask anyone anything. Let’s go onto the roof. We will carve a hole. We’ll hoist this guy who he’s paralyzed. He can’t do nothing. He’s coming with us whether he likes it or not. We’ll lower him down. It just feels to me like a thing that men came up with, probably even young men. It just feels like a young man kind of thing, someone who doesn’t have a great concern for what a mother-in-law thinks about what’s happening to her house. That feels like what’s going on here, and that’s what they do. It’s quite a crazy story.

They go up onto the roof, they make a hole. Now, first-century houses in the Middle East were flat roofs. We know that many of them you could walk up on top, and there was an area you could go up on top. Either way, this is a structure that is built for some weight. This is not a thatched roof where they’re pulling some of thatches aside and lowering someone down. This is a structured roof, which means most likely there were logs that went across from wall to wall in order to offer structural integrity and then covered in mud. Just processing, cutting a hole big enough to lower a paralyzed person down would be some amount of deconstruction going on here. In fact, the ancient Greek that it’s written in, literally the words are, “They unroofed the roof.” That’s what it says. They didn’t make a hole in the roof. These guys unroofed the roof in order to get in. That’s what’s happening on top of the roof.

Unroofing the Roof

Remember, inside this house is packed full of people. This is not an empty house. There is a sermon going on inside that house. Preachers deal with all kinds of distractions that happen in the sermon. We say things like, “If your kid makes noise in the service, don’t worry, we love the sound of children, it’s great, but if you want to make a hole in the roof, don’t do it during the sermon.” That’s my hot tip for you. Danny remembers the time they took out this ceiling and replaced the Masonite with gyprock, and 100 years of dust came down. Danny will tell you they didn’t do it on Sunday during the service. That’s a good piece of advice there. What’s happening inside the building is a sermon. What’s happening on the roof is unroofing the roof. There’s a tension rising here between this clash between Jesus’ priority trying to get to the sermon and the other people who desperately want to get to Jesus.

There’s a reality we see here where often people’s desire for what they want Jesus to be and what they want Jesus to do for them distracts them from recognizing who Jesus is and what he wants for us. This is a tension that’s going on all the time with these chapters. People are so desperate for Jesus to do things for them that they are missing their whole point of what Jesus wants for them, and that’s the picture going on here. As we come to unpacking who is this man, I think we have to wrestle with that same idea ourselves, that we have preconceived ideas of who God is. We have preconceived ideas of what we think a good God should do, and what that means is that sometimes we would conclude God can’t be a good God if he doesn’t do these things that I’ve decided a good God should do. Jesus can’t be the man he says he is if he doesn’t line up to the things that I feel like he should line up to. There can’t be a God who calls me to live a life of purpose when God’s desires are different to what I think my life of purpose should be, when the things that I value aren’t aligned.

What happens is we come to this idea of who is God with our preconceived ideas of who we think he should be, and so often we struggle to recognize who he is because of what we want him to do for us. We talk about this classically when we talk about things like prayer, that there’s a danger we come to prayer like God is a genie with three wishes, and you need to make sure you choose your wishes very carefully. A prayer that starts something like, “I don’t ask for much, but maybe this one thing you could do,” or we approach God like some sort of witchcraft, a conjuring of, “You got to say the right words, figure out the right magical set of words, and if you say them just right, say them the right way, say the right words, then God will honor your wishes, and he will do the things that you’ve asked him to do.” We come to God with these ideas of who he is that we’ve conceived, and so often that leaves us disappointed when he doesn’t seem to be the God we think he should be. That’s a big picture of what’s happening in this story. There’s a clash between what people want and what Jesus’ priorities are, and that clash comes to a head in this moment. Jesus is preaching. He wants to preach. He’s got his opportunity to preach. It’s a packed house, and even then, where no one could get in with someone for healings, they found a way in by unroofing the roof, and they’re here.

Surprised by the Goodness of God

What does Jesus do? He preaches a sermon. That’s what he does. He preaches a sermon. I’ve titled this sermon for Jesus, “Surprised by God’s Goodness.” This is the sermon. It’s very short. He says, “My child, your sins are forgiven.” That’s his sermon. I know you’re thinking, “Wish all preachers could learn to keep their sermons that short and tight.” That’s his sermon, “My child, your sins are forgiven,” and in that one sentence, Jesus is teaching so many things. The first thing is he’s surprising them with who he is, and we get that really clearly by the response to his one-sentence sermon. His response is, “Hang on, only God can forgive sins.” Jesus’ one sentence, “Your sins are forgiven,” is revealing an incredible thing about who he is and what sin is.

What Sin Is

I think we have this preconceived idea of what sin is, and we come to the idea of sin with these ideas. Often we think sin is bad things. “Bad things” is not a summary of the picture of what the Bible gives us for sin. The other way we might use the word sin is we kind of, I mean, the things like ice cream, talk about the seven deadly sins, and so you get this sin is like the guilty pleasures. It’s the things we would like to do, but we can’t do, or sin is the things that we desire, the good things that are fun, the fun things that God, because he’s anti-fun, he says no to these things. Those are the ideas we kind of get of what sin is, but the picture of sin in the Bible is far bigger than just kind of bad things. The idea of sin in the Bible is actually something personally, directly, a grievance against God.

Sin is the wrong things we do against God. If I use the illustration of a parent who tells a child not to do something, for example, when I was growing up, my mom had a China cat that she had on the mantelpiece. I don’t know where the cat came from. I have a vague memory that when she found this cat, she said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted a China cat.” Clearly, you can relate. Everyone always wanted a China cat. She found this China cat somewhere, bought it, put it up on the mantelpiece, and it’s not that my parents hadn’t ever said, “Don’t throw things in the house before,” but Mom was out, and it was just me and my younger brother at home, and we were playing a game of tag, and as the supreme superior being that I am over my younger brother, I was faster than him, and so in his frustration, he threw something at me, and it’s just that I’m better at dodging things my brother throws than the China cat was, and so the China cat met its demise.

You understand the picture here that there’s something we’ve done that’s wrong, and to be fair, I think it’s right to say I am complicit in some of that. I didn’t throw the Bible that he threw at me, but I was involved in that moment. I was already doing things that I also shouldn’t be doing, and the result, the consequence of what happened then, is not a consequence on me and not a consequence on my brother. There will be a consequence on us when Mom gets home, but the consequence really is on my mother who lost something precious that she valued. That in a way is an image of sin, that it’s not just something against God, but it’s a grievance against God.

Sin is a Grievance Against God

It’s not just the wrong things that we do that we shouldn’t have done. It’s also the things that we should have done that we failed to do. I know another story of a man, a South Sudanese man, when he was young in South Sudan, he was put in charge of someone’s house. He was house-sitting someone’s house, and the guy gave a whole bunch of instructions, but one of them was to look after his dogs. This man had two dogs he was house-sitting the house and the two dogs, and in a lot of countries, dog food is quite expensive. When I grew up in Papua New Guinea, we fed our dog rice paired with a little bit of meat because rice is significantly cheaper to get. People food is cheaper to get than imported dog food, and so that was the case here. This guy was house-sitting, and he was hungry, and it’s people food after all, and so him and his friend who was house-sitting started eating through the dog’s food. Over a course of time, the dog started to get sick and eventually died while he was house-sitting the house. He just hadn’t processed that in a fine backyard a dog couldn’t scavenge for itself in the way it could in a village situation.

The wrong they did in that moment, they did something they shouldn’t have done, but they also neglected to do something they should have done, which was feed the dog, and once again, the consequence wasn’t directly on him, although there may have been some consequences. The immediate consequence was on the poor dogs and also on the owner of the dogs. We get a bit of a picture there of what sin looks like. Sin is a grievance against God, and if this is God’s world and he’s created it, then he has the right to choose how we live in it. If he’s created this world to operate in a certain way, and we don’t operate in that certain way, it makes sense that that world will start to break down, and we will see natural consequences to what’s going on there. That’s a bit of a picture of what sin looks like.

When Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven,” they rightfully say, “Only God can forgive sins,” because the sin is against God. It’s like when my brother broke my mom’s China cat, I said to him, “It’s okay, I forgive you.” That doesn’t work. If these two friends that were looking after the dog looked at each other and said, “I forgive you,” it doesn’t work. The sin is against someone else, and so when Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven,” he’s making a surprising statement about who he is. He’s also making a surprising statement about their status before God with their sins. There’s a whole lot of worldviews we have over the consequence of wrongdoing. In Jesus’ day, one of them was particularly around how that when someone was sick, it was directly because of something they’ve done wrong, or it was something their parents did wrong, maybe even during while they were pregnant with them or in their early life.

The idea was that all illness could be boiled down there, so much so that when Jesus, we read in John chapter 9, when Jesus meets a blind man, the disciples say to Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” That’s how instilled this idea was. When this paralytic is lowered in front of Jesus, and he says, “Your sins are forgiven,” there’s something specific Jesus is saying about their worldview as far as what the consequences of sin are. The reality is there is a consequence for sin, and we will see natural consequences in this life for things we’ve done, but the reality is we sometimes don’t see natural consequences for wrongdoing that we do in this life. That’s why someone who can be a criminal drug lord can live a wealthy, successful life, and it feels unfair that that’s happening. The reality is there’s multiple layers of consequences we see in the Bible. We see natural consequences that happen from the breaking down of our world, breaking down of God’s order, but we also see this layer of supernatural consequences that is the impact directly with God. Those supernatural consequences we face, those consequences not in this life, but beyond this life. When Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven,” there’s a surprising moment that he is releasing this man from all those consequences. We’re going to see it in its entirety even in the form of natural breaking down of this world.

I title this sermon “Surprised by the Goodness of God” because the thing that happens in this moment is not the thing they asked for, but it’s the thing this man needed greater than anything else. The greatest need anyone faces is their place before God. That is the thing that Jesus addresses. If there is a God, and he has made this world, and this is his world, and everything we love and hold dear, everything we value, every relationship we have, if he is the source of all those things, then to lose our place before him is to fracture our relationship with everything good that we know. While we may sit in that moment and think, “No way, that’s not this man’s greatest need. Here’s a man who is in deep trouble. He’s paralyzed.” Apart from not just being out to play hacky sack with the other young men that carried him here, or Ultimate Frisbee, or whatever they’re playing, his whole livelihood is impacted by this. There’s no Centrelink, there’s no NDIS. This man’s whole life is packed into that, and so the suffering of missing out in his life, but also he’s most likely has to be carried to the city gates where he can beg. He can’t do much in his begging. He’s paralyzed. His greatest need is clearly his mobility, but I think we come to that with our own expectations, and something far greater is going on because this man’s relationship with the one who created everything good, everything that he might possibly be missing out on in this life, the one who created all that, his place before that God is at jeopardy because of his wrongdoing in his own life.

It’s not because he’s a criminal crime lord. The man is not getting up to much mischief. He’s paralyzed. It’s because everyone has a place of rebellion before God. All of us in our own ways have rebelled against God, and all of us have a problem in our relationship between us and our maker. Jesus proclaims forgiveness. A priest in Jesus’ day was allowed to proclaim forgiveness on behalf of someone, but that priest had to offer sacrifices in order to show the impact of sin, the consequence of sin. As we find out with Jesus, actually was pointing towards what Jesus was going to do, and Jesus here in this moment is the ultimate priest. He is the one that’s going to offer the ultimate sacrifice with his own death and resurrection, and because of that, because he is who he says he is, because of what he is going to do, Jesus has the authority to rectify this man’s place before God and deal with his greatest problem: forgiveness first. That is why it’s surprising by the goodness being surprised by the good of God.

The Greatest Need

That’s not where this story ends either. In order to prove he has the power to forgive sins, he does something very visual in front of them all. He tells the man, “Get up and walk.” This raises some questions when we think about our expectations and how God is answering our desperate desires because it’s fine to say that the ultimate problem we have is our place before God, but at the same time, this man in different ways, we have our own desperate desires from God. We have our own pleas in our life, our own things that we come before God and say, “Please bring an answer to this.” One of the questions this raises is if the greatest need and priority is our place before God, one of the key questions we need to ask is when we are waiting on God for answers, when we feel like God might even be saying no to the things we ask him for, how do we approach that? Does that make us run back towards God, or is that something that makes us run away from God? If the greatest need is our place before God, then we need to use those moments to run to him, to rest in him, to seek more of him, not less.

It’s a wrestle we face, isn’t it? There’s a place of anger when God doesn’t do the things that we think he should do. We say, “Are you not a good God? Why are you not do these good things that I ask you to do?” It’s because he’s a good God that we should run to him and not away from him in those moments because he has the best plan for us. The reality is that may not result in this life, but the best plan for us is beyond this life, and the best plan for us now is to be in restored relationship with him. It’s true that often our preconceived ideas of God impact our expectation of what we think he is, and sometimes that means that we’re focused on what God can do for us rather than what he wants for us. There’s a challenge here for us to think about that, to recognize Jesus who he says he is, what he said he did, and that his greatest priority is for us to find our place before God.

Miles said it, talking about the baptism to Ivy, that one of the questions, the prayer that God always answers yes to is the one that says, “I want to receive your forgiveness.” The knock on the door, Jesus will always open and let us in. The one prayer we can always know Jesus will say yes to is the one that says, “Let your death and resurrection count for me.” That’s the invitation he gives us amongst all the other desires we have. There’s an incredible invitation to come to him and to receive his invitation to be made right before God because of what he has done. I encourage you that wherever you sit in that space, whether this is a journey that you’re thinking about more to keep exploring it, to talk to me or one of the leadership team here, next term we’re going to be running the Alpha course, which is a great place to explore faith and unpack that more, or if you have a Christian friend in your life that can ask questions to. If you’re someone who is already connected into Jesus, but you’re just wrestling with those questions of your desires not being answered, I want to encourage you to find ways to point yourself and point your heart back to Jesus. Remind yourself of the good things. It’s one of the reasons why we say in prayer, starting with thankfulness is a great practice for our hearts because even in the moments where we feel like we’re longing so much to think about thankfulness will help remind us of the goodness of God even amidst the darkness. I encourage you in those things.