NaturallyResilient

About

Matthew 9:2-8 is another healing story but I think it has an interesting twist. A paralyzed man was brought to Jesus and “Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralyzed man, ‘Take heart, son! Your sins are forgiven.’”

Two things I want to point out, first who had the faith? It says seeing ‘their’ faith. Was this the faith of the men who brought the paralyzed man to Jesus or did this include the paralyzed man’s faith. I doubt that the paralyzed man had much if any say in where his friends took him so it may have just been the faith of the friends that Jesus could heal their friend. To me this says that the faith of another can help someone else. This is where prayers for someone else can be beneficial.

The second twist was the change in wording from what Jesus usually said. The usual phrase Jesus used in healing was ‘your faith has healed you’, but here he says ‘your sins are forgiven’.

Many illnesses are caused by our emotional state. I have seen many emotional problems manifest in physical form. It is often our emotional state knocking us in the head to get our attention but we still ignore them because our society and culture has so disjointed ourselves into compartments that don’t mix. We have doctors for the physical, psychologist for the mental and priest for the spiritual crisis. But a crisis in any one of these can cause changes and problems in one or two of the others. We are all tied together, we are not three different elements (body, mind and spirit) separated but one being that integrates all three.

This man may have been going through a spiritual crisis over some action that he could not move past and his body was accommodating this crisis by freezing or paralyzing his body so he could not physically move forward. By releasing and forgiving the event that sent him into the spiritual crisis the body followed suit and released the paralysis!