At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, "This fellow is blaspheming!" – Matthew 9:3

Today's Scripture Reading (December 29, 2023): Matthew 9

It was his first sermon. At the time, we had a tradition that the Youth of the church would take the service one Sunday evening a month. And if an older teen was willing, one of them could preach. On this night, one of the teens was ready to preach his first sermon. His name was Doug (his real name), and he had decided to preach from the story of the paralyzed man being brought to Jesus. In Luke, the story starts with a group of four men who carry their paralyzed friend to the place where Jesus is teaching, but when they arrive, the crowd is too large for the friends to get into the house, let alone close to Jesus. So, the men decide to get to Jesus by digging a hole in the roof. Doug was graphic as he described how these friends carried the paralyzed man up on the roof of the house and then found the place where Jesus was teaching and began to dig through the roof. He described what it must have been like in the room with the noise from above and the bits of dirt that fell onto the crowd below. He wondered what the house's owner must have been thinking as the men were dismantling his roof.

But eventually, they created a hole large enough to fit the paralyzed man through, and they lowered him through the hole in the roof to Jesus, who healed the paralyzed man. It is a great story that was well told by Doug.

But when Matthew takes up the story, he leaves the house, the roof, and even the crowds out. And a good question to ask is, why? The love that drove the friends to climb up on the roof and cut a hole in the ceiling is a big part of the story. Matthew, why did you leave that out?

The most likely response from Matthew might be that he didn't want the story of the roof and the dirt to steal the focus away from the actual subject of the story: four men brought a man who needed help to Jesus. The focus of the friends was on the man and Jesus. They had faith that Jesus could do something. Jesus's focus is not on the roof but on the man. He sees him and his friends.

I grew up in a church where people were experts in the many names of God. And I have said that I have a favorite name for God, but it is not one of the more popular ones. My favorite name for God is not El-Shaddai, which means God Almighty, or even Jehovah Jireh, which means the God who provides. My favorite name for God comes from the story of Sarah's Egyptian slave, Hagar, running away from Abraham and Sarah. Hagar is pregnant with Abraham's child, but Sarah, whose idea it was for Abraham to sleep with Hagar in the first place, is jealous of her slave and has mistreated her.

Hagar meets with God in the wilderness, and God promises to bless her child. And in response, Hagar calls God by the name "El Roi." It is the only place in the Bible where this name is used, but I love it. El Roi means "the God who sees me."

Jesus fulfills this name as he comes up against the four men carrying the paralyzed man. He sees them, all of them. The Scribes and the religious elite refuse to see them. Their focus is not on the people but on the law and sin. All they can see is that Jesus is doing something they don't believe he can legally do because the first thing that Jesus decides to do is forgive the man for his sins. The Scribes also thought this man was paralyzed because of his sin, and they had no mercy. The paralyzed man was getting what he deserved. Their focus was on sin because that is what they saw. But Jesus saw the man and had mercy on him.

Is it fair to admit that sometimes we share the focus of the Scribes? We miss the person and focus on the sin. We boldly proclaim that God hates sin but loves the person. However, we struggle with putting the idea into practice. Jesus saw the man and his friends, not their sin. Because the Scribes saw the wrong instead of the person, Jesus focused on what the Scribes concentrated on and first forgave the man before him, placing him on equal ground with the Scribes. And in the process, he opened himself up to a charge of blasphemy.

In the manger, when everyone that mattered missed the birth, God saw Jesus and sent the shepherds and the Wiseman because he remains the God who sees.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Matthew 10