Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 85 · March 26
Their Faith
“When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.”
Four men broke somebody's roof and Jesus called it faith.
That is the sequence in Capernaum. The house is full, the door is blocked, and four men carrying a paralysed friend go up the outside stair, dig through a roof of mud and thatch and beams, and lower him on his mat into a room they cannot get into themselves. When Jesus saw their faith. Saw it, because it had taken the shape of a hole somebody was going to have to repair. Two kinds of reader are in that scene, and only one of them is doing anything.
If you are one of the four, the faith being credited here is the kind visible from the ground. Nobody asked those men for a statement of belief. They turned up with a stretcher and made a mess.
If you are the one on the mat, the text says nothing whatever about your believing. You are carried in on other people's conviction and it turns out to be enough for the room. Some seasons run that way and they are not disqualifying.
Then the gift arrives, and nobody in the party had come for it. Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. Four men went through a roof for a pair of working legs and he starts somewhere else entirely, on a need that had not been mentioned, in front of scribes who understood at once what was being claimed.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 85 is For Such a Time (Esther 4:14).