The Faith of the Four

The house in Capernaum is full past the doorway. Jesus is teaching. Four men arrive carrying a fifth on a mat, and they cannot get in. Mark 2:1-12 tells what they do next: they climb onto the flat roof, dig through it, and lower their friend down through the hole into the middle of the room. It must have taken time. Dust and bits of thatch would have fallen on the crowd below. Nobody stopped them.

Then comes the line to underline: when Jesus saw their faith. Not his faith, the paralysed man's, though he may well have had it. Their faith. The faith of the four who would not accept that the door was blocked.

We tend to think of faith as an individual transaction between one soul and God, and in a real sense it is. But Scripture is full of people being carried. Moses' arms are held up by Aaron and Hur. Paul is lowered from a wall in a basket. Here a man is lowered through a roof, and the faith that Jesus commends is the faith of his friends.

Some Sundays you walk into church with faith to spare. Other Sundays you are the one on the mat, unable to move, doubting whether it is worth the effort of getting there. On those days it is not weakness to be carried. It is how the body of Christ is meant to work. The people who pray for you when you cannot pray, who keep showing up when you have stopped, who dig through the roof on your behalf, are doing exactly what these four did, and Jesus sees it.

And there is a second turn. You will not always be the one on the mat. Look around your congregation today for the person who has gone quiet, who used to be in the third row and now is not. There is a roof somewhere that needs opening, and it takes more than one pair of hands.