We Have Seen Strange Things Today! Series

We have seen strange things today

(Disclosure: This message is based on a sermon I preached at New Hope Baptist Church near Fulton, MO, on February 2, 2025; not an exact transcription.)

Introduction: This story is one that’s told by both Matthew and Mark, as well as Luke. The main points are the same even though some of the wording is different. That’s to be expected when different writers look at the same event from different angles or perspectives.

All of the writers agree, though, that there was a very sick man who had some very good friends who did what they could for him, even tearing open the roof so they could get their sick friend in sight of the Great Physician!

1 The Multitude, Listening

Text: Luke 5:17, KJV: 17 And it came to pass on a certain day, as he was teaching, that there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every town of Galilee, and Judaea, and Jerusalem: and the power of the Lord was present to heal them

Jesus was in Capernaum, according to Mark 2:1, when this event took place. Earlier, He had asked Simon Peter to launch his boat a little way from the shore so He could teach the people who had come to hear Him. Afterwards, the Lord rewarded Peter by telling him to head for deep water in order to find a good catch. It was a good catch, all right, because there were so many fish in the nets that the nets began to break and the boats (Peter somehow got the attention of one or more other boats) had begun to sink! When they got back to land, Peter and others left everything to follow Jesus (Luke 5:1-11).

After this, Luke relates how Jesus healed a man “full of leprosy”—one wonders how bad of a case that man really had—and then He went into the wilderness to pray (5:12-16). Then He went into Capernaum, teaching and preaching (Mark 2:2), to a crowd so large that some couldn’t even get near the door to the house!

I’ve sometimes wondered what type of tone, pitch, accent, and so on the Lord used when He spoke. Whether He spoke in a tenor or higher-pitched male voice, or had a deeper baritone or lower-pitched voice, it was enough for the officers sent to arrest Him to say, “No man ever spoke like this Man (John 7:46, my paraphrase)!”

Without spending too much time on the Lord’s vocal qualities (and there must have been plenty!), the main point is that _how_ Jesus spoke backed up and verified _what_ He spoke. Nothing false or questionable in what Jesus said and had to say.

No doubt the crowd who were standing by the house where this took place wanted to hear every word Jesus spoke. The problem, though, was that our Lord was not only involved in the ministry of teaching and preaching, but also healing, and that very crowd who wanted to hear were now standing in the way of someone who needed to be healed.

2 The Man, Suffering

Text, Luke 5:18-19, KJV: 18 And, behold, men brought in a bed a man which was taken with a palsy: and they sought means to bring him in, and to lay him before him. 19 And when they could not find by what way they might bring him in because of the multitude, they went upon the housetop, and let him down through the tiling with his couch into the midst before Jesus.

In the crowd, there were four men who desperately wanted their mutual friend to be healed of “the palsy” as Luke puts it. Dr. A. T. Robertson observed that what is translated “palsy” here in the King James Version is more like paralysis (this is found online in his ‘Word Pictures in the Greek New Testament at https://godrules.net/library/robert/robertluk5.htm). This paralytic had to be carried on a “couch” or “pallet (Robertson, as above)” and I’m sure he was grateful for these friends who took him where he needed to go.

The problem here is that these five men could not get anywhere near Jesus! Mark explained in Mark 2:2 that these men couldn’t even get to the door because there were so many people. This had to leave the four men, who were able to walk, with a difficult choice: turn around and leave, hoping to meet Jesus another day; or, wait until they could get inside the house; or, well, what other choice did they have? They knew none of these four could heal much of anything, let alone a man who was paralyzed. What now?

The answer was as simple, and it dealt with how the houses were constructed back then. Generally they were built of stone with either an upper room or chamber. To reach that upper room, it was as easy as walking up a staircase. Then, since the roofs were made of tiles, it was relatively easy to pull up a few of these (the roofs generally were flat!) and there was an opening, a hole in the roof, large enough for these men to lower their sick friend down to where Jesus was preaching and teaching. After all, once the first tile or two were taken up, it would have been easy to see where Jesus was and direct their sick friend in that direction.