NOTES for Mar 2:1-12
One of the hardest things in spiritual life is faith in God's action in our everyday life. The scribes who did not believe that Jesus could forgive sins were not atheists. They believed that God, in principle, could forgive, but how is this reflected in real life? For them God is invisible and inaccessible. His forgiveness has no effect on visible reality. With this approach, God turns into an abstraction. But the Lord Jesus turns their abstract faith in forgiveness into a sign, a sign of God's power acting in this world. He does what the more practical friends of the paralytic hoped for: He grants him not only forgiveness that is "spiritual, somewhere up there in heaven," but real, effective forgiveness that turns his life around.