NOTES for Mar 2:1-12
Healing and the forgiveness of sin are connected things. That is not surprising: illness is a consequence of sinfulness. Of course, it is pointless to look for any specific connections between particular illnesses and particular sins corresponding to them. There are no such connections. There is something else: the incompleteness of life caused by the fall into sin and its consequences.
It is this incompleteness that gives rise to illnesses, in the end making fallen humanity mortal. After all, inevitable death from old age is also a kind of illness, and an absolutely incurable one, at least within the order of things that exists in the fallen world. Jesus, however, brings not mere treatment, but healing.
This is not the restoration of that relative health described by the familiar medical formula "practically healthy," but the return of a person to the fullness of life that was given to him from the beginning. Of course, in itself this does not yet mean that the healed person immediately becomes a resident of the Kingdom. To become one, a person must travel a long road, the road of spiritual and then physical transformation, which is usually completed beyond the limits of earthly life. But everyone healed by the Savior shares in the Kingdom and receives the greatest fullness of life available to him in his present state.
How much of the fullness he has received he can keep is a question for the person himself. The same is true of the question of how well he can preserve the freedom from sin that he receives at the moment of healing. And he surely receives it, because in the Kingdom, in whose life the healed person shares, there is no place for sin. This is a sharing in new life, a new start, a clean slate. What follows depends on the person himself: on his later life, on how truly new it will be.