The Crowd Who Had No Clothes

The story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man brings up something I’d never considered before: Jesus comes for the invisible and the overlooked, but the paralyzed man was visibly disabled and in need. As a high-functioning grad student, I’m noticed all the time, but my needs aren’t. People with disabilities are often overlooked, but their needs are visible in ways mine aren’t. When the paralyzed man came through the roof to Jesus, so many people overlooked him. He was right there! Isn’t that interesting?

Jesus healed a paralyzed man who was overlooked by an entire crowd of folks coming to study the Scriptures. They came to hear from a religious teacher, and yet by ignoring the paralyzed man, they were ignoring a clear scriptural command to help the needy among them. They weren’t being deliberately cruel or antagonistic, but the paralyzed man was still ignored. How does that happen? What does it mean?

When Jesus wanted to unpack a serious topic, he often turned to parables and fables to illustrate the point. Story-telling as a way of exploring truth is as old as the sun, and it’s one of my favorite writing devices. To show how crowds of people can make themselves fools, let’s revisit the old fable of The Emperor Who Had No Clothes.

In this fable, an emperor is obsessed with clothes and constantly commissions new outfits. He loves to go on parades and show them off. A crafty seamstress tells the emperor she has a magic cloth that only the intelligent can see and feel, and she has made him an outfit. Of course, she’s draping nothing over him, but the emperor doesn’t want to seem like a fool, so he pretends to be able to see it. And when he goes out on the parade, everyone in the crowd watching pretends to see the clothes too because they don’t want to admit they don’t see it, because that would mean they’re acting foolish, too.

In the crowd, everyone would rather go along with the lie (the emperor has on clothes) than face the truth (he doesn’t) and potentially be ridiculed, embarrassed, or shamed. It’s a whole lot easier to go along with what everyone else is doing rather than face their own vulnerabilities in front of a crowd.

The emperor keeps parading in front of the cheering crowd, but then a little boy cries out, “The emperor has no clothes on!” After a moment of silence, everyone bursts out laughing because it’s true, and it took a little boy to get them to face their fear and admit to the truth.

In a similar way, Jesus points out the obvious to us and gets us to admit that we might be lying to ourselves about the world around us.

We tend to ignore people who remind us of our own brokenness and powerlessness, even when they’re right in front of us.

It’s often not a conscious choice. We just don’t want to be uncomfortable, like the crowd in the fable who didn’t want to be seen as foolish.

Now, here’s where I put a spotlight on the comparison between the fable and the paralyzed man.

In both stories, the crowd overlooks what’s happening in order to avoid the uncomfortable vulnerability that comes with truth.

Stick with me. In the fable, the crowd goes along with the emperor, who is visibly making a fool of himself. However, in the story of the paralyzed man, the crowd overlooks the man, who visibly needs help and community. The crowd is making a fool of themselves in both stories.

The crowd has shown up for teaching from a Biblical scholar and yet doesn’t live out the Bible’s teachings. It’s not like they’re throwing stones or tomatoes at the paralyzed man; they’re simply looking right over him. Broken people remind us of our own brokenness, and it makes us uncomfortable.

The crowd passively decides to pretend something is real on a large scale because it’s easier. Look at other examples of this from the Bible: there was no room for Mary and Joesph in the inn, even though she was hours away from giving birth. The people of Bethlehem ignored Ruth, though she was a foreigner and needed compassion. The crowds in these stories know what the scriptures teach about how to care for people in these situations, yet they aren’t doing it.

God seems to delight in using people who are visibly in need to teach us how to love each other.

It breaks us out of the lie we live in and forces us to really look at one another.

And Jesus thrives here. He uses the paralyzed, overlooked man, like Mary or Ruth, and teaches the crowd how to love. Like the little boy in the fable, Jesus is leading the crowd into a different and more truthful behavior.

Jesus, like the little boy in the fable, tells the truth. Unlike the little boy, Jesus offers a radical and transformational love that changes everything. He forgives the paralyzed man who had very visible needs and healed him, showing the crowd how they had failed to help him. The paralyzed man’s visible needs were the very things that made him invisible to his community! I am certainly not excusing the crowd, (in fact, in this story, I am aligned with the crowd) when I say that they had all kinds of reasons to passively ignore the visibly in need. They could have been busy, uncomfortable, inconvenienced, and unsure of what, exactly, to do.

What all these reasons not to help have in common is this: they aren’t good enough reasons for Jesus.

His transformational love goes beyond reason.

Jesus could have helped many different people in that crowd. There might have been people who had jobs and houses and families but were still suffering. People with working legs who struggled invisibly. People with invisible illnesses or abusive relationships or demons or debt. But Jesus chose to heal an overlooked man with a very visible disability in front of everyone. I could write a dozen blog posts about this story from the angle of the man’s faith, or his friends’ faith, or through the lens of disability or sin or class. But I’m most interested in how everyone in that crowd ignored that paralyzed man. That’s a lot of people, and Jesus didn’t stand for it.

With his transformation love, Jesus broke the lie that the crowd had agreed to tell. “Look at this,” Jesus might as well have said. “You’re ignoring the needy among you. You can all see he can’t walk, and you did nothing.”

Jesus comes for the invisible and the overlooked, even when the overlooked are visibly invisible. He breaks a society’s collective lies and brings people into the goodness and light of his love. If there’s one takeaway from this story, it would be this:

Jesus’ transformational love breaks the lies in our lives that are too hard to step away from on our own.

By walking in the direction that Jesus is walking in, we can leave the lies behind and see the truth for what it is. The emperor has no clothes on. Jesus’ transformational love is better than any kind of ignorance we wrap around us, and that love looks like friendship with people who call out in the crowd, “The emperor has no clothes on!” and “I’ve come to seek help from Jesus!”

Friendship with people who live with disabilities connects us to the reality that, yes, this life is broken, and yes, we don’t have as much power as we’d like, but Jesus is in control. And his kind of love brings us together in ways we would never manage on our own.

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