Our text for Sunday reveals Jesus asserting to a paralytic man, “your sins are forgiven,” which carried deep connotations for Mark’s original audience. Commenting on this event, Ched Myers states:

“In choosing to introduce the language of the debt code, Jesus is elaborating the symbolics of hierarchy. The man’s lack of bodily wholeness would have been attributed to either his own sin, or, if a birth defect, inherited sin; he was thus denied full status in the body politic of Israel. Jesus summarily releases him from all debt – hence restoring his social wholeness and thus his personhood, which in turn is equated with the restoration of physical wholeness. The man walks, and the crowd glorifies God: the “body” (physical/social) has been restored (2:12). Once again, the crowd is amazed (cf. 1:27) that Jesus has out-duelled the scribes.

The scribes are incensed, and for good reason. Their complaint that none but God can remit debt (2:7b) is not a defense of the sovereignty of Yahweh, but of their own social power. As Torah interpreters and co-stewards of the symbolic order, they control determinations of indebtedness. But as Jesus did with the priestly prerogative, he has also expropriated this function. Faced with this threat, the scribes accuse Jesus in the strongest possible language: “He blasphemes!” (2:7a). This will ultimately be the charge for which Jesus is condemned to death at the end of the story (14:64). Though here it is not yet pressed, it is no accident that the next time the scribal authorities appear it is in the person of government investigators from Jerusalem (3:22).”

- Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, 155