Healing the Paralytic

Plain English Version (PEV)

Mat 9:1–8

1 Jesus was walking along, and 2 blind men followed him. They kept on shouting to him, “You belong to David’s family, so you are the one God promised to send. Please, be sorry for us.”
2 Jesus went into a house, and the blind men came to him. He asked them, “Do you believe that I can make your eyes good, so you will see again?” The men said, “Yes, Sir, we believe that you can do that.”
3 Then Jesus touched the men’s eyes and he said, “You believed in me, so you will see again.”
4 Then straight away those men could see again. Jesus told them strongly, “Don’t tell anybody about this.”
5 But they went away and told everybody in that country that Jesus made their eyes better.
6 Jesus and his followers got up and started to walk along the road. Then some people brought a man to Jesus that had a bad spirit living inside him, so he couldn’t talk.
7 Jesus said to that bad spirit, “Get out of this man.” Then the bad spirit went out of that man, and he started to talk. Everybody there was very surprised. They said, “Nothing like this ever happened before in our country, called Israel.”
8 Jesus said to his followers, “Lots of people need to hear about me. They are ready to listen, but nobody is telling them. They are like a big crop of food plants on a farm that are ready for the workers to get their seeds for food. But there are only a few workers. The farmer needs a lot of workers to bring all those seeds into the shed, and in the same way I need a lot of workers to tell people about me, and bring them to God.

Mrk 2:1–12

1 Some time later, Jesus went back to the town called Capernaum. The people heard that Jesus was home again,
2 so they all went to see him. Soon the house was too full and there was a big mob outside too.
3 While Jesus was inside, teaching the people God’s story, some men came to the house with a crippled man on a swag. They wanted to get that man close to Jesus, so that Jesus could make him better.
4 But those men found a lot of people blocking the house. So they carried the sick man up on to the flat roof of the house and made a hole in it. Then they picked up the sick man on his swag and put him down through the hole to where Jesus was.
5 Jesus saw them do this, and so he knew that they really trusted him. Then Jesus said to the crippled man, “You know all the bad things you did? I will make you not guilty of them, and God will not punish you.”
6 But some of the Jewish law men didn’t like Jesus saying that. These law men were thinking,
7 “Hey, he can’t say that. Only God can talk that way. This man is talking like he is God. He can’t talk like that. He is shaming God.”
8 Straight away, Jesus knew what the Jewish law men were thinking, so he said, “You are thinking the wrong way. I might say to this man, ‘You did bad things, but I will make you not guilty of them.’ Or I might say to him, ‘Get up, pick up your swag and go home.’ I can do both of these things.
9 I will show you that I’m the boss over sickness, and God also said I can make people like they are not guilty, so that God will not punish them. I’m God’s special man from heaven, and I have the power to say these things, and I have the power to do these things.” Then Jesus looked at the crippled man and said,
10 “Come on, get up, pick up your swag and go home.”
11 Straight away, that man got up, rolled up his swag in front of all the people, walked out of the house and went home. Everybody there saw him do it and they got a big surprise. They started talking about it. They praised God, telling him he is really good. They said, “We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
12 After this Jesus left the house and walked along next to the lake. The people from the town kept coming to him, so he kept teaching them.