24 Life-Changing Lessons from Mark 2: Applying Mark 2 to Your Daily Life

Nearness to Jesus and reaching Him are two different things. In Mark 2 the house is packed with people who came to be close to Him, and the man who needs Him most cannot get through the door.

These lessons from Mark 2 are for anyone who has felt that gap. The believer who has been carrying someone to God for years and seeing nothing. The man whose past feels like a locked door. The long-time church member who still has all the right answers and cannot remember the last time his heart moved.

The chapter forces a verdict. Jesus makes claims here that a good teacher has no business making, and every person in that room, including the one reading this, has to decide what to do with them.

Brief Summary of Mark 2

Mark 2 moves through four scenes in and around Capernaum. Jesus is preaching in a crowded house when four men lower a paralysed man through the roof. Jesus forgives the man’s sins, the scribes accuse Him of blasphemy, and He heals the man to prove His authority. He then calls Levi from the tax booth and eats at his table with publicans and sinners.

The Pharisees challenge the company He keeps, question why His disciples do not fast, and finally accuse them of breaking the sabbath in the grainfields. One issue runs under all four scenes: the authority of Jesus, and whether He truly has it.

Lesson 1: Christ Gave the Word to a Crowd That Came for a Miracle (Mark 2:2)

Mark 2:2: “And straightway many were gathered together, insomuch that there was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door: and he preached the word unto them.” (KJV)

Word had spread that Jesus was back in the house at Capernaum, and the town emptied itself into that one doorway. They had heard what His hands could do in that region, and they came for the sight of it.

He preached to them.

Mark tells us plainly what Jesus did with a room full of people who wanted a wonder. He gave them the word. The healing came later, and it came as evidence for something He had already said, not as the main event. Christ never treats preaching as the warm-up act before the real power arrives. The word is the power.

Read also: The Book of Mark Summary by Chapter 1 to 16

Ask yourself what you are actually hungry for on a Sunday. Most of us can say whether a service felt strong, and far fewer of us could repeat one sentence of what was preached in it. We rate the atmosphere and forget the message. Jesus filled that house with the word because the word was the greater gift, and a believer who learns to prize it has learned to prize what Christ Himself put first.

Lesson 2: A Crowd Around Jesus Can Still Block a Man From Reaching Him (Mark 2:2, 4)

Mark 2:4: “And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was…” (KJV)

You can be surrounded by people who genuinely love Jesus and still find the door shut. That is what happened in Capernaum. Nobody in that doorway was an enemy. They were the interested, the curious, the hungry, the ones who wanted to be near Him, and together they became the wall a dying man could not get past.

That is a hard thing about church life. A room can be full of people who love Christ and still be closed to the person outside it. Nobody plans it.

The crowd is absorbed in its own view of Him, standing where it has always stood, and it never turns around to see who is on the stretcher behind it. Jesus is in the house, and the man who needs Him is stuck in the yard.

Paul told the Philippians to look “not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others” (Philippians 2:4). That is the cure for a blocked doorway, and it costs nothing but attention.

Look at your own church, your own small group, your own row on a Sunday morning. Who is standing at the edge of it, and would anybody notice if they stopped coming?

Lesson 3: Your Faith Can Carry Someone Who Cannot Walk to Jesus (Mark 2:3, 5)

Mark 2:3, 5: “And they come unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was borne of four… When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” (KJV)

Four men carried a man who could not carry himself. They did the walking, they took the weight, and when Christ acted, Mark says He acted because He saw their faith.

Be careful how far you take that. Scripture never teaches that one man’s faith saves another. The paralysed man consented to the ride, let himself be lowered into that room, and heard Christ’s word with his own ears. What the verse does teach is that God honours the faith of people who refuse to leave someone stranded. Their believing did not replace his. It brought him where his own legs never could.

Somebody in your life cannot get to Jesus on their own strength right now. A grown child who has stopped praying. A friend who says he is fine and is not. A parent who will not discuss it.

Pick a name, and start carrying: the call you make every week, the meal, the ride to church, the prayer that has gone unanswered for eleven years and gets prayed again tonight.

Lesson 4: When the Door Is Blocked, Faith Digs Through the Roof (Mark 2:4)

Mark 2:4: “…they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay.” (KJV)

What do you do when the ordinary way in is closed?

These men went up the stairs. Houses in that part of Galilee were built with flat roofs of beams packed with clay and branches, reachable from outside, which is how four men could get a stretcher up there and dig through.

The digging cost them something, though, and it cost somebody else more. The roof was not theirs. They tore a hole in another man’s house, dust and clay fell on the heads of everyone below, and Jesus never said a word of rebuke about it.

Faith that gets people to Christ is often inconvenient to somebody. It disturbs the meeting. It makes a mess in a room that was running smoothly. Four men decided that a soul was worth more than a tidy ceiling, and heaven agreed with them.

Most of us give up at the crowd. We call once, get no answer, and tell ourselves we tried. The men in this chapter looked at a closed door and started climbing.

Lesson 5: Christ Calls You Family Before He Fixes Your Life (Mark 2:5)

Mark 2:5: “…he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” (KJV)

The first word out of His mouth to a paralysed stranger is “Son.”

A man is lying in the dust of a broken ceiling, unable to do a thing for himself, and Jesus speaks to him as family. Before the healing. Before the argument with the scribes is settled. Before this man has served, given, obeyed, or proved anything at all. He is called a son while he is still on the mat.

Everything the gospel says about adoption is sitting in that one word. John writes that to as many as received Him, “to them gave he power to become the sons of God” (John 1:12), and here is Christ handing that name to a man with nothing to offer in exchange for it.

Read also: How to Accept God’s Forgiveness and Forgive Yourself

You will spend your life tempted to believe that God will accept you once the paralysis clears. Once the habit dies. Once the anger cools. Once you finally feel like a real Christian.

He calls you His before the fix. That is the order in Mark 2, and it has never changed.

Lesson 6: Christ Goes First to the Need You Never Mentioned (Mark 2:5)

Mark 2:5: “When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” (KJV)

You come to God with the need you can name, and He answers a need you never mentioned. Five men made that trip for one reason. They wanted legs. Jesus dealt first with the man’s sin.

Be clear about what this does not mean. Christ is not saying that this man’s paralysis was punishment for his own sin. When the disciples assumed that about a man born blind, Jesus told them plainly that neither the man nor his parents had sinned to cause it (John 9:3). Sin is the reason there is any sickness or death in the world at all, and that is a different claim from tracing one man’s illness to one man’s failure.

What Jesus is saying is that this man had a wound deeper than the one that put him on the stretcher, and He went for it first.

The diagnosis, the debt, the person in your family who will not speak to you: whatever you brought Him, He hears it, and He is not dismissing any of it. He also sees the thing underneath it that you have stopped bringing up. Would you still call Him good if He healed the deeper wound first and left the visible one a while longer?

Lesson 7: Right Doctrine Can Still Reach the Wrong Verdict About Jesus (Mark 2:6-7)

Mark 2:7: “Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?” (KJV)

The scribes were right, and that is what makes this so uncomfortable. Forgiveness of sins does belong to God alone, and Isaiah puts the claim in God’s own mouth: “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake” (Isaiah 43:25). Their theology was sound.

From a correct premise they reached a murderous conclusion. They began with a true doctrine and ended by calling the Son of God a blasphemer, and within a few verses they are watching other men’s hands in a cornfield to see what else they can charge Him with.

Sound belief did not protect them from a hard heart. It gave the hard heart better arguments.

There are believers who have sat in church for thirty years, who can defend every doctrine they hold, and who have not been moved by Jesus in a decade. The knowledge stayed. The love went somewhere else.

If you know more about God than you did five years ago and love Him less, something has gone wrong that more study will not repair. What has your right theology been used to justify lately?

Lesson 8: Christ Answers the Argument You Never Say Out Loud (Mark 2:8)

Mark 2:8: “And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts?” (KJV)

Most of us carry an argument with God we have never said out loud. The prayer He did not answer. The loss that still makes no sense. The resentment you would never bring to a prayer meeting because it would sound faithless.

The scribes had said nothing aloud either. Their accusation sat behind their faces, and Jesus answered it as though they had shouted it across the room. Twice in this scene He reads what is inside a person: the faith of four men on a roof, and the objection of the men sitting comfortably in front of Him. The same eyes do both.

Jeremiah said it of the LORD long before: “I the LORD search the heart” (Jeremiah 17:10). Here that searching walks into a house in Capernaum with a human face.

He already knows your argument, word for word, and He came into the room anyway. The quarrel you are hiding from Him is the one He is waiting to have with you.

Lesson 9: Jesus Proved His Authority Where Everyone Could See It (Mark 2:9-11)

Mark 2:10-11: “But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.” (KJV)

Anybody can say “thy sins be forgiven thee.” Nobody in that house could check it. So Jesus staked the invisible claim on a visible test: a man everyone in town knew could not walk would walk, immediately, in front of them.

He did not ask them to take His word for it. He handed them evidence they could measure, in a packed room, where a failure would have finished Him. Faith in Christ has never been a leap into the dark. It rests on things that happened in daylight, in public, in front of hostile witnesses.

Read also: 10 Reasons to Have Faith in God

That matters when your faith goes dark. Feelings drain away, prayers hit the ceiling, and the whole thing can start to feel like something you talked yourself into. On those days you are not asked to manufacture certainty out of nothing. You are asked to remember that the One who told you your sins were forgiven backed His word in front of a room that wanted Him wrong, and He has not changed since.

Lesson 10: Obey the Command You Cannot Yet Carry Out (Mark 2:11-12)

Mark 2:11-12: “I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house. And immediately he arose, took up the bed…” (KJV)

What do you do with a command you have no strength to obey?

That is exactly the position the paralysed man was in. The one thing he could not do was get up, and getting up is what he was told to do. He had no power in his legs and no evidence that anything had changed. He had a word from Christ and a decision to make about it, and the strength arrived in the moving, not before it. The healing met him in the middle of his obedience.

God often works this way. The forgiveness you owe somebody is beyond you until you pick up the phone. The confession you cannot face is impossible until you say the first sentence of it. You keep waiting to feel able, and the ability was never going to arrive while you lay still.

Whatever He has told you to do that you have no strength for, take the first inch of it today and let Him supply the rest of the distance.

Lesson 11: He Carried Home the Bed That Once Carried Him (Mark 2:12)

Mark 2:12: “And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went forth before them all…” (KJV)

He walked out of that house with the mat on his shoulder. The same mat four men had sweated under. The proof of his helplessness, folded up now and carried by the man it used to carry.

Jesus could have told him to leave it there. Instead the thing that testified to his ruin became the thing that testified to his healing, and the whole town watched him walk it home. God is not embarrassed by your history.

The marriage that nearly ended, the years you wasted, the addiction that owned you, the season of depression that flattened you: He does not ask you to bury any of it. He redeems it, until the weight that pinned you down becomes the story that shows what Christ can do.

The bed went home with him, not hidden, not burned, but carried in daylight in front of everyone who had watched him come in.

Lesson 12: Being Amazed by Jesus Is Not the Same as Following Him (Mark 2:12)

Mark 2:12: “…insomuch that they were all amazed, and glorified God, saying, We never saw it on this fashion.” (KJV)

You can be moved by Jesus and surrender nothing to Him. That is the whole story of the crowd in this house.

They gave the best response religion can produce without repentance. They were impressed, they praised God, and their verdict was that they had never seen anything like it. Mark records no confession of sin, no follower gained, nobody who went home different. The religious men in that same room were plotting His death within a few verses (Mark 3:6).

Wonder is not surrender. A sermon can stir you, worship can move you, a testimony can undo you, and you can still walk out having handed over nothing at all. The emotion feels like devotion, so we let it pass for devotion, and the years go by with the heart untouched.

Amazement asks nothing of you. Christ asks for everything, and He is worth it.

When did being moved by Jesus last cost you something you did not want to give?

Lesson 13: Christ Calls You in the Middle of the Life You Are Ashamed Of (Mark 2:14)

Mark 2:14: “And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the receipt of custom, and said unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him.” (KJV)

Jesus called him at the booth. Mid-shift, hands on the money, in the middle of the job everybody hated him for.

Tax collectors in that system bought the right to collect Rome’s revenue and kept whatever they squeezed above the quota, which is why they were counted as traitors and thieves in their own towns. Levi was not a promising candidate.

He was a collaborator with the occupying power. Christ walked past his table and said “Follow me” without one word about cleaning up first. Matthew’s Gospel tells us this same man is Matthew (Matthew 9:9), who would go on to write a Gospel.

Read also: Am I Beyond Repentance?

There is no waiting period built into this call. He does not stand outside your life until the shameful part of it is over. He comes to the booth.

Whatever you would not want read aloud about your past or your present, Christ already knows it, and He is still standing at your table saying the same two words.

Lesson 14: Following Christ Will Cost You a Seat You Cannot Get Back (Mark 2:14)

Mark 2:14: “…Follow me. And he arose and followed him.” (KJV)

Peter could always go back to fishing. The boats were still there, the nets still hung in the shed, and later he did go back for a night.

Levi could not. A publican who walked away from his contract was finished. The booth would be handed to another man within days, and no synagogue was waiting to receive him. When he stood up from that table, he burned the only living he had. Mark gives him no negotiation, no request to settle the accounts first, no season of thinking it over. He arose and followed.

Obedience that costs nothing is rarely the obedience Christ asks for. The relationship you end. The money you hand back. The promotion you turn down because of what it would take from your family and your soul.

What are you still sitting at, only because you know the seat would be gone if you stood up?

Lesson 15: Your Old Table Is Your First Mission Field (Mark 2:15)

Mark 2:15: “And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him.” (KJV)

Your first mission field is usually the table you were already sitting at. Levi’s first recorded act as a disciple was not a sermon. It was a dinner party.

He filled his house with the only people he knew, which happened to be a room full of publicans and sinners, and he put Jesus in the middle of the table.

A preacher in Israel could have knocked on those doors for a year and never got that crowd into one room. Levi did it with an invitation, because they were his friends, and his access was worth more than any strategy the religious establishment could have designed.

We often do the reverse. Someone comes to Christ and we pull them out of every old relationship they have, into a schedule so full of church that within a year the only people they know are Christians, and the room they came from has nobody left in it.

If you are new in Christ, do not empty your table. Set a place at it for Him, and let the people who knew the old you watch what He is doing with the new one.

Lesson 16: When They Cannot Touch Christ, They Will Question His People (Mark 2:16)

Mark 2:16: “And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?” (KJV)

Why did they take it to the disciples? Jesus was in the room. He was at the table, well within earshot, and the complaint about Him was carried to the men who followed Him.

That is usually how it comes. Anyone who follows Christ into rooms the respectable avoid gets asked to account for Him: why your church takes those people in, why you still eat with that friend, why you have kept the friendship at all. The pressure lands on you, and it is designed to make you drop the people Jesus is reaching so the questions will stop.

The disciples leave the question hanging. Jesus answers it Himself in the very next verse, and His answer defends them completely.

You are not required to justify the mercy of God to people who dislike where it is going, and you are not the one it has to be explained to. Stay at the table, keep the friendship, and let Him speak for it.

Lesson 17: Only Those Who Admit They Are Sick Send for the Physician (Mark 2:17)

Mark 2:17: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (KJV)

Jesus does not argue with the Pharisees about who is in the room. He agrees with their diagnosis and turns it into an invitation they refuse to accept.

They were right that the house was full of sinners. What they missed was that their own certainty of being well was the one thing holding them outside the mercy of Christ. A physician is useless to a man who believes he is healthy. In the kingdom of God the disqualifying condition is the pretence of health.

Read also: Why Do I Keep Sinning the Same Sin?

Church is one of the easiest places on earth to perfect that pretence. You learn the language, you answer “fine” for years, and the sin you would have to name in order to be healed of it goes on being managed instead of confessed.

What are you still calling a weakness, a personality trait, or a rough patch, that you have never once brought to Christ as a sickness?

Lesson 18: Christ Receives You as You Are and Calls You to Turn (Mark 2:17)

Mark 2:17: “…I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (KJV)

Most people stop reading that verse three words early.

He calls sinners. That is the glory of it, and nobody who has grasped it ever gets over it. There is no entrance exam, no probation, no clean-up required before Christ will sit at your table. And He calls them to repentance.

He does not leave them where He found them, and He never pretended He would. Paul asks the obvious question and answers it in the same breath: “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid” (Romans 6:1-2).

Hold both halves or you lose the gospel. Drop the second and grace becomes permission, a Christ who came to reassure you about the very things that are killing you. Drop the first and you are back with the Pharisees, waiting until you are well enough to be welcome.

The Physician takes you exactly as you are, and the Physician fully intends to change you. Those were never two different offers.

Lesson 19: Jesus Is the Bridegroom, and Joy Is the Right Response to Him (Mark 2:18-19)

Mark 2:19: “Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them? as long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.” (KJV)

Who asked the fasting question? Not only the Pharisees. John’s own disciples came too, and these were sincere men, disciplined men, taught by the greatest prophet of that generation.

They still got it wrong, because they measured another man’s walk by their own practice and never asked what hour it was. Jesus answers by calling Himself the bridegroom, the name John the Baptist had already given Him (John 3:29). You do not fast at a wedding. The presence of Christ made mourning the wrong response, and a discipline kept at the wrong hour had stopped being obedience and turned into a yardstick.

We still hand that yardstick around. The believer who prays at five in the morning wonders about the one who does not. The one who fasts twice a month sizes up the one who never has. A discipline that has become the measure of everybody else’s holiness has already lost its way.

Lesson 20: The Bridegroom Said He Would Be Taken Away (Mark 2:20)

Mark 2:20: “But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days.” (KJV)

He is defending a party when He says it, and that is what makes the sentence land so hard.

In the middle of explaining why His men are feasting, Jesus tells them a day is coming when He will be torn away from them, and then the fasting will make sense. Mark leaves the meaning unexplained. The words themselves point where the whole Gospel is heading, and being taken away is the language of force, of a man seized rather than a man departing on his own terms. The shadow of the cross has fallen across the wedding.

Read also: 10 Importance of Fasting and Prayer

“Then shall they fast in those days” is not a prediction the church has outgrown. Those are the days we live in. The bridegroom has gone to the Father, and He has not yet come back for His bride. Fasting is what longing looks like when it puts down its fork.

If you have never fasted, the reason may not be your theology. It may be that you have grown comfortable in the absence of Christ.

Lesson 21: The Gospel Is Not a Patch on Your Old Life (Mark 2:21-22)

Mark 2:22: “And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.” (KJV)

You cannot sew Christ onto the edge of the life you already had and expect the seam to hold.

The picture comes from the kitchen. Wine that is still working gives off gas, and a fresh skin has enough give left to stretch with it, while a skin that has already stretched and hardened will split and lose everything inside it. Christ is saying that what He brings cannot be carried in the old container. We usually aim this at institutions and church programmes. He aimed it at people who wanted His power without letting go of their system.

Matthew Henry saw something here that most readers walk past. The parable also shows God’s patience with young believers, who are not to be loaded with heavy burdens before they are strong enough to carry them. Christ handles new skins with care.

Look at your own hardened places, the habits of thought and comfort you have never let Him near, and ask whether they are the reason so much of what He pours keeps ending up on the floor.

Lesson 22: Answer Accusation the Way Jesus Did, from the Scriptures (Mark 2:25-26)

Mark 2:25: “And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him?” (KJV)

Accused of breaking the sabbath, Jesus does not appeal to His feelings, to the hunger of His men, or even, at first, to His own authority. He goes to the text and asks Bible men whether they have read their Bible.

The disciples were not stealing. The law allowed a traveller to pluck grain by hand from a neighbour’s field (Deuteronomy 23:25). What the Pharisees objected to was a man-made definition of reaping that turned a hungry walk into a crime. So Jesus reaches for the account of David and the shewbread, where a real human need was met with holy bread the law had reserved for the priests, and God did not strike him down for it.

This is how a believer stands under accusation, whether it comes from a legalist in the church or from the voice in your own head at two in the morning. Feelings will not settle it. Argument will not settle it.

Go and find out what is written, and answer from there.

Lesson 23: Rest Is a Gift God Gave You, Not a Burden He Laid on You (Mark 2:27)

Mark 2:27: “And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.” (KJV)

Some of us cannot rest without feeling guilty about it. There is always another job, another message, another person who needs something, and stopping feels like laziness dressed up as devotion.

Jesus states the purpose of the day God set apart. It was made for man, given as a mercy to creatures who wear out, and the Pharisees had turned the gift into a test the giver never intended. He upholds the fourth commandment here and tells them plainly what it was for.

Christians differ, sincerely and in good conscience, about how the sabbath command applies to the church today, and this article leaves that question where the text leaves it. What Mark 2:27 settles is the heart behind the day. God gives rest as a gift, and He watches you take it the way a father watches a tired child finally sleep.

The God who built a day of rest into the world understands the body He gave you.

Lesson 24: Jesus Is Lord of the Sabbath, and That Claim Holds the Chapter Together (Mark 2:28)

Mark 2:28: “Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.” (KJV)

Everything in this chapter has been building to this sentence.

He began by forgiving sins, which the scribes rightly said only God can do. He ends by claiming ownership of the day God Himself set apart at creation. Along the way He has taken the title Son of man, the figure Daniel saw receiving an everlasting dominion from the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:13-14).

A rabbi debating the finer points of sabbath law does not talk like this. The Lord of the sabbath is telling the men who policed it that they are standing in front of its owner.

They understood Him perfectly, which is why the next thing they do is take counsel how they might destroy Him (Mark 3:6).

Every lesson in this chapter rests on whether that claim is true. If it is false, the forgiveness means nothing and the healing was a trick.

If it is true, then the authority that walked into that crowded house owns the argument you are having with Him, the past you are ashamed of, the discipline you are proud of, and the rest you will not allow yourself.

He is Lord of all of it. The only question left is what you will do about it.

Key Themes in the Lessons from Mark 2

• The authority of Christ over sin, over the law, and over the day of rest
• Faith that acts, and the people it carries to Jesus
• Grace that reaches the disqualified and calls them to repentance
• The new life Christ brings, which cannot be patched onto the old
• Right doctrine held with a hard heart

Frequently Asked Questions About Mark 2

Related Articles to Read Next

• Is Grace a License to Sin?
• The Importance of Repentance in the Bible
• Parable of New Wine in Old Wineskins Meaning
• Bible Mark 2 Quiz With Answers
• Lessons from John 3

Conclusion

Mark 2 opens with a man who cannot reach Jesus and closes with religious men who cannot bear Him. Between the two stands the same Christ, forgiving what only God can forgive, calling the man everyone else had written off, and taking for Himself the lordship of the day God made.

The lessons from Mark 2 leave nobody neutral. Four friends dug through a roof. Levi walked away from his living. The crowd was amazed and went home unchanged. The scribes kept their seats and began to plot.

You are already somewhere in that room. The question is whether you will remain a spectator of a Christ you find impressive, or come to Him the way the sick come to a physician, and let Him deal first with the wound you have never named out loud.

He is still saying “Son.” He is still saying “Follow me.”