Old/New Testament

The healing of the paralytic

9 Jesus got into the boat, and crossed back over to his own town.

² Some people brought to him a paralyzed man lying on a bed. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Cheer up, my son! Your sins are forgiven!”

³ “This fellow’s blaspheming!” said some of the scribes to themselves.

⁴ Jesus read their thoughts. “Why let all this wickedness fester in your hearts?” he said. ⁵ “Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? ⁶ But, to let you know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he spoke to the paralyzed man—“Get up, pick up your bed, and go home!”

⁷ And he got up, and went away to his home. ⁸ When the crowds saw it they were frightened, and praised God for giving authority like this to humans.

The call of Matthew

⁹ As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-office.

“Follow me!” he said to him. And he got up and followed him.

¹⁰ When he was at home, sitting down to a meal, there were lots of tax-collectors and sinners there who had come to have dinner with Jesus and his disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?”

¹² Jesus heard them.

“It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,” he said, “it’s the sick. ¹³ Go and learn what this saying means: ‘It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.’ My job isn’t to call upright people, but sinners.”

¹⁴ Then John’s disciples came to him with a question.

“How come,” they asked, “we and the Pharisees fast frequently, but your disciples don’t fast at all?”

¹⁵ “Wedding guests can’t fast, can they,” replied Jesus, “as long as the bridegroom is with them? But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.

¹⁶ “No one,” he went on, “sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat. The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. ¹⁷ People don’t put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the skins will split, the wine will be lost, and the skins will be ruined. They put new wine into new skins, and then both are fine.”