Jesus would have liked Doritos' BOLD flavors! ha...!

He was pretty bold, right? I mean, he did crazy things and I always hear people describing him as being bold and radical.

But I read the story of the paralytic and his four friends, and I think Jesus likes boldness in others, too.

People are amazed by the things Jesus is doing, so they crowd around the house he's staying in. Four guys have a friend who is a paralytic. OK, I'm going to do a little interpretation now. They're thinking, "OK. This Jesus dude just rid a leper of leprosy. He made someone who was unclean clean. We gotta get our paralytic friend to him, so that he can be healed too."

They get there, and it's so packed that they can't even see inside the house. They're like, "F this. We're getting our friend to Jesus - a big crowd isn't gonna stop us." So they scale the freaking roof and then start breaking the roof in order to make a hole in it. Now, the owner of this house has gotta be like WTF?! And the four guys must realize how crazy and ridiculous their actions look. They must care about getting their friend, who is obviously freaking loved by these four dudes, to Jesus more than they care about how crazy and ridiculous they look. Who will want to be friends with these guys (besides the paralytic)? They will probably be shunned from people's homes after this!

So they finally get through the roof, and they lower their friend into the house in front of Jesus. People are shocked that these four guys would have the audacity to do what they've just done. But Jesus sees their audacity, and he says (actually, he observes this) that they have faith.

Now, people probably expected Jesus to heal the paralytic. I mean, he's been pretty good to people with bad physical conditions thus far. But I think that Jesus was impressed by the sheer audacity of those 4 crazy friends. He likes it and appreciates it. And that's why he meets their audacity with some audacity of his own - he forgives the sins of the paralytic. Instead of just healing the dude, Jesus first puts himself out there in a highly controversial way and forgives the dude's sins.
Of course, then some scribes are thinking, "Who do you think you are!?!?!?!"

And I don't just think that Jesus was thinking to himself, "The next guy that asks me to heal him, I'm going to use him to show people I can forgive sins!" I like to think that this was Jesus' way of properly responding to something that he really appreciated.

So that's something I see in Jesus now. He appreciates boldness in others (specifically, being bold toward him). He thinks it is proper to respond to that with boldness of his own.

So... if we do something crazy/ridiculous for Jesus, he won't leave us hanging - he'll respond somehow with some craziness of his own. Just the kind of guy he is, I suppose. Cool.