Mark 2:1-12
Trinity 19
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
There is a strange thing that Jesus often did during His ministry. On several occasions after performing a miracle, He would tell the people who saw it not to tell anyone else about it. That’s not the main thing Jesus wanted to be known for. There was something much more, much better even than multiplied loaves of bread or healed bodies. Those things were signs of something greater that they would only be able to grasp fully after He had died and risen again. The main thing about Jesus is the forgiveness of sins.
In today’s Gospel the paralytic’s friends bring him to Jesus. And it says that when He sees their faith–not the faith of the paralytic–when He sees their faith, the friends, then He deals with the paralytic in mercy. This is a little bit like Christians bringing an unbelieving friend to church and to Christ, or like parents bringing their baby to baptism. By nature we are all spiritually paralyzed, unable to do anything to bring ourselves to the Lord. We must be brought by someone else so that the Lord may do His forgiving and saving work on us.
Remember that when dealing with your unbelieving friends or family. You can put your faith to use for their good. You may not literally be able to carry them to church. But you can confess your faith to them and invite them. They’re paralyzed, and they need you to do that. And they need your prayers. The Scriptures say that the prayer of a righteous man avails much. When you pray for your friends and your loved ones in the name of Jesus, the righteous Man, those prayers are heard. Now, you cannot believe for someone else, just as the paralytic’s friends couldn’t believe for him. If your children have turned from their baptism and wandered away from church, no matter how much you love them, that does not mean that they love God or that they are saved. But the prayers of a righteous mother or father avail much as well. So you keep on praying, you keep on waiting, you remind God of the promises He has made, you carry them on the stretcher of prayer to God, and you wait and see what He will do.
After all that the paralytic’s friends did in order to get him to Jesus, they had to be expecting and hoping for a healing. But when Jesus sees their faith, He says to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven.” Well, that seems a little anti-climactic. What they wanted wasn’t forgiveness, but a healing; they wanted him to walk again. They had just gone through all this trouble to get to Jesus, literally going through the roof, risking embarrassment, and maybe a bill for repairs, and this is all He does? Well that’s a little bit of a let-down. Jesus didn’t seem to live up to their expectations.
Why is it that we are so disappointed with the forgiveness of Jesus, as if it were nothing special? Why are we not content with that, always wanting something different, something more exciting or interest-grabbing? When I did my vicarage near downtown Las Vegas back in 1988-89, it was virtually a daily occurrence that people would come in off the street asking for money or food or gas. Everyone had a story, some more believable than others. It happens here, too, from time to time. Though sometimes I can give them some food or other assistance, usually I tell them that we don’t have any money to give out. The only thing we have to here is the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins. That I can give them in abundance. But they are rarely interested in that offer. “No, I know all about forgiveness and stuff. What I need is some cash.”
So it was, I think, with the paralytic and his friends here. When Jesus says to him, “Your sins are forgiven,” you can almost feel his disappointment. “OK, fine. I’m still stuck here on this mat.” There are some Christians who like to say that we shouldn’t always be talking about the forgiveness of sins. There’s other more important stuff to be focusing on. But they are wrong. Everything about Christianity comes back to and is rooted in the forgiveness of sins. If it is truly Christianity and not just generic spirituality and religious self-help, then it all is based in and comes from the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, everything. It all comes back to this fundamental reality: that He does not hold our sins against us, that He loves us and accepts us, that we are forgiven.
The truth is that the paralytic could have remained paralyzed and been OK, because his sins were forgiven. He could have endured that kind of life, difficult as it was; he could have gone on, he could have waited for the time when he would walk again on the last day, because his sins were forgiven. For his true sickness was cured; his deepest need was met. The power of the curse was broken; his soul was healed; he was right with God forever. From that comes the power to live with difficulty, the power to suffer, the power to submit and to believe that God is good, even in the dark times when it seems that He is absent or that He has taken His promise away.
The story might well have ended there, were it not for the scribes questioning what Jesus was doing forgiving sins. The reason that the paralytic gets healed doesn’t really seem to be so much for his good as it is to put those scribes in their place who say, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They are shocked at Jesus’ behavior. Why? Because He is a man. How can a man forgive sins? Who does this Jesus think that He is? Of course, He thinks that He is God, that He has authority in heaven and on earth, that what He says, is. And that’s true. Jesus is a man, but much more. He is God in the flesh, who most certainly has the authority to forgive sins. And He demonstrates that fact by healing the paralytic.
Jesus says, “Which is easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say ‘Rise and walk.’” Well in truth, this Gospel teaches that the easier thing to say is “rise and walk.” If you say “rise and walk,” and it fails, it doesn’t happen, nobody’s mad, though you may look like a fool. But if you say, “I forgive your sins,” then what happens? They’re angry. What is it that made them angry at our Lord in the Gospel? It was not “rise and walk.” It was rather when He exercised His real authority over death and the devil, when He forgave the man’s sins. That made them angry, that caused them to get all up in arms. So also today, there are those who bristle at the notion that a pastor would say, “I forgive you your sins,” even though it is done by the authority of Christ, or who think it is somehow medieval to practice private confession and absolution. “Who does that guy think he is, hearing people’s confessions and forgiving their sins?” Well hopefully, a pastor knows that he is the called and ordained servant of Jesus who put him there for that very purpose.
It is easier to say “rise and walk.” The TV preachers, the spiritual charlatans do it all the time. It’s easy to fake that, or on a legitimate level, to engage in medical health and healing enterprises, and no one gets upset. Because those are the types of things we like to see the church doing. Everyone likes to see the church engaged in human care, in works of mercy in the physical realm, because that fits. No one’s ever bothered by that. If you open up a soup kitchen or a food pantry, whether or not they like your doctrine, they like what you’re doing. The world at some level recognizes and embraces good works. They think that’s all the church should be about, fulfilling the Law of love, helping your neighbor, being nice.
However, what the people of this world do not like is a reminder that they are sinful and that they need Christ’s forgiveness or they’re going to hell. That’s what will get people’s blood boiling. The scribes certainly did not want to think in those terms. They’d much rather rely on their own efforts and goodness than to be convicted of sin and to have to deal with the Jesus who pardons sin by the power of His bloody, paralyzing death for us. Jesus did not take the easier way, but the way of the cross. That’s the problem with those who think Christianity should be focused on something more than the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is everything. Everything comes back to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us.
So hear again Jesus’ words to you today: “Your sins are forgiven.” That is no small thing. For if the wages of sin is death, then the forgiveness of sins is life, life forever with God. And in that there is the power for you to endure, to wait, to believe that whatever terrible things you may have to suffer, God still loves you. You will have perfect health and wholeness in your soul, in your mind, in your body. And you will walk–if not now, then you will walk on the Last Day, you will rise from the dead just as Jesus did in glory. Regarding the benefits of the Sacrament of the Altar, the Catechism puts it most simply when it says, “Where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.”
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
(With thanks to the Rev. David Petersen)