Mark 2.1-11; Isa 43.18-25
Why is Jesus such a poor physician? In terms of diagnostic skills the BMA would consider him to be a liability. The best miraculous healer of his day sees a paralytic man come to his public surgery in Capernaum, a man who is lowered from the roof because he could not walk through the door and all Jesus says is ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ While the four friends that dug through the mud roof get ten out of ten for ingenuity in queue jumping, Jesus surely scores very low on the scale of rapid response and compassion. What do you think, maybe a three out of ten for some nice words but no action? However, I wonder if we have been too generous in our scoring? Is Jesus in fact being worse than simply revealing that he is an incompetent medic? Is he using the man to get one over the doubting scribes, so that the paralytic becomes no more than a pawn in Jesus’ own power struggle with his opponents? As the story unfolds, after pronouncing forgiveness of sins, the scribes challenge Jesus – accusing him of usurping God’s prerogative to forgive sin. As a result they make the stinging, but logically correct deduction from their own perspective – Jesus is a blasphemer. Well is that how we should read the story, a pompous Jesus with an overblown ego? Does Jesus simply hit back with a party trick. In essence saying, ‘So you don’t think I can forgive sins – then watch me make a paralysed man walk and see what you make of that!’ Those of you who have had the misfortune of one of my sermons inflicted on you before, will probably be waiting for me to debunk this set of propositions that I have just offered. Well I hope not to disappointment you, but bear with me while we first briefly consider the idea of forgiveness.
Forgiveness, at its most basic level, is an action whereby a person or group that has suffered some wrong agrees to set aside the right for restitution, or to forgo any claim for the offending party to be punished. In this sense the one who has been wronged grants pardon to the offending person and gives up all claim against that person. That is quite a forensic or juridical definition of forgiveness, and while it is I believe correct, perhaps its very transactional account of forgiveness if applied to our understanding of divine forgiveness would make such acts appear fairly cold. For forgiveness is not just about balancing some ledger of good and bad acts, by having the bad ones struck of the list – it is about rebuilding relationships and making people and communities whole.
Four years ago, on the 13th of February 2008, the nation of Australia had a national day of apology seeking forgiveness from the indigenous peoples for the so-called stolen generation. – That was the policy that took away lighter-skinned and half-caste aboriginal children from their birth families, and placed them in state and later church institutions. Yes, the church was directly complicit in this practice. However, the national day of apology was highly controversial. Certain sectors of the community felt no need to seek forgive or to issue an apology, arguing that one generation could not legitimately be forgiven for the sins of another. While this was the philosophical reason that was presented against issuing a national apology, perhaps the fundamental reason was more pragmatic. There were fears concerning claims for financial compensation. While those fears did not materialise, in one way fears about the price of forgiveness are correct. For it needs to be recognised that forgiveness is indeed a costly business. National examples could be multiplied – one only has to recall South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission where horrendous personal stories were recounted, often followed by victims of facing those who had tortured them or killed their family members and having the grace to say at the end of those stories ‘I forgive you.’ That was no easy path.
Most of us will not, I suspect have been involved in acts of forgiveness and reconciliation on a national scale. Instead, it is at a personal level where we need to be forgiving, and also open to being forgiven. Sometimes actions in the past cannot be undone, but one must strive to take the initiative in reaching out to those who have wronged us. When I lecture at the University I try to keep everything very historical and factual – I do not go in for all that new-fangled feel-good application stuff. Unlike my scintillating colleagues I have a much easier method of judging the success of my lectures. I consider it a personal triumph if I can see at least one set of open eyes by the end of the 50 minutes. However, after one fairly typical lecture some years ago on 1 Corinthians 7 – where Paul articulates views on marriage and celibacy in light of his perspective on an imminent parousia and his eschatological theology (now you may understand why not everybody stays awake!), I was stopped by one young lady, who said she wanted to ask me a question. I braced myself to launch into a disquisition on the finer points of the Greek text. Yet, actually, none of that was what mattered. You may consider her question naïve, and you might be right. But with a shaky voice, she prefaced her question with the phrase ‘I have a friend who wants to know…’. Now I think we all perhaps can recognise the transparency of those words ‘I have a friend’. Her enquiry went something like this: ‘I have a friend, she is a Christian and that really matters to her, she has done something she regrets, and she wants to know if she can become a virgin again?’ Yes, at one level the question is of course incredibly naïve, and yet at another it encapsulated her deep sense of failure and emptiness. As tears welled-up in her eyes, I must confess that I was a very poor doctor. I did not discuss medical possibilities and impossibilities. Indeed, my response would not have passed muster with the BMA. Yet instead I tried to do something I would never do in my intentionally dusty and stodgy lectures – I tried application. We spoke about what the message of Jesus really meant at its deepest level, how relationships could be put right, how people could be made whole again, and how true forgiveness enabled one to move on without always living in a sea of regrets. Did I answer her question? Well I leave you to judge that.
Jesus was confronted with a paralytic on a stretcher in front of him. The man’s friends had gone to extraordinary lengths to get him there. No request was necessary, the situation spoke for itself. And yet despite the obvious Jesus says, ‘Son your sins are forgiven.’ In the worldview of the Old Testament, there was a direct, if not causal link expressed at times between sin and affliction. This comes out clearly in the book of Deuteronomy Likewise this outlook explains why Job (to put it mildly) is so ‘hacked-off’ when he is suffering. Job’s friends tell him he must have done something wrong to account for all that has befallen him. However, Job cannot fathom his suffering, so he resolutely declares that none of his afflictions make sense precisely because he has done nothing wrong. Similarly, in Jesus’ own day, when he is met by a blind man, his disciples ask, ‘who sinned, this man or his parents?’ (John 9.1). The paralytic who is brought before Jesus was almost certainly subjected to the same value judgments – he was afflicted in this way and people would have assumed it was because he must have sinned against God. Such an assessment not only drew attention to his physical condition, it made him a social pariah. Indeed, the man was lucky to have four friends willing to bring him to Jesus. With the man paralyzed not just physically, but also socially and emotionally, Jesus speaks words that heals his whole being. The declaration of forgiveness of sins is not just some tactical manoeuvre in a religious debate, with Jesus using a man in desperate need of healing. Instead, Jesus recognises that the condition is not physical alone and his words of forgiveness and his actions in physical healing together restore the man to wholeness.
It might be debated whether the man really needed forgiveness in relation to his paralysis, or, using trendy jargon that has the pretence of perhaps making it appear that I know what I am talking about, whether the man’s need for forgiveness was a social construct that had been imposed on him because of the prevailing worldview. Such assessments are probably all very clever and true, but the reality was that in his mind the paralytic man desperately felt that he needed to be forgiven. Even within our modern context, my impression is that often the last people to forgive us are ourselves. We hold on to our guilt, we refuse forgiveness, and sometimes what I see as amazing is the very people who are the most generous in forgiving others cannot accept that they too have been forgiven. I have spoken to some of you here who you have at times told me how past events continue to cast a shadow over all that you do. Often those feelings have to do with broken relationships, or the sense that you feel you could have done more for a loved one who is no longer with you. – I hear such self-assessments from those of you who did everything humanly possible. What is more, we enslave ourselves in this state of unforgiveness even while we come each week to this place confessing our sins and seeking forgiveness. We hear the words of absolution that implore God ‘to forgive and free us…to heal and strength us…to raise us to new life.’ The divine promise is that forgiveness and wholeness of life are already yours, for God has given them to you in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The prophet Isaiah spoke to a people who were broken by the experience of exile in a foreign land. They now recognised those actions that their nation had committed which resulted in exile. And in that foreign land they had sat down beside the rivers of Babylon and wept. But now under the influence of the Persian potentate Cyrus, the people had returned home. However, they were in danger of not recognising that they had been forgiven. It is within this context that Isaiah brings the tender word of God to his people. He says, ‘Do not call to mind the former things, or ponder things of the past. Behold I will do something new’ (Isa. 43.18-19). Now as then, Isaiah speaks to the people of God. Now as then, he calls to each of you to leave behind former things, not to ponder the past. Now as then, he announces to each of you that God will do something new, something that brings wholeness to each of our lives – no matter how broken and messy they may be. At the end of our Old Testament reading, still prophetically declaring the words of God, Isaiah pronounces the divine promise ‘I, even I, am the one who wipes away your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sin’ (Isa. 43.25). God does this new thing with us for his own sake, because he is love, and because he wants each of us to be part of his people.
So as we come to this holy table today, there is no need to trust in our own strength instead we trust in God’s sheer goodness. As we come here, it is not to look back to former things, or to ponder things of the past. Instead we can look forward as those who are called to be disciples of Christ. And as we look forward to our future, without looking back, without doubting God’s forgiveness, we see Jesus. And we hear his voice saying to each on of us, ‘daughter, your sins are forgiven; son, your sins are forgiven.’ Therefore, as people in whom God has created clean hearts, we turn in praise to him who promises not to remember our sins. For he is the one who makes all things new and the one to whom belongs all might, honour, glory, power and dominion, both now and for ever. Amen.
