by CCW | 30 October 2011 13:16
It is, I think, a most compelling and touching scene, at once a story of friendship and forgiveness and of healing and restoration. In so many ways, it illustrates what St. Paul is telling us in the Epistle. Do we not see here in this Gospel scene the kindness of friends towards one another? Do we not hear in this Gospel Christ’s words of forgiveness to the man sick of the palsy? Is it not the tender-heartedness of Jesus that we see displayed here in all of its wonder and power?
Well, to be sure and wonderfully so. And yet there is something more, something of a more sombre and disturbing nature. There is as well in this Gospel scene the vanity of minds, the darkening of the understanding, the hardness of hearts, the corruption of souls; in short, all the other things that the Epistle mentions. There is an evil in the heart which resents and opposes the good that might be done to others.
The soul is the battlefield between good and evil. And we all stand convicted or better yet, in the imagery of the Gospel, we all lie paralysed, unable to move, our palsied limbs reflecting a deeper paralysis of the soul which we see in the resistance and opposition of the scribes to Christ’s words of forgiveness to the one who was paralysed. They say nothing, but “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?”
Christ addresses that obduracy of the mind, that stubbornness of the soul, which remains closed to the possibilities of God’s grace at work in people’s lives, the kind of grace which is already evident in the action of those who brought their paralysed friend to Jesus. The greater miracle here is the forgiveness of sins and the joy or good cheer which accompanies it. “Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.” This is what Jesus wants us to know even in the face of skeptical hostility and animosity. “Certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth.” For only God can forgive sins, yet only man stands in need of the forgiveness of sins without which we are dead already, dead in ourselves, in the terror and the darkness of our own fears and anxieties, our hatreds and our envyings.
“But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) arise, take up thine bed and go unto thine house.” That ye may know. The healing of the body merely serves as a demonstration of the greater power of the forgiveness of our sins. In a way, it is simply an object lesson.
There are things which Christ wants us to know so that by his grace we may will them in our lives. “Be ye renewed in the spirit of your minds,” Paul says, seemingly echoing the challenge of the Gospel, “that ye may know.” Know what? Know that Christ Jesus is the forgiveness of sins. That is the primary thing in relation to which everything else is subordinate.
It is wanted that we should “learn Christ.” Such a learning is new life. In the midst of the barrenness of death, in the midst of the darkness in human hearts, there is hope and redemption. There is a healing of the soul, “Son be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee,” and there is a kind of resurrection of the body, “Arise, take up thy bed and go unto thine house.”
But only if we will so learn Christ as to be found in him. You see the kindness, the tender-heartedness, the forgiving of one another are not simply matters of niceness; they are the motions of Christ’s grace in us flowing out of his forgiveness of our sins.
What does it mean to be kind to one another? It means to place one another in the presence of Christ seeking his mercy and forgiveness and wanting his healing grace for all our souls in disarray. Such is the meaning of our intercessory prayers.
We place ourselves and one another in the presence of Christ, knowing that he is the forgiveness of sins. In so doing we are acting out of what we have been given to know. Something of the power of the resurrection of Christ moves in us in acts of kindness and charity. There is something more beyond the barren fields of human lives, something more beyond stone cold hardness of our sin-darkened hearts. We arise to walk in the paths which he has prepared for us but only if we are open to his presence and have learned what he would have us know.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Trinity XIX, 2011
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