Day: October 26, 2014

“Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; / Lord, hear my voice”
(Psalm 130.1)

The psalmist’s cry echoes the cry of Jonah from the belly of the great fish, a cry, he suggests, that is from “the belly of Sheol,” the term for the Jewish underworld. Jonah is as far from God as he can be. And yet, not unlike Christ on the cross in his cry of dereliction, he cries out to God. In the case of Jonah, he cries out to the God from whom he has tried to get as far away from as possible. The biblical, theological, and psychological point is that you can’t.

As another psalm (Psalm 139) reminds us, “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me:/ thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts from afar” (vs.1). It goes on to ask “whither shall I go then from thy spirit?/ or whither shall I flee from thy presence?/ If I climb up into heaven, thou art there:/ if I go down to hell, thou art there also” (vs. 6,7). God would not be God if we thought we could escape his presence and his truth.

The story of Jonah is partly told to make this point about God and about God as the universal God and not just the God of a particular people, a tribal god as it were. The Book of Jonah is actually a profound satire upon the folly of that kind of thinking. A most unusual book of Hebrew prophecy, to be sure, it yet offers an important spiritual insight into the nature of God, not altogether unlike The Book of Ruth with her insight that “your people shall be my people, your God my God” for God is for all people. They may have been written about the same time in the third century BC.

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“That ye may know”

Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins connects us to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The forgiveness of sins is about the death and resurrection of Jesus in us.

St. Matthew’s story of the paralytic abbreviates St. Mark’s account. St. Mark’s fuller story reads like a burial-scene. The paralytic is helpless as the dead, he is carried out like the dead by his four bearers; a hole is opened for him, as for the dead, he is lowered into it, as unto his grave. But falling, he does not fall into clay, he falls before the feet of the Son of God, who says to him, first, “thy sins are forgiven thee” and then “arise and walk” (Austin Farrer).

With Matthew, too, we are brought dead in our sins into the presence of Christ. We are brought by faith and Jesus, seeing the faith of those who brought him, says, “Son be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”.

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“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you”

A most compelling and touching scene, at once a story of friendship and forgiveness, of healing and restoration, it illustrates what St. Paul is saying in the Epistle. Here is the kindness of friends towards one another. Here in Christ’s words of forgiveness towards the man sick of the palsy is the tender-heartedness of Jesus.

And yet there is something else here too, 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 – the 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 are all paralyzed, unable to move, 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 paralyzed. 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 paralyzed friend to Jesus.

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