Christ Church

“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.

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.” Only God can forgive, yet only man stands in need of the forgiveness of sins without which we are dead already, dead in ourselves, dead in the terror and the darkness of our own fears and anxieties, our hatreds and our envyings; in short, our nothingness.

“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 you may know. The healing of the body 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, reflecting the challenge of the Gospel, “that ye may know.” Know what? Know that Christ Jesus is the forgiveness of sins.

It is wanted that we should “learn Christ.” Such 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.”

How powerfully this speaks to the emptiness of the culture of our world and day – to the nihilisms, passive and active, that wreak such death and destruction in our souls and our communities. A culture that is unable to name, let alone commit, to ideals and principles, a culture that is supine in the illusions of comfort and convenience, is an empty culture. Paradoxically, it becomes the breeding ground for the active nihilism which is visited upon us in Canada now in the acts of terrorism this week in Quebec and at the National War Monument and Parliament in Ottawa. In our passive nihilism we despair of the spiritual and intellectual principles that bring dignity and even nobility to our humanity. We retreat into the various ghettoes of our despair, into the gated communities of our minds and souls, unable to articulate or commit to anything more than our immediate self-interests.

Out of such spiritual emptiness comes an anger and desire for something more which seeks meaning and purpose but finds it only in death and destruction, in the forms of terrorism that only destroy. Why? Because we have forgotten or denied the very lessons of the Gospel. Because we have forgotten what Christ wants us to know which is the very counter to our nothingness.

We can only know Christ as the forgiveness of sins when we have confronted the empty nothingness of our lives considered in ourselves. Only by knowing that we are nothing can we then discover that we are something – something in the eyes of God – but only through the forgiveness of sins, only through the transformation of our nothingness into something more. It means learning to live for God and for others, pure and simple, and yet so hard. It means learning Christ so as to be found in him. The kindness, the tender-heartedness, the forgiving of one another, are not merely matters of niceness; they are the motions of Christ’s grace in us flowing out of his forgiveness. They are about spiritual principles that confer dignity and bring us into communion with God and with one another.

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 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 just as in the Gospel story. We do so knowing that he is the forgiveness of sins. In so doing we act 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 than nihilism.

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.

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

Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIX
October 26^th, 2014