That you may know
Know what? Today’s readings make it abundantly clear that there are things which Jesus wants us to know. They are the things that belong to our being known by God, to the being of our life with God and in God. The idea of the ethical, of the Good, informs and shapes our thinking and our doing. This is one of the great insights of the religious and philosophical traditions of the world and something which we do well to reclaim. It is, perhaps, the only real counter to the ways in which we manipulate nature and one another and which are so destructive of human personality, the human community, and our world. And that is where these readings come into play; literally, we might say, they are about death and resurrection in and through forgiveness.
In the reading from Ephesians, Paul speaks directly about what we have learned in Christ that is transformative in terms of our behaviours and actions. “You have not so learned Christ,” he is saying, if you remain “in the vanity of [your] mind,” in “the darkness” of your “understanding,” in “ignorance” of God, in “hardness of heart,” in hedonism, in “all uncleanness with greediness.” Not a bad summary of the compulsions and challenges that all of us confront in ourselves and in our lives. What is wanted is to be “renewed in the spirit of [our] minds.” How? By virtue of “the truth that is in Jesus” and what follows from that, namely, the qualities of Christ alive in us. It means putting off “the old manhood” and putting on “the new manhood” which is nothing less than Christ in us. Paul here provides some very specific situations or conditions of soul that capture us all in the negative, only to then provide the antidotes to encourage us all in terms of the radical meaning of our life in Christ.
“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice,” he says. Isn’t that only too true? Especially the part about “all malice,” that dreadful feature of wanting the injury of others? But then, he opens us out to our life in Christ. “Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” These are not empty platitudes of mere moralizing. The Gospel shows us the radical significance of forgiveness.
Forgiveness. This is what Jesus, above all else, it seems, wants us to know. It is what Paul, too, has grasped. Jesus is the forgiveness of sins without whom we cannot forgive one another. Forgiveness is a divine quality realized in our human lives through the grace of Christ. It is transformative. It is touching and powerfully moving as we see in the Gospel. A paralyzed man is brought by his friends to Jesus. It is as if he were dead, unable to move. They seek the healing of their friend sensing something powerful and divine in Jesus. “And Jesus, seeing their faith,” speaks to the man who is paralyzed. His words are astounding. “Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.” Words of forgiveness. The greatest problems of our humanity are found in our souls.
Forgiveness happens even in the face of our hard-heartedness, our malice, our unkindness and our indifference to one another. “Certain scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth.” In one way, they are right. Forgiveness is something divine, not something which we can achieve and attain humanly speaking. We can want forgiveness and we can want to forgive one another. But to say that we want it is to say that we don’t have it. Our wanting it does not cause it to happen. John the Baptist preaches “a baptism for the forgiveness of sins” but he is not that forgiveness. He points to God and to God in Christ. “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” he says. Forgiveness belongs to the radical nature of redemption, to God’s recreation of our humanity through the Incarnation. Only God can make something out of nothing; there is nothing greater than the nothingness of our sins. Sin, after all, is the great negation of all that is good. It is as if evil were ‘the greatest nothing,’ if one can possibly speak that way.
“That you may know,” Jesus says. He wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins and that forgiveness in us belongs to the radical truth of our humanity in God. “That you may know the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins,” he bids the paralyzed man “arise” and, in a lovely image, “take up his bed” and go to his house. It is death and resurrection but only by way of forgiveness.
This is even more dramatically illustrated in Mark’s account of this event. The friends of the paralyzed man, finding that Jesus is surrounded by a great crowd, open a hole in the roof above the room where Jesus is teaching and, literally, let the paralyzed man down on his pallet. It is like the lowering of the body of the dead into the grave but here he is lowered down to the feet of Jesus and that makes all the difference. It is death and resurrection. Christ’s words of forgiveness lead to restoration, to resurrection.
The healing of the body serves to highlight the greater healing of our souls. The greatest untruth of modernity lies in the divorce of the physical from the spiritual, the very thing philosophical religion challenges and counters; the very thing, too, this Gospel counters and corrects. Notice too that the healing of soul and body belongs to the good of the individual within the community. God seeks the radical good of our humanity which is found alone in his goodness. That this happens even in the face of our animosity and malice is what Jesus wants us to know. What stands in the way is us when we are stuck in our stubbornness, our hard-heartedness, our meanness and our malice, our ill-will, all of which is about the old man rather than the new man.
The long Trinity season runs out in the things which Jesus wants us to know, the greatest of which things, it seems, is forgiveness. The forgiveness of sins makes us members of one another and raises us up into the communion of saints. It is what Jesus wants us to know.
That ye may know
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIX, 2019