“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
Paul’s strong and powerful words are complemented and illustrated wonderfully in the Gospel. The teaching of both is, perhaps, best concentrated for us in the Collect: “forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee: Mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.” For the readings all turn on the question about what is moving in our hearts. In short, the emphasis is upon the qualities of Christ present or absent in us and in ways that challenge our thinking.
Have we learned Christ? Have we heard him? Have we been taught by him, “as the truth is in Jesus”? The question is put to us directly, not as external rebuke but as the strong reminder of our new creation in Christ, having put off “the old manhood” – the term is inclusive, our old sinful humanity (τον παλαιον ανθρωπον) – and putting on “the new manhood” (τον καιον ανθρωπον), our humanity as made new in Christ. How? By being “renewed in the spirit of your mind.” This is altogether about our sanctification, literally, “the holiness of truth,” the complete counter to our current intellectual and spiritual despair of truth in a world of lies and deceit.
This has to do with the quality of our lives together in the body of Christ. We are bidden to put away lying and speak truth to each other because “we are members one of another.” We are not isolated, autonomous beings; we have our life and being with one another in the body of Christ. Paul’s words unpack the whole meaning of our life in Christ in thoughtful but shocking ways. “Be ye angry,” he says! What! Isn’t our world angry enough and way too angry? Yes. But there is a place for righteous anger about things which should disturb us because they diminish and destroy what belongs to the truth of our humanity. Such is the righteous wrath of Christ in the cleansing of the temple, to take but one example. “Be ye angry but sin not.” Don’t let your wrath possess you. “Let not the sun go down on your wrath: neither give place to the devil.”
There is nothing here that is mere ‘feel goody-goodism’ or obsessive self-righteousness. It is really about a kind of critical self-appraisal but without wallowing in self-pity. He goes on to consider the forms of our relationship with one another; not stealing but labouring, “working with [our] hands the thing which is good” but doing so for the good of others as well, “that [we] may have to give to him that needeth.” Once again, the emphasis is on the ethical, upon our being together as “members one of another.” So too with our speech which is not about evil talk but about what edifies and builds up and “ministers grace to the hearers.” All of these exhortations belong to the Holy Spirit moving in us without which we risk grieving the Holy Spirit, in effect denying the Spirit of Truth in self-contradiction, and negating our being in God. The Epistle sums up in a magisterial fashion what we are to put away from ourselves and what we are to do: “Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
What this powerful teaching looks like is seen in the Gospel. It highlights what God in Christ wants us to know. The essential teaching is the forgiveness of sins, the great and central teaching about our being in Christ. What Christ seeks for us we must seek for each other. The story shows us what is to be sought and what stands in the way, the darkness of our hearts of division and despair.
It is a touching story. “A man sick of the palsy,” a paralytic, is brought by unnamed and unnumbered others to Jesus, seeking his healing. Jesus recognises their faith and says to the paralyzed man, “Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.” This may trouble us because it seems to equate physical conditions with moral actions. But that is to forget that our experience of the world is entirely coloured by sin, that suffering and death have to be considered in the light of human sin, not necessarily in a simple causal sense but in a general way. We suffer because we are not at one with God and his creation. We suffer as the result of our own actions and the actions of others in complex ways. Even so-called “physical evils,” the things that can happen to us just because of where we are at any given moment, are things about which we pray for deliverance. This, too, is part of the spirituality of thanksgiving: “From lightning and tempest, from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine … Good Lord, deliver us,” as the Litany puts it. This belongs to a healthy awareness of the created order and the power of natural forces that can destroy and harm human life. In a larger theological understanding, such things are all part of the Fall, of sin and evil, our separation from God and the world such that we have to learn to respect our world and our place in it.
Jesus’ words to the paralytic are words of saving grace, of that greater healing of our wounded and broken humanity. This is the point of the Gospel in the face of our unbelief and critical hostility. “Certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth.” They have in mind the teaching that only God can forgive sins. True. The point, however, is Jesus is true God and true Man. In him we alone find the salvation or wholeness which God seeks for our humanity. In him we find the new manhood, the renewal of our humanity. The passage highlights precisely what Jesus wants us to know: namely, that he is the forgiveness of sins and that the healing of our bodily ailments is part of the greater healing and restoration of our humanity.
Just as Jesus knew the unspoken faith of those who brought the paralytic; so too he knows the hearts of the scribes; indeed, all our hearts. That is something divine revealed to us through the tender-heartedness or compassion of Christ. It is a powerful illustration of what Jesus wants to know, what Paul wants us to have learned having been taught by Jesus as the truth is in him. “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 thy bed, and go unto thine house.” The healing is the teaching of the greater truth. Christ is the forgiveness of sins and that is the greater teaching that belongs to our life in Christ.
To learn this is to learn Christ. It signals the true meaning of what we pray for in the Collect: our recognition that without the grace of forgiveness we are not able to please God, which is to say, to live the life which he seeks for us as members of one another. I don’t need to highlight how counter-culture this really is. It speaks to the darkness and despair, the violence and anger of our disordered world because it calls us to the “renew[ing] of the spirit of [our] minds” through the Holy Spirit directing and ruling our hearts in all things. Such is the radical truth of our humanity in its freedom and dignity.
“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 19, 2023