“Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”
It is a remarkable Gospel. What does Jesus want us to know? That he is the forgiveness of sins. “That you may know,” Jesus says to the sceptical scribes whose inner thoughts he knows, it seems. Wow. But what does forgiveness mean and what does it look like?
If you say, “I forgive you, but I can’t forget,” then you haven’t forgiven the sin. You have merely put away the penalty that you might have exacted, your ‘pound of flesh’, as it were. But the original wrong isn’t made right between you. It isn’t forgiven. Forgiveness cannot be mere words.
Or if you despise the one who has offended you so that it is a matter of repugnance or a matter of indifference to have anything further to do with him, then you haven’t forgiven him so much as tried to forget him; in short, to erase him from the horizon of your mind as if he didn’t exist.
If you say, “I will forgive, because if I don’t, God won’t forgive me,” then perhaps you come a little closer to true forgiveness, though standing still a long way off. At least the common basis of our sinful humanity is recognised – a common need, a ground of sympathy, is acknowledged. It points to the radical meaning of what we pray. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” That acknowledges a sense of reciprocity between God and us.
Forgiveness means the removal of sin and the restoration of the good. Forsaking means the actual turning away from sin so as to turn to the active loving of the true and absolute good, God. It means the desire or pursuit of righteousness. The forgiveness of sins enables the forsaking of sins, the following after righteousness only through the restoration of righteousness in us.
These twofold motions of the soul are repentance. As Jeremy Taylor writes:
Repentance, of all things in the world, makes the greatest change: it changes things in heaven and earth; for it changes the whole man from sin to grace, from vicious habits to holy customs, from unchaste bodies to angelical souls, from swine to philosophers, from drunkenness to sober counsels.
Repentance makes the greatest change. This is what we need to know. Repentance is conversion in the sense of a turning around, a turning around because of having been turned around but to what? To our thinking after or upon the motions of God’s love towards us. Repentance means a change of heart and a conversion of mind. It means “put[ting[ off the old manhood, and be[ing] renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put[ting] on the new manhood.” It means “put[ting] away … all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking … with all malice, for ye have not so learned Christ.” Ah! It is something to be learned. A putting off and a putting on, a change inwardly and outwardly; a complete re-ordering of our lives. And all because of what we have learned. But how is this to be accomplished?
“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” God’s forgiveness must be active in our forgiveness. The forgiveness of sins is a divine activity accomplished in the flesh of our humanity, in the very manhood of Christ. For “without thee we are not able to please thee,” as the Collect reminds us.
God alone can forgive sins, but it is we alone who must be forgiven. The two sides meet in Jesus Christ. Forgiveness belongs to God because the forgiveness of sins means the restoration of our humanity to truth and righteousness. This cannot be accomplished by a mere forgetting of sin, the pretence that nothing happened when, in fact, something did, but by the making right of what was wrong, a transformation of sin into righteousness, of evil into good.
The gospel story anticipates the forgiveness of sins for the whole world. Christ forgives the sins of the man sick with palsy even as he perceives the hidden and suspicious thoughts of the Scribes. Christ heals the paralytic so that “ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” It is what he wants us to know!
Forgiveness, omniscience, new birth and life – these are all divine activities wrought by Christ in the flesh of our humanity. Why? “That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins.” Forgiveness is through the Word made flesh. Christ in the inmost being of his perfect human soul yields to the will of his heavenly Father, referring all things to the divine source of all things. He intercedes for us. When he dies, he has the whole of mankind in his heart. Austin Farrer recalling this story in Mark’s account notes that:
Jesus is by his own death the forgiveness of sins; he is the resurrection and the life through his own resurrection. We are thrown into the life-giving sepulchre of Christ, we touch the slain and living Christ, his body and his blood; our sins are forgiven us, and we live by him; we arise to walk in all those good works that he has prepared for us to walk in. (Austin Farrer, The Crown of the Year, Trinity XIX)
Forgiveness ultimately means to will the true good, the good that is God himself and the good of our humanity. “Forgiveness,” writes George MacDonald, “is not love merely, but love conveyed as love to the erring so establishing peace with God, and forgiveness towards our neighbour.” Forgiveness is one of the great distinctives of the Christian faith. What can it mean in the face of conflict and war, in the face of enmity and hatred? Everything. It means an openness to the transcendent love of God without which our lives are the prisoners to our passions. At the very least, we have to want that peace and reconciliation that ultimately comes from God and let it direct and rule our hearts. We are recalled to the ultimate dignity of our humanity found in the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. We come to him who has given himself for us.
Christ is our forgiveness who at the moment of his dying, prays “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” even though this is exactly what he wants us to know and to enjoy.
“Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity XIX, 2025