Such a vivid picture we get from today’s gospel reading of the sheer drama of Jesus’s ministry. Here into the ordinary, humdrum, everyday lives of these villagers of Galilee, had burst someone so out of the ordinary, that crowds were drawn to be part of what was going on.
According to Mark, Jesus had begun his ministry in Capernaum not long before, teaching in the synagogue, and what had struck people first of all was the feeling that, unlike what they were used to from the teachers of the law, Jesus spoke with authority, as if he really knew what he was talking about. This was immediately noticed also by a man in the synagogue who had an evil spirit, and who heckled him. Imagine the dramatic effect on the rest when Jesus drove out the spirit, which left him with a shriek – the authority of his words now matched by the power of his works!
That same evening, Mark tell us, the whole town gathered at the door of Simon and Andrew, and Jesus healed many sick people, and drove out many demons. So, right from the start, Jesus’s ministry was a relentlessly public affair. Suddenly, in this peaceful backwater, events were really happening. You can understand how, along with this public interaction, Jesus had a great need for privacy, for solitude. Don’t you feel for him, when his new disciples find him and exclaim, ‘Everyone is looking for you.’? So after preaching and healing for a few days in nearby villages, he returns to Capernaum, and it says, ‘the people heard that he had come home’.
In fact so many people gathered to hear Jesus preaching that there was no room inside or outside the house. The show, clearly, was all set to continue. And were they disappointed? Well, just imagine! At that moment, enter someone suffering from paralysis – probably everyone knew who hw was – being carried on his bed-mat by four other people. It couldn’t have been a very dignified procedure, could it? And then the way is blocked by all these crowds. Imagine the throng parting to let them through. ‘You’ll never get anywhere near him, mind.’ ‘The only way you’ll get to him now is if you drop down through the roof.’ Could it have been a remark like this that gave them the idea of doing what they did? They may have been helped to get up there, and to start unpicking the roof tiles. How did they dig through the hard mud roof? Maybe someone passed up implements. What a great scene in the drama it was for those outside!
But presumably, the people inside the house had no idea that this was going on. The first they would have known would have been the noise of someone bashing on the roof above their heads. And this wouldn’t have been knocking, this was serious damage, reinforced by mud and bits of ceiling falling down on top of them, as suddenly this new drama took over the house.
What would you have done? Say you had been the preacher in that situation, confronted by what can only be described as Extreme Behaviour... Couldn’t such an excited crowd so easily get completely out of control? Wouldn’t you have tried to quieten things down a bit?
It’s amazing how in control Jesus is. He is fully aware that not everyone there has come with the same agenda. There are at least three completely different messages that he has to convey to different people in the crowd. There is the paralysed man, and his bearers: they need to hear words of healing. The drama for them is urgent and personal. There is the wider crowd: they need to discover who Jesus is, and what his power and authority really are. For them, the drama is one of spiritual experience and revelation. But within the crowd, there are also the teachers of the law, whose own authority and deeply held beliefs are at risk from the unorthodox and possibly punishable things Jesus is filling the people’s heads with. For them the drama is perhaps the anticipation of being able to catch him in his words, and so silence him.
By what he says, Jesus maximizes the drama for all three of these different ‘hearers’. This is crowd control at its most amazing. ‘”Son,” he says, “your sins are forgiven.” Imagine the sick man comforted but puzzled at the same time. Imagine the crowd wide-eyed and open-mouthed with astonishment at this totally unexpected and momentous pronouncement. And imagine the teachers of the law, aghast at the apparent blasphemy that they have just heard with their own ears, but at the same time perhaps half jubilant that maybe they can get him for this.
It’s their response that we hear about first. Mark tells us that they are only thinking to themselves, but I imagine them thinking out loud, turning to each other and comparing reactions, frowns of disapproval corrugating their learned faces. Did Jesus really not know there were there or what they would have thought until after he had spoken? I’m convinced that they were both recognisable and predictable.
But the riddle that Jesus then presents them with goes right to the heart of the matter. “Which is easier,” he says, “to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, or ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’?” And the temptation is to say “Well, of course it’s much easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ because you don’t have to prove anything. If you say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk,’ you run the risk of being shown up for an impostor – because if the person doesn’t get up and walk, you obviously don’t have the power you say you have.”
But the point is that if you think the forgiveness of sins is easier than the healing of the body, you clearly have no idea how costly forgiveness is – no idea of how much is involved in bridging the gulf between good and evil. The implication is that words of forgiveness pronounced by such a person are valueless. Jesus immediately makes it clear that his words are not valueless, by what he does next.
The teachers of the law have no more to say; in fact they themselves have been taught a very important lesson, both about who Jesus is, and about their own spirituality. They now face a choice between accepting his authority, or hardening their resolve to look for ways to crush it. We don’t know, of course, how these particular men responded, but Jesus did present them with the challenge – as he always does to anyone who hears his message.
As for the wider crowd, how did all this affect them? Well, as I said, what they needed was to understand that they were experiencing a revelation of the reality of God, and not some magical trickery. If Jesus had just said, “Get up, take your mat and walk,” even if the healing had taken place, how would he have been any different from all sorts of others who practised healing? By placing the healing firmly in a spiritual context, and by publicly challenging the spirituality of the very people who were supposed to be the guardians of that spirituality, Jesus was speaking to their deepest desires. What more could they wish for, than to know that both health and acceptance by God were there for the having – all through faith in Jesus?
But what about the paralysed man and his bearers? I wonder what they thought when the first thing they heard Jesus say was, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Did they think Jesus was siding with those who would have believed that the paralysis – and indeed all sickness – was a punishment from God for particular sins? It could be that they themselves held this belief. If, so, then Jesus’s words were a way of liberating him from any such sins. Interestingly, though, we are not told that they reacted to those words of forgiveness in any way. So it may be that they didn’t have this belief, or, if they did, that they had a sense of grievance with God, feeling that God had punished the man unfairly, as he certainly wasn’t any more guilty than all the other unrighteous people who walked about scot free.
“Son, your sins are forgiven!” Is that what we came for? Anyway, what sins?
But then, as Jesus continues with this public work of teaching and healing, as we know, he does speak the words that command the man to be well, and to demonstrate it in front of the whole crowd of people. “Get up, take your mat and walk.” He does so, and presumably a respectful space is made for him as he leaves. His urgent and personal needs are fully satisfied, and he now faces the task of building a new life for himself as a healthy person. You wonder how easy that is going to be for him! However, he must have had this desire. So must his friends. Nothing else would have motivated their outrageous behaviour in pushing right to the centre of attention as they did. There was no need for Jesus to ask, as he so often did of the people he helped, “What do you want me to do for you?” Here the desire was clear, and their confidence in Jesus was clear too, not in any words, but in the way they had got themselves together to move towards Jesus, both physically, by bringing him, and also in their hearts. They had gone on what we might call “An excursion of faith,” and this was the faith that Jesus recognised, and in the context of which he gave his forgiveness and healing.
Jesus makes it clear that the spiritual aspects of the case are more important than the physical. I don’t mean to suggest that he didn’t think it was important to heal the man. His compassion knows no bounds. No, it’s the fact that he recognises their great faith, first of all, and the way the healing is enclosed within an act of forgiveness. This is how Jesus starts, and when he says the words of healing he tells us that it is in order for it to be known ‘that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.’
This is very striking. The paralytic came for healing, and it was clear to everyone what healing was required. But as for the sins, this is not so straightforward. We might well ask (as I suggested earlier), “What sins?” And it’s clear that we don’t know. And the man himself, does he know what sins are ‘in the frame’? He hasn’t come in order to confess, so he probably doesn’t have any in the forefront of his mind.
But Jesus’s words, “Son, your sins are forgiven,” tell us that he is not being selective. This is a total cleansing. Just as in his now healthy body he now has the chance of a new life, so in his relationship with God he is given a new life. So, to the question, ‘What sins?’ we now have Jesus’s answer: “All of them”.
And that’s not all. The fact that he received forgiveness without any self-examination or explicit confession, the fact that it was forgiveness that was Jesus’s first impulse, shows us a great truth: that God is simply bursting to forgive us; that he is much readier to forgive than we are to confess; that his love for us is infinitely greater than the sum total of all our guilt.
So let’s remember that when we come to confession. What does it mean if we come doubting whether we are forgivable? If we get stuck hating ourselves, or thinking we’re not worth saving, doesn’t that effectively paralyse us so that we are unable to recognise or accept the love of God which is directed with passion and urgency towards each one of us.
I am encouraged to speak in this way partly by the writings of Julian of Norwich, which overflow with a sense of God’s love, but also by Archbishop Rowan Williams’s book about praying with Icons of the Virgin: “Ponder these things.” From reading it, I have begun to understand how to look at icons, and in particular the type where ‘the Christ child embraces Mary cheek to cheek, his arm encircles her neck, with one foot he seems to be pushing himself up against her body with great energy, and his right hand grasps her veil’. To understand this icon, we must remember that the child is indeed God, and that Mary represents the whole of humanity.
‘If we begin,’ writes the Archbishop, ‘as most of us tend to, with a notion that God stands at a distance waiting for us to make a move in his direction, this image should give us something of a shock. The Lord here does not wait, impassive, as we babble on about our shame and penitence, trying to persuade him that we are worth forgiving. His love is instead that of an eager and rather boisterous child.’ In this image of the Christ child clinging with such simple urgency to his mother, we get a glimpse of the urgency of God’s love. This is the same urgency which made Jesus say – when he saw how the sick man and his helpers had come to him on their ‘excursion of faith’ –, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”