Magazine letter for February 2023
I remember little from my school days, which is not surprising, my memory about anything is not that great, but I do remember a story from my Scripture lesson when I was in primary school (who remembers Scripture lessons? Shows my age!). It was the story of the paralysed man whose friends made a hole in the roof of a house in order to lower him, still on his bed, right in front of Jesus (Mark 2.1-12). It seemed an extraordinary thing to do – and dangerous, what if they had dropped him! I don’t know if I was so interested in what came next, Jesus saying to the man, ‘My son, your sins are forgiven’. I possibly thought that it wasn’t his sins that was worrying the man! But such absolution incurred the wrath of the Pharisees. Famously Jesus replied, ‘What is easier, to say to the paralytic your sins are forgiven, or to say rise, take your mattress and walk?’ Of course, he did duly heal him. But why were the Pharisees so incensed?
Because this was audacious, even arrogant – to forgive sin was the responsibility of God, after the duly appointed rituals, of course. But Jesus was proclaiming the kingdom of God, and in the kingdom of God sin is forgiven – undeserved, unmerited, unasked, sin is forgiven. This is new – the people in the crowd have seen the sick made well, but they have not seen that the sickness in our very souls is also made well – they had not seen the kingdom of God. Obviously this will be a problem to the professional moralists. To them Jesus says no one’s excluded from the kingdom of God – not even those who think themselves unworthy – only those who won’t come in. In the kingdom all are welcome, you can even enter through the roof if you like.
Of course this is a scandal, of course this ruins all attempts to use religion for social control, it makes a nonsense of ‘Moral leads’ and ‘we look to religion to give society some discipline’ – Jesus rejects it all. ‘My child your sins are forgiven’ blows it all out of the water. The rule of God demands we show love, generous love, not withhold love. It’s no accident that the very next episode in Mark is Jesus calling a tax collector to follow him and then eating at his house ‘with tax collectors and sinners’.
And lest we think that it’s easier to say your sins are forgiven than to say to someone paralysed, get up and walk, it wasn’t for making people walk that Jesus was crucified. When it came to cost – teaching people about forgiveness in the kingdom of God cost Jesus a cross.
Why do I think of this now? Maybe it was the recent announcement of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book this year, ‘Failure: What Jesus said about sin, mistakes and messing stuff up’. Not a bad choice I feel.
William