Now Jesus was traveling village to village across the countryside. He would preach in the synagogues and he healed people and drove out demons wherever he went. All along the way crowds were growing but he refused to settle down and put up shop in one place forming a family business the way people expected. 

Jesus returned home to Capernaum and by then the crowds were so huge that there was no longer room inside nor even outside near the door. While Jesus was in the midst of preaching there came a crash as someone tore through the roof. A group of friends lowered a paralyzed man through the new hole in the roof.

Jesus says to the man, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” “What’s this?” everyone asks. “Where’s that famous healing we’ve heard so much about?” Some legal experts were there grumbling amongst themselves. “Who did this Jesus think he was? He insulted God. How can he claim to forgive sins?”

“Wait just a minute,” Jesus says, “Do you think it’s so hard to say your sins are forgiven? How about if I say take up your mat and walk? Let me tell you this: the human has the authority to forgive sins.”

Right then and there Jesus turns to the paralyzed man, helps him up and the man takes his mat and walks out.

If you remember this story, then it’s likely that what you remember is the people breaking through the roof and lowering a man in. You may have missed the fact that Jesus was preaching at the time and not even healing people. The man not only jumped the line, but completely interrupted what Jesus was doing.

What drew my attention today was that Jesus forgave the man’s sins. I was reading a book about sin, healing, and grace by Nadia Bolz-Weber called Accidental Saints. I felt pulled to preach on this topic, but I thought about preaching a feel-good sermon on Psalm 86 from the Revised Common Lectionary about God always being with you. I knew the leading was not going away when sin and forgiveness showed up again in this month’s Bible study.

Back to the story, verses three and four seem to point to a request for healing the man from paralysis. His paralysis is mentioned twice in as many verses. You are likely to remember the healing, but the forgiveness of sins may have slipped your mind. I worry that this story smacks of ableism. Is this the same Jesus that accepts people as they are?

When Jesus forgave the man’s sins people were upset, but Jesus makes a point by healing the man. Saying someone is forgiven is easy. Healing paralysis is hard, but if Jesus can do the hard thing, then surely the easy is within his reach. Jesus says the human has authority to forgive sins. Generally, we translate the human as the Son of Man or the Human One. Listen to how we put capital letters in and turn into a title. Jesus may be less giving himself an honorific and more trying to make a point about being human like everyone else.

Frankly, this talk about sin makes me uncomfortable. Just saying “Let’s take a moment to talk about sin” makes me feel like a caricature of a Southern Baptist minister. What’s more the ancient tendency to tie sin with disability is problematic. But it’s important to admit that we make mistakes and we are offered grace and forgiveness. As Quakers we have a tendency towards utopianism. We see a perfect world and must blind ourselves to our failings. The good news is that we are freed from the weight of a Calvinist sense of the total depravity of humanity. The bad news is that we have a hard time admitting mistakes. If humanity is good then maybe it’s not OK to admit we have failed. If we are going to break through a pseudo-community into true community we must move from where everyone is nice to each other and people pretend not to be hurt by one another into a world where we must admit that we sometimes let each other down.[i] At the Yearly Meeting we were reminded by the speaker, Christy Randazzo, that sin is when we become disconnected from each other.

I grew up in the Catholic Church. Every Sunday we sang about the Lamb of God. I learned a subtle but momentously different pattern to how people sang this song. Some sang Lamb of God who takes away the Sin of the world and some who sang Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The Sin of the world is the corruption caused by systemic evil. Humanity loses self-awareness and gives into greed. Humans become disconnected from one another. Sins imply a multitude of individual mistakes. However, we need to be aware of the systemic as well as the individual. We may have the best of intentions when we steward our money or try to feed our families healthy food. Yet, the cheap items we get may save us money at the expense of the suffering of others. The farms and ranches where our food comes from may rely on the destruction of wilderness or misuse of precious water. It is very difficult to live in the world without hurting anyone or anything. 

Even as we attempt to rebalance the definition of Sin to include systems of oppression, greed and destruction, we cannot deny that we fail and let one another down on an individual level. We let our egos guide our actions when we need to consider others and the effect on the whole. We are disconnected from the world, God, and each other. We make too many commitments, and our word fails to be our bond. Emotion derails our reasoning. We let our self-righteousness overwhelm our mercy.

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, Jesus teaches us about confronting one another when we hurt each other. We must also take care to avoid disciplining others for the wrong reasons. Be aware that you may gain satisfaction from judging others. Confronting people in private is key because it can save the pride of the person called to account and makes it easier for the person to change without outside pressure leading to retrenchment.

Jesus finishes by saying that we have the power to forgive or not on a cosmic scale. It is our duty to offer forgiveness and/or guidance. We are empowered to forgive not merely as individuals but on God’s behalf too.

Part of being freed from our mistakes and accepting the grace of God is telling one another what we are loathe to admit. For me that’s admitting that I have failed in the past and that I will let you down at some point in the future. 

Yet the word of forgiveness is what Jesus calls the easy part. Nadia Bolz-Weber explains the process of grace and forgiveness this way:

“it is difficult to create this thing that frees us from the bondage of self. We cannot create for ourselves God’s word of grace. We must tell it to each other. It’s a terribly inconvenient and oftentimes uncomfortable way for things to happen. Were we able to receive the word of God through pious, private devotion — through quiet personal time with God — the Christian life would be far less messy. But, as Paul tells us, faith comes through hearing, and hearing implies having someone right there doing the telling.”[ii] Nadia also tells us that she felt it necessary to tell her congregation that she would let them down at some point. I should let you know the same. I am not perfect and will let you down in some way.

We can ask forgiveness. We don’t have to say, “Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.” We can start with a simple, “I messed up.” We don’t have priests like the Catholics do. We can turn to one another. We rely on the grace of God to work through us ordinary, flawed people and to work through other ordinary, flawed people to bring grace to us. God takes our imperfect offering and turns it to blessedness. This is the miracle of God’s grace.

Queries

• When have you had God work through you offering grace?
• When has God offered you grace working through another?

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[i] pg 75, Bolz-Weber, Nadia, Accidental Saints

[ii] pg 165