The Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity
“Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”
I said recently in a sermon that many of the readings we hear this time of year, as Advent looms on the horizon – the end of one, and the beginning of a new church year – seem to be focused on healing and many of them on forgiveness.
The way that the schedule of our readings is arranged every year, something that we call the lectionary, is no accident or haphazard order – the church through the millennia discerned shape of our church year and how the lessons that we encounter every year can be instructive for us by following a spiritual logic to shape our souls and convert our hearts Sunday by Sunday.
This long season that we are approaching the end of, the Trinity season, is, as I have said many times in the past, focused on our growth in Christ. The first half of the year from Advent to Trinity Sunday is focused on the work of Jesus in his life and ministry, while the second (we might say) is now about what Christ is doing in us, and us in him – or, to put it even more plainly, this time and the readings we hear is meant to make us think about how we are living as his followers.
And so there’s kind of a sense that as we approach the end of the year we come face to face with healing and forgiveness and the ways that Jesus brought people to encounter and know them in his time, so that we can think about how we have known, encountered, and shared forgiveness ourselves. It’s like a test – to think back over the last year, to think about our forgiveness of others, or the forgiveness which we need to ask from others; are we walking the walk, or just talking to the talk? And as we know forgiveness is a difficult test for our love, forgiveness is hard.
And so it’s interesting in the Gospel today that it is words of forgiveness that Jesus speaks to the paralyzed man who is brought to him; not words of physical healing, no words of encouragement, but forgiveness, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.” But even more curious than this is why Jesus says this to the young man. We don’t know, but perhaps we can infer that this young man didn’t ask his friends to carry him to Jesus, the young man didn’t himself crawl to find Jesus – but he was carried there by his friends. In fact we might even go as far as to infer that the young man may not have had faith in Jesus’ power to heal, but his friends did. “And just then some people were carrying a paralysed man lying on a bed. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.’”
And I think that this tells us something very, very important about the nature of our sin – which is to say our trespasses against one another, our virtue (viz. living for the love of God and neighbour), and forgiveness. And it’s Paul that helps us with this a little bit today.
We hear from Paul’s letter to Ephesians today, a letter written to the church in Ephesus perhaps during Paul’s imprisonment, and like all letters you can guess at the weak points of the Christian community in Ephesus by some of what Paul says, and it seems like the problem may have been unity. But it isn’t a scolding letter, rather Paul is laying out for them some of the shape of our Christian life together, and several times Paul reminds them – as he writes elsewhere – that through Christ we are one body. We hear in chapter four today Paul exhorting the Ephesians not to live alienated from God because of hardness of heart or ignorance, not trying to talk the talk of a follower of Jesus, but walking the walk of their former lives before Christ. Paul says that whatever and whoever we were before is to be put away because we have a new way of seeing the world, of seeing our neighbour, of even seeing ourselves, and we need to clothe ourselves in this understanding, “be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and [to] clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
And he goes on to say, “putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another.” But what Paul means here is that we are members – as in limbs – of one another; it is not that through Jesus we are bound together as a Christian community by some stated affiliation to a particular church organization, Paul is literally saying you are parts of one another’s bodies; the word member, μέλη, is the word you’d use to describe your arm or your leg or your hand. Speak the truth to your neighbour because your neighbour is part of your body, every bit as much as your arm is part of your body, and so to fail to love a neighbour, or to intentionally hurt a neighbour is no different than taking a saw to your own arm.
In our limited way of seeing things we think that our hurting someone else only hurts them, but it hurts us; just as when we do something self-destructive or hurtful it has a ripple effect because it’s not just ourselves we injure, but our neighbours, because our we are one with our neighbours. And I know this sounds abstract and weird, but think about a family and how the well-being of the parents even towards themselves impacts the well-being of the whole family; if a father struggles with a gambling addiction that addiction doesn’t harm only him, but it impacts financial stability, it impacts the time his children get to spend with him, the way they view him, the trust they have in him and others later in life.
But the good news is that the opposite is true – when the father or the mother is healthy and well, rooted in prayer and faith, forgiving and loving, the family prospers; when you in your heart are more inclined towards forgiveness and mercy, more in touch with God and not your own desires, others benefit, because others aren’t really others at all. It means that because we are one your burdens are my burdens and I can help you carry them them; maybe you can’t pray right now, maybe you feel no connection to God lately and you’re carrying an intolerable burden – but we are both parts of one body, I can be the friend that can help carry you, paralyzed as you are by fear, by doubt, by shame – to Jesus to find healing, and you can be that friend who can carry another.
It is the faith of the friends that brings Jesus to give the paralyzed man the healing he most truly needs – forgiveness – because he and his friends are one and his burdens are their burdens, and their faith, in his moment of weakness, can be his sustaining faith. The reason we think about sin, repentance, forgiveness is not because sin is some arbitrary grievance for God but because sin hurts the very things – the very body – that God most loves and treasures, and the Gospel today is a reminder of God’s treasuring of that one body, because it is a Gospel that reminds us that even though – and even when – we are paralyzed by our temptations, our doubts, fears, shames, hurts or whatever…even when our trespasses have hurt not only ourselves but our neighbours…God knows our needs before we ask, God knows the thing we need the most of which we may even be ignorant, and God pre-empts us as he did the man’s friends, with words of love and forgiveness.
But the challenge - the test that this goodness gives us - the test we really ought to walk away today and contemplate, as we journey into these final weeks of the church year, is that test of whether, receiving that pre-emptive forgiveness that’s given before we even ask, we will go out into our day our week and the coming month and ourselves be so quick to forgive another.
