When I see a bumper sticker, I like to pull up along side the car and see if the message fits the driver. Sometimes it's a surprise. I saw an off-color bumper sticker on a car. I pulled up along side, and saw a little old lady driving. It makes you wonder what's happening to our world.
Jean saw a car with a bumper sticker on it that said, "Honk if you love Jesus." So she pulled up along side and honked, and the man flipped her off. So you never know.
I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Life is too short to feel guilty." I couldn't see who was driving the car, she was going too fast, and I couldn't catch up with her. I guess she also believed that life is too short to obey the law.
I got to thinking about that phrase, "Life is too short to feel guilty." It sounds like it could have come from one of those semi-religious, quasi-psychological enterprises that crop up every now and then. And if so, then I am really going to be embarrassed. But on the other hand, "life is too short to feel guilty."
I think what it says is true. Maybe these semi-religious, quasi-psychological enterprises have arisen, and flourished, in our time because the Church has forgotten that Jesus came into the world to forgive sinners. The Church is in the business of proclaiming that good news, because "life is too short to feel guilty."
Let's look at our text for this morning, the healing of the paralytic. It raises all kinds of questions right off, if you read it carefully. It says, "Jesus was at home in Capernaum." Well I thought his home was in Nazareth. Maybe he had a condo in Capernaum. Which makes sense, if you were from Nazareth.
Anyway, he is at "home" in Capernaum. The crowd gathers to hear him. They are stacked into the house in great numbers. In fact, they are overflowing the house, out through the door, onto the lawn, sitting on the window sills, hanging from the rafters. And among this crowd there are some scribes. They are here at the beginning of the gospel, and they will follow him throughout the story, appearing every time he preaches, among the crowd. Every time Jesus gathers people around him to preach, they will be in the background, gathering evidence for the inevitable arrest and trial.
Now here comes a group of four men carrying a paralytic to see Jesus. They can't get into the house, it's too crowded. The crowd won't part to make a path for them. So they climb to the roof, take off part of the roof, and lower the man right onto Jesus' lap.
Now the text says that Jesus "saw their faith." The faith that Jesus sees, according to the grammar of the text, is the faith of the four men who brought the paralytic there, not the paralytic himself. Which raises another interesting question, will my faith help somebody else? Can faith be vicarious? I don't know. But I do know what people have said. They've said, "I've felt your prayers." Or, "I was uplifted by the knowledge of your concern and prayers for me." I know that Archbishop Tutu, in South Africa, said many times that what kept him going in the fight against apartheid during the struggle in South Africa, for all those years, were the prayers of people around the world that he felt uplifting him and giving him courage.
So when Jesus said that their faith had healed the paralytic, what did he mean? Elsewhere he will say, "Your faith has made you well." But is he saying here, "Your friends faith has made you well"? Think about it.
But that is not really what this text is about. What it is about is Jesus forgiving the sins of the paralytic, though nobody has said anything about the paralytic being a sinner. But of course we know that in those days they believed that physical illnesses and deformities were punishment for sin.
But people in our day say something like that as well. They make the same case, only they say it is psychosomatic. They say that we can punish ourselves physically by the way we think. If we think bad thoughts, if we suppress bad things, we are going to pay for it physically. It will do harm to our body. That's axiomatic now. It's called psychosomatic medicine.
Some people turn to this text from the perspective of psychosomatic medicine, and interpret the story saying, Jesus is the great diagnostician. He just looks at this guy and he knows immediately that he is laboring under repressed guilt. So Jesus forgives him, and he is healed.
The problem is, that's not what the story says. You have to read it carefully. The story says first he forgives his sins, then he enters a dispute with the scribes, and then he heals the paralytic.
So there are really two miracles here. One is the forgiveness of sins, which is what the story is all about. That's what gets the attention in the story. The other is the healing of the physical problem, which no one pays much attention to, except of course to ooh and aah, which they always do at the occasion of a healing.
The story is called, "The Healing of the Paralytic," but it's really about the forgiveness of sins. This guy falls into Jesus' lap. Everybody sees it. Now Jesus has to do something. He's right on his lap. All eyes are on Jesus. He already has a reputation as a healer. This is only the second chapter of the gospel. In the first chapter he healed, among other people, a leper. That's why the crowd is there. They know his reputation. They've come to see a miracle of healing.
So the crowd is there looking at Jesus now. But Jesus is looking at the scribes in the back of the room, with their notebooks. He continues to look at them, and stretches out his hand, and touches the paralytic, and says, "Your sins are forgiven."
But look. That does not heal the paralytic. He is still paralyzed. To say, "Your sins are forgiven," doesn't heal him. What it does is shock the scribes. Which is exactly what Jesus intended to do. The scribes, when they hear that, gasp. They start to write furiously. Jesus says to them, "Why do you question all of this? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, `Your sins are forgiven,' or, `Rise, take up your pallet and go home'?" Then comes the punch line. "The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins."
That's what this story is about. He has already healed. That's not a big deal. That's why he says it is easier to heal than it is to forgive sins. Healers were no big deal in those days. There must have been healers by the hundreds in Palestine in those days. But only God can forgive sins. So who is this man?
The scribes are back there writing, this man thinks he's God, this man says he's sent from God, this man thinks he is the Son of God, or something blasphemous. They write it all down in order to get rid of him. But Mark writes this incident down in his gospel in order for you to come to him. "For the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins." That's why he came. And "life is too short to feel guilty."
Now the first thing that needs to be said in talking about guilt and sin is that some people ought to feel guilty. I mean, they have done terrible things. They have hurt people. They have thought only of themselves. They have manipulated people. They have used people. They have done those things that they ought not to have done, and they have not done those things that they should have done. So guilt, in their case, is appropriate. And sometimes they actually feel it. When they do, it is the most human and the most healthy response to what they have done. So in their case you could say, "life is too short not to feel guilty."
Which is the point that Carl Menninger made in his famous book, Whatever Became of Sin. Menninger pointed out that guilt isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is a sign of conscience. A conscience is a sign of a moral individual. A moral individual is a fully human person.
Someone who can't feel guilt isn't really human. They are sub-human. Guilt is good when it motivates change. That's what it is for. Guilt is good if it gets you to live a better life than the life that you are living now.
A man came to a therapist and complained of feeling guilty. The therapist shared this with me. He said he was feeling guilty and wanted to get rid of it. It was messing up his life, making him depressed all the time. In the therapy it was revealed that the person was doing something that violated his sense of right and wrong. He wanted the therapist to get rid of the guilt so that he could continue to live the life that he was living. The therapist said to him, if you want to get rid of the guilt, to stop doing what is causing it.
So there are some, an increasing number I suspect in our time, in this secular age, who know nothing about guilt, and who ought to feel guilty. It would do them some good. And it would do society good as well. We would raise the level of quality of life in this society by a great deal if there were the kind of healthy guilt that motivates us to live better lives.
But there are those who have not done anything wrong, and who still feel guilty. Their problem is not a problem of conscience. Their problem is a problem of the spirit. You can make the distinction between a moral problem and a spiritual problem. A moral problem is relatively simple. It is a matter of the will. Just stop doing what you're doing. If it is doing you harm, just stop it. You know what you ought to do to do good? Start doing it. It's a matter of the will.
A spiritual problem is complex. It's a matter of your relationship with God. How do I have a relationship with God? Well I wonder if you have noticed that psychology emerged in this world when the religious perspective declined. That was at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. With the decline of a religious outlook on life, people turned to what was available, to the secular science for answers to what was wrong with them and what they could do about it. Before that time people turned to religion for the answers.
Religion said the secret of human life, the reason that you are here, is to have a relationship with God. If you don't have that relationship, then there is going to be an emptiness in your life. You are going to feel something, and that feeling was identified as guilt. In other words, if there is something wrong with your life, something missing, what you feel is guilt. God is missing from your life. You are made for God. You are made in God's image. You will be restless, you will be ill at ease, you will be dis-eased, until you rest in God. That is the religious answer to the human condition, reconciliation with God.
But you don't hear that much anymore, not even in church. Which is an indication of how vast the influence of secular science has been in interpreting what life is all about. Secular therapy is good, and God uses it. But I couldn't help notice this. When the world turned from a religious understanding of human life, they got rid of God, but they didn't get rid of guilt. In fact, if anything, the incidence of guilt has increased in that time. Only now people use another language for it. They use the language of science. They use the language of psychology. But whatever language they use to describe the symptoms, they have remained the same in every age. What you don't hear in this age is a religious diagnosis of the problem, you are separated from God. Which in the Bible is what is meant by sin. And what you need is to hear that you are forgiven, which in the Bible is what it means by reconciliation.
So the message that you are supposed to hear, the reason the Church is here in the first place, is to proclaim that message of forgiveness. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever would believe in him should not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world through him would be saved."
That's the way the Gospel of John puts it. The Gospel of Mark puts it much more simply. "The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins."
When Jesus talked about what forgiveness means, what it looks like, he used the analogy of family reunion. I think he did that because he knew that everyone of us would know what that means. Even if we have had lousy parents, we can understand what it would mean to have a homecoming, a family reunion. Even if we are estranged from homes that we do not want to return to. Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again." Many of us have no desire at all to go home again, to the homes that we left. But we still know what he is talking about. We know what it should have been like. We know what we wish it had been like.
He even spoke of Christian life in terms of family. He looked past his mother, his brothers and sisters, and pointed to the crowd, and said, "Here are my mother, and my brothers and sisters." A new family. And when he ate with his disciples, he ate with them in a family meal. He gathered them around the table the way a family gathers around the table. Then he told us to do the same thing.
And every time we celebrate Holy Communion, we gather around a family table, because the Church is to be the new family. And for some, it will be the only genuinely human family they will ever know. Which is why I am made bold to tell this story.
A woman went through the trauma of divorce. She was the granddaughter of a Baptist minister, whom she loved and deeply respected. Her grandfather, in fact, married her. But during this time of trial in her life, this painful period, she avoided seeing him, as she avoided seeing all the other members of her family. After her divorce she dreaded now having to see them, but she knew that she had to. And it happened. She described the way it happened.
I remember starting to walk up a long, grassy hill to where he stood. When he saw me, he immediately started down the hill toward me. Before I could think of anything adequate to say, he hugged me, and said, "You know, I have been wondering what I said wrong?" I collapsed into his arms and wept.
When I finally gained control, I looked into his own smiling, wet-eyed
face. I still couldn't think of a word to say. And he didn't say a word
either. But with his arm around my shoulder, we just walked together up
the hill and back into the family.1
That's the same story that Jesus told about a son, feeling guilty, afraid to come home, afraid to face the father. But when he had the courage to do that, and to ask forgiveness, he found the father coming down the road to meet him.
I tell you, the Son of man has authority on earth to welcome you back into the family.
1. From Don Shelby