01.13. THE FORGIVING SON OF MAN

Chapter 13 THE FORGIVING SON OF MAN

" That ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith He to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house."

Matthew 9:6 The great example of our Lord’s teaching, which we call the Sermon on the Mount, is followed in this and the preceding chapter by a similar collection of His works. These are arranged by the evangelist with some care in three groups, each consisting of three miracles, and separated from each other by other matter. The miracle to which our text refers is the last member of the second triad, of which the others are the stilling of the tempest and the casting out of demons from the two men in the country of the Gadarenes.

One can discern a certain likeness in these three incidents. In all of them our Lord appears as the Peace bringer. But the spheres in which He works are different in each. The calm which was breathed over the stormy lake was peace, but of a lower kind than that which filled the souls of the demoniacs when the power that agitated them and made discord within had been cast out. Even that peace was lower in kind than that which brought repose by assurance of pardon to this poor paralytic. Forgiveness is a loftier blessing than even the casting out of demons. The manifestation of power and love rises steadily to a climax. The text subordinates the mere miracle to the authoritative assurance of pardon, and thus teaches us that the most important part of the incident is not the healing of disease, but the accompanying forgiveness of sins. Here we have noteworthy instruction given by our Lord Himself as to the relation between His miracles and that perpetual work of His, which He is doing through the ages and today, and will do for us, if we will let Him. It towers high above the miracle, and the miracle is honored by being its attestation. We deal, then, with this narrative as suggesting great principles over and above the miraculous fact.

I Man’s deepest need is forgiveness.

How strangely irrelevant and wide of the mark seems Christ’s response to the eager zeal of the bearers and the pleading silence of the sufferer ! " Son," — or as the original might more accurately and tenderly be rendered, "Child," — "be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee." That sounded far away from their want. It was far away from their wish ; but it was the direct answer to the man’s true need. Possibly in this case the disease was the result of early profligacy —

"A sin of flesh avenged in kind."

Probably, too, the paralytic felt, whatever his four kindly neighbors may have done, that what he needed most was pardon ; for Christ casts not His pearls before eyes that cannot see their luster, nor offers His gift of pardon to hearts unwounded by the consciousness of sin. The long hours of compelled inactivity may have been not unvisited by remorseful memories, and the conscience may have Stirred in proportion as the limbs stiffened. Be that as it may, it is to be observed that our Lord points to the miracle as a proof of His power to pardon, given not to the palsied man, but to the cavilers standing by, as if the former needed no proof, but had grasped the assurance while it was yet unverified. Thus both Christ’s declaration and the swift acceptance of it seem to imply that in that motionless form stretched on its pallet an inward tempest of penitence and longing raged, which could only be stilled by something far deeper than any bodily healing. At all events, the plain lesson from Christ’s treatment of the case is that our deepest need is pardon. Is not our relation to God the most important and deep reaching relation that we sustain ? If that be right, will not every thing else come right ? As long as that is wrong, will not everything be wrong? And is it not true that, whatever may be our surface diversities, we all have this in common, that we are sinners ? King and clown, philosopher and fool, cultured and ignorant, are alike in this, that " all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Royal robes and fustian jackets cover the same human heart, which in all is gone astray, and in all writhes more or less consciously under the same unrest, the consequence and token of separation from God.

Hence is seen the wisdom of Christ and the adaptation of His gospel to all men, in that it does not trifle with symptoms, but goes direct to the deep lying and often latent disease. It is waste time and energy to dally with surface and consequential evils. The only way of making the fruit good is to make the tree good, and then it will bring forth according to its kind. Cooling draughts and waterbeds are alleviations for the sick, but the cure must be something more potent. The fountal source of sorrow is sin, for even to the most superficial observation, the greater part of every man’s misery comes either from his own wrongdoing or from that of others; and, for the rest of it, the judgment of faith which accepts the declaration of God regards it as needed because of sin, in order to discipline and purify. The first thing to do in order to stanch men’s wounds and redress their misery is to make them pure, and the first thing to do in order to make them pure is to assure them of God’s forgiveness for their past impurity. So the sarcasms which are often launched at religious men for " taking tracts to people when they want bread," and the like, are excessively shallow, and simply indicate that the critic has but superficially diagnosed the disease, and is therefore woefully wrong about the needed medicine. God forbid that we should say a word that even seemed to depreciate the value of other forms of philanthropic effort, or to be lacking in sympathy and admiration for the enthusiasm that fills and guides many self sacrificing and earnest workers amid the squalor and vice of our complex and half barbarous " civilization." It is the plain duty of Christian people heartily to rejoice in and to help all such work, and to recognize it as good and blessed, being as it is a direct consequence of the Christian view of the solidarity of humanity and of the stewardship of possession. But we must go a great deal deeper than aesthetic, or intellectual, or political, or economic reforms can reach before we touch the real reason why men are miserable. The black wellhead must be stanched, or it is useless trying to drain the bog and make its quaking morass solid, fertile soil. We shall effectually and certainly cure the misery only when we begin where the misery begins, and where Christ began, and deal first with sin. The true "saviour of society " is he who can go to his paralyzed and wretched brother, and, as a minister declaring God’s heart, can say to him, " Be of good cheer ; thy sins be forgiven thee." Then the palsy will go out of the shrunken limbs, and a new energy will come into therm, and the sufferer will rise, take up his bed, and walk.

II Forgiveness is exclusively a Divine act.

We read that there were sitting by, with jealous and therefore blind eyes, a company of learned men, religious formalists of the first water, gathered, as one of the ether evangelists tells us, out of every corner of the land, as a kind of ecclesiastical inquisition, or board of triers, to report on this young Galilean Teacher, whom His disciples unauthorizedly called Rabbi. They were unmoved by the dewy pity in Christ’s gaze as by the nascent hope beginning to swim up into the paralytic’s dim eyes. But they had a keen scent for heresy, and so they fastened with sure instinct on the one questionable point, " This man speaketh blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but God only?" Formalists, whose religion is mainly a bundle of red tape tied round men’s limbs to keep them from getting at things that they would like, are blind as bats to the radiant beauty of lofty goodness, and insensible as rocks to the wants of sad humanity. But still these scribes and doctors were perfectly right in the principle which they conceived Jesus to be outraging. Forgiveness is an exclusively Divine act. Of course it is so. Sin is the perversion of our relation to God, The word " sin " implies God, and is meaningless unless the deed be thought of in reference to Him. The same act may be regarded as being sin, or crime, or vice. As sin, it has to do with God; as crime, it has to do with public law and with other men ; as vice, it has to do with the standard of morality, and may affect myself alone. The representatives of national law can pardon crime. The impersonal tribunal of morals is silent as to the forgiveness of vice. God alone has to do with vice or crime considered as sin, and He alone against whom only we have sinned can pardon our transgression.

God only can forgive sins, because the essential in forgiveness is not the remission of external penalty, but the unrestrained flow of love from the offended heart of Him who has been sinned against. When you fathers and mothers forgive your children, does the pardon consist simply in sparing the rod ? Does it not much rather consist in this, that your love is neither deflected nor embittered any more, by reason of your child’s wrongdoing, but pours on the little rebel, as before the fault ? So God’s forgiveness is at bottom, " Child, there is nothing in My heart to thee but pure and perfect love." Our sins fill the sky with mists, through which the sun itself cannot but look a red ball of lurid fire. But it shines on the upper side of the mists all the same and all the time, and thins them away and scatters them utterly, and shines forth in its own brightness on the rejoicing heart. Pardon is God’s love, unchecked and unembittered, granted to the wrongdoer. That is a Divine act exclusively. The carping doctors were quite right ; "no man can forgive sins but God only."

Such forgiveness may coexist with the retention of some penalties for the forgiven sin. " Thou wast a God that forgavest them, and Thou tookest vengeance on their inventions." When sins are crimes they are generally punished. The penalties of sins considered as vices or breaches of the standard of morality are always left. For the evil thing done has entered into the complex whole of the doer’s past, and its "natural issues" are not averted, though their character is modified, when they are borne in consciousness of God’s forgiveness. Then they become merciful chastisement, and therefore tokens of the Father’s love. The true penalty of evil, considered as sin, is wholly abolished for the man whom God forgives, for that penalty is separation from God, which is the only real death, and he who is pardoned and knows that he is, knows also that he is joined to God by the pouring on him, unworthy, of that infinitely placable and patient love. Pardon is love rising above the black dam which we have piled up between us and God, and flooding our hearts with its glad waters.

We might add here, though it be somewhat apart from our direct purpose, that the forgiveness of sin is a possibility, in spite of modern declarations that it is not. Many confident voices say so now, and when we venture to ask, with the humility which becomes a mere believer in Christianity when addressing our modern wise men, why forgiveness is impossible, we are referred to the iron links of necessary connection between a man’s present and his past, and assured that in such a universe as we live in, neither God nor man can prevent the seed sown from springing, and the sower from reaping what he has sown. But we may take heart to answer that we, too, believe that " whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," and then may ask what that has to do with the Scripture doctrine of forgiveness, which leaves that solemn law quite untampered with, in so far as the iron links which the objectors contemplate are concerned, and proclaims this as the very heart of God’s pardon, that the sinful man, who forsakes his sin and trusts in Christ’s sacrifice, will be treated as if his sin were non existent, in so far as it could interfere with the flow of the full tide of God’s love. But we need a definite conveyance of this Divine forgiveness to ourselves. If we have ever been down into the cellars of our own hearts and seen the ugly things that creep and sting there, a vague trust in a vague mercy from a half hidden God will not be enough for us. The mere peradventure that God is merciful is too shadowy to grasp, and too flimsy for a troubled conscience to lean on. No thing short of the King’s own pardon, sealed with His own seal, is valid ; and unless we can come into actual contact with God, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude from . His own lips His assurance of forgiveness, we shall not have enough for our souls’ needs.

III Christ claims and exercises this Divine prerogative of forgiveness. The fact that Jesus answered the muttered thought of these critics might have convinced them that He exercised other Divine prerogatives, and read men’s hearts with a clearer eye than ours. He must be rightly addressed as " Lord" of whom it can be said, " There is not a word in my tongue, but, lo. Thou knowest it altogether." If He possess the Divine faculty of reading hearts. He is entitled to exercise the Divine power of forgiving what He discerns there. But mark His answer to the objectors. He admits their premises completely. They said, " No man can forgive sins, but God only." Now, if Jesus were only a man like the rest of us, standing in the same relation to God as other saints, prophets, and teachers, and having nothing more to do with God’s forgiveness than simply to say to a troubled heart, as any of us might do, " Brother, cheer up ; I tell you that God forgives you and all who seek His pardon ; " if His words to the paralytic were, in His intention, only ministerial and declaratory ; — then He was bound, by all the obligations of a religious Teacher, to turn to the objectors and tell them that they misapprehended His meaning. Why did He not say to them in effect, "I speak blasphemies ! No, I do not mean that. I know that God alone forgives, and I am only telling our poor brother here, as you might also do, that He does. The blasphemy exists only in your misunderstanding of My meaning " ? But Christ’s answer is not in the least like this, though every sane and devout teacher of religion would certainly have answered so. In effect He says, " You are quite right. No man can forgive sins, but God only. I forgive sins. Then whom think ye that I, the Son of man, am ? I claim to forgive sins. It is easy to make such a claim, easier than to claim power to raise this sick man from his bed, because you can see whether his rising follows the word, whereas the other claim cannot be visibly sub-substantiated. Both sentences are equally easy to say, both things equally impossible for a man to do ; only the doing of the one is visible, and of the other is not. I will do the visible impossibility, and then you can judge whether I have the right which I allege to do the invisible one."

Clearly there is in this answer of Jesus a distinct claim to forgive sins as God does. The objection which He meets and the manner of meeting it alike forbid us to take " power to forgive sins " in this context in any but the highest Divine sense. Now, this claim seems to bring us face to face with a very distinct alternative, which I venture to urge on your consideration. To offer the choice of being impaled on one or other horn of a dilemma is not the best way of convincing hesitating minds of the truth ; but still it is fair, and to some may be cogent, to say that a very weighty " either ... or " is here forced on us. Either the Pharisees were right, and Jesus Christ, the meek, the humble, the religious Sage, the Pattern of all self-abnegation, the sweet reasonableness of whose teaching eighteen centuries have not exhausted nor obeyed, was an audacious blasphemer, or He was God manifest in the flesh. The whole incident compels us, in all honest interpretation, to take His words to the sick man as the Pharisees took them, as being the claim to exercise an exclusively Divine prerogative. He assumed power to blot out a man’s transgressions, and vindicated the assumption, not on the ground that He was but declaring or bringing the Divine forgiveness, but on the ground that He could do what no mere man could. If Jesus Christ said and did anything like what this narrative ascribes to Him — and if we know anything at all about Him, we know that He did so — there is no hypothesis as to Him which can save His character for the reverence of mankind, but that which sees in Him the Word made flesh, the world’s Judge, from whom the world may receive, and from whom alone it can certainly receive, Divine forgiveness.

IV Jesus Christ brings visible witnesses of His invisible power to forgive sins. Of course the miracle of healing the paralytic was such evidence in very complete and special form, inasmuch as it and the forgiveness which it was wrought to attest were equally Divine acts, beyond the reach of man’s power. We may note, too, that our Lord here teaches us the relative importance of these two, subordinating the miraculous healing to the higher work of giving pardon. But we may permissibly extend the principle, and point to the subsidiary external effects of Christianity in the material and visible sphere of things as attestations of its inward power, which only he who feels his burden of sin falling from his shoulders at the cross knows as a matter of experience. The manifest effects of the Christian faith on individuals, and of the less complete Christian faith which is diffused through society, do stand as strong proofs of the reality of Christ’s claim to exercise the power to forgive. The visible results of every earnest effort to carry the gospel to men, and the effects produced in the lives of the recipients, do create an immense presumption in favour of the reality of the power which the gospel proclaims that Jesus exercises. We may admit the extravagance, the coarseness, the narrowness, which too often deform such efforts, and dwarf the spiritual stature of their converts ; but when the bitterest criticism has blown away much as froth, is there not left in the cup a great deal which looks and tastes very like the new wine of the kingdom ? Passions tamed, hopes hallowed, new and noble direction given to aspirations, self subdued, the charities of life springing like flowers where were briers and thorns or waste barrenness, homes made Bethels, houses of God, that were pandemonium’s, — these and the like are the witnesses that Jesus Christ advanced no rash claims, nor raised hopes which He could not fulfill, when He said, "Thy sins be forgiven thee." Wherever Christ’s forgiving power enters a heart, life is beautified, purified, and ennobled, and secondary material benefits follows in its train. We have a right to claim the difference between so called Christian and non Christian lands as attestations of the reality of Christ’s saving work. It is a valid answer to much of the doubt of today ; — If you wish to see His credentials, look around. His own answer to John’s messengers still remains applicable : " Go and tell John the things that ye see and hear." There are miracles, palpable and visible, still wrought by Jesus Christ, more convincing than were those to which the forerunner was directed when his faith faltered. It is still true that " His name, through faith in His name, makes men whole," and that in presence of unbelievers, who may test the cure. Still the dead are raised, deaf ears are opened, dormant faculties are quickened, and, in a thousand channels, the quick spirit of life flows from Jesus, and " everything lives whither soever that river Cometh." Let any system of belief or of no belief do the like if it can. This rod has budded, at all events. Let the modern successors of Jannes and Jambres, who have found out that Christianity is a " creed outworn," and Jesus an exhausted Source of power, do the same with their enchantments.

These thoughts yield two very plain lessons. One is addressed to professing followers of Jesus Christ. You say that you have received in the depths of your spirit the touch of His forgiving hand, blotting out your sins. No body can tell whether you have or not, but by observing your life. Does it look as if your profession were true ? The world takes its notions of Christianity a great deal more from you, its professors, than it does from preachers or apologists. You are the books of evidences which most men read. See to it that your lives worthily represent the redeeming power of your Lord, and that men, looking at your beautiful, holy, and gentle life, may be constrained to say, " There must be something in the religion that makes him such a man." The other lesson is for us all. Since we are all alike in that forgiveness is our deepest need, let us seek to have that prime and fundamental necessity supplied first of all; and since Jesus Christ assures us that He exercises the Divine prerogative of forgiveness, and gives us materials for verifying His claim by the visible results of His power, let us all go to Him for the pardon which we need most of all our needs, and which He and only He can give us. Do not waste your time in trying to purify the stream of your lives, miles down from its source ; but let Him heal it, and make the bitter waters sweet at the Fountainhead. Do not fancy, friend, that your palsy or your fever, your paralysis of will towards good, or the diseased ardor with which you follow evil and the consequent restless misery, can be healed anywhere besides. Go to Christ, the forgiving Christ, and let Him lay His hand upon you, and from His own sweet and infallible lips listen to the blessed words that shall work like a charm in all your nature, " Son, be of good cheer ; thy sins be forgiven thee ; " " Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole ; depart in peace." Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing. Then limitations, sorrows, and the diseases of the spirit shall pass away, and forgiveness will bear fruit in joy and power, in holiness, health, and peace.