'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.'--MATT. ix. 6.
The great example of our Lord's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is
followed, in this and the preceding chapter, by a similar collection
of His works of healing. These are divided into three groups, each
consisting of three members. This miracle is the last of the second
triad, of which the other two members are the miraculous stilling
of the tempest and the casting out of the demons from the men in the
country of the Gergesenes.
One may discern a certain analogy in these three members of this
central group. In all of them our Lord appears as the peace-bringer.
But the spheres are different. The calm which was breathed over the
stormy lake is peace of a lower kind than that which filled the soul
of the demoniacs when the power that made discord within had been
cast out. Even that peace was lower in kind than that which brought
sweet repose in the assurance of pardon to this poor paralytic.
Forgiveness speaks of a loftier blessing than even the casting out
of demons. The manifestation of power and love steadily rises to a
climax.
The most important part of this story, then, is not the mere healing
of the disease, but the forgiveness of sins which accompanies it.
And the large teaching which our Lord gives as to the relation
between His miracles and His standing work, His ordinary work which
He has been doing all through the ages, which He is doing to-day,
which He is ready to do for you and me if we will let Him, towers
high above the mere miracle, which is honoured by being the signal
attestation of that work.
Therefore I would turn to this story now, not for the sake of
dealing with the mere miraculous event, but in order to draw the
important lessons from it which lie upon its very surface.
I. The first thought that is suggested here is that our deepest need
is forgiveness.
How strangely irrelevant and beside the mark, at first sight, seems
the answer which Christ gives to the eager zeal and earnestness of
the man and his bearers. Christ's word is 'Son,' or as the original
might more literally and even more tenderly be rendered, 'Child--be
of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.' That seemed far away from
their want. It _was_ far from their wish, but yet it was the
shortest road to its accomplishment. Christ here goes straight to
the heart of the necessity, when, passing by the disease for the
moment, He speaks the great word of pardon. The palsy was probably
the result of the sufferer's vice, and probably, too, he felt,
whatever may have been his friends' wishes for him, that he needed
forgiveness most. Such a conclusion as to his state of mind seems a
fair inference from our Lord's words to him, for Christ would never
have offered forgiveness to an impenitent or indifferent heart.
So we may learn that our chief and prime need is forgiveness. Amid
all our clamours and hungry needs, that is our deepest. Is not a
man's chief relation in this world his relation to God? Is not that
the most important thing about all of us? If that be wrong, will not
everything be wrong? If that be right, will not everything come right?
And is it not true that for you and me, and for all our fellows,
whatever be the surface diversities of character, civilisation,
culture, taste and the like, there is one deep experience common to
every human spirit, and that is the fact, and in some sense more or
less acutely the consciousness of the fact, that 'we have sinned,
and come short of the glory of God'?
There is the fontal source of all sorrow, for even to the most
superficial observation ninety per cent., at any rate, of man's
misery comes either from his own or from others' wrongdoing, and for
the rest, it is regarded in the eye of faith as being sorrow that is
needful because of sin, in order to discipline and to purify. But
here stands the fact, that king and clown, philosopher and fool, men
of culture and men of ignorance, all of us, through all the ages,
manifest the unity of our nature in this--I was going to say most
chiefly--that lapses from the path of rectitude, and indulgence in
habits, thoughts, feelings, and actions, which even our consciences
tell us are wrong, characterise us all.
Hence the profound wisdom of Christ and of His Gospel in that, when
it begins the task of healing, it does not peddle and potter on the
surface, but goes straight to the heart, with true instinct flies at
the head, like a wise physician pays little heed to secondary and
unimportant symptoms, but grapples with the disease, makes the tree
good, and leaves the good tree to make, as it will, the fruit good.
The first thing to do to heal men's misery, is to make them pure; and
the first step in the great method by which a man can be made pure,
is to assure him of a divine forgiveness for the past. So the sneers
that we often hear about Christian 'philanthropists taking tracts to
people when they want soup,' and the like, are excessively shallow
sneers, and indicate nothing more than this, that the critic has
superficially diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about the
remedy. God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to
depreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt
upon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for the
enthusiasm that fills and guides many an earnest man and woman, working
amongst the squalid vice of our great cities and of our complex and
barbarous civilisation to-day. I would recognise all their work as
good and blessed; but, oh! dear brethren, it deals with the surface,
and you will have to go a great deal deeper down than æsthetic, or
intellectual, or economical, or political reformation and changes
reach, before you touch the real reason why men and women are
miserable in this world. And you will only effectually cure the
misery, but you certainly then will do it, when you begin where the
misery begins, and deal first with sin. The true 'saviour of society'
is the man that can go to his brother, and as a minister declaratory
of the divine heart can say--'Brother, be of good cheer; thy sins be
forgiven thee.' And then, after that, the palsy will go out of his
limbs, and a new nervous energy will come into them, and he will
rise, take up his bed, and walk.
II. Now, in the next place, notice, as coming out of this incident
before us, the thought that forgiveness is an exclusively divine
act.
There was, sitting by, with their jealous and therefore blind eyes,
a whole crowd of wise men and religious formalists of the first
water, collected together as a kind of ecclesiastical inquisition
and board of triers, as one of the other evangelists tells us, out
of every corner of the land. They had no care for the dewy pity that
was in Christ's looks, or for the nascent hope that began to swim up
into the poor, dim eye of the paralytic. But they had keen scent for
heresy, and so they fastened with true feline instinct upon the one
thing, 'This man speaketh blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but God
alone?'
Ah! if you want to get people blind as bats to the radiant beauty of
some lofty character, and insensible as rocks to the wants of a sad
humanity, commend me to your religious 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. These are the people who
will be as hard as the nether millstones, and utterly blind to all
enthusiasm and to all goodness.
But yet these Pharisees are right; perfectly right. Forgiveness
_is_ an exclusively divine act. Of course. For sin has to do
with God only; vice has to do with the laws of morality; crime has
to do with the laws of the land. The same act may be vice, crime,
and sin. In the one aspect it has to do with myself, in the other
with my fellows, in the last with God. And so evil considered as sin
comes under God's control only, and only He against whom it has been
committed can forgive.
What is forgiveness? The sweeping aside of penalties? the shutting
up of some more or less material hell? By no means: penalties are
often left; when sins are crimes they are generally left; when sins
are vices they are always left, thank God! But in so far as sin is
sin, considered as being the perversion and setting wrong of my
relation to Him, its consequences, which are its penalties, are
swept away by forgiveness; for forgiveness, in its essence and
deepest meaning, is neither more nor less than that the love of the
person against whom the wrong has been done shall flow out,
notwithstanding the wrong. Pardon is love rising above the ice-dam
which we have piled in its course, and pouring into our hearts.
When you fathers and mothers forgive your children, what does it
mean? Does it not mean that your love is neither deflected nor
embittered any more, by reason of their wrongdoing, but pours upon
them as of old? So God's forgiveness is at bottom--'Child! there is
nothing in my heart to thee, but pure and perfect love.' We fill the
sky with mists, through which the sun itself has to look like 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. And that is a divine act, and a divine act alone.
Pharisees and Scribes were perfectly right. No man can forgive sins
but God only.
And I might add, though it is somewhat aside from my direct purpose,
God _can_ forgive sin; which some people nowadays say is
impossible. The apparent impossibility arises only from shallow and
erroneous notions of what forgiveness is. God does not--it might be
too bold to say God cannot, if we believe in miracles--but as a
matter of fact, God does not, usually interfere to hinder men from
reaping, as regards this life, what they have sown. But as I say,
that is not forgiveness; and is there any reason conceivable why it
should be impossible for the divine love to pour down upon a sinful
man who has forsaken his sin, and is trusting in God's mercy in
Christ, just as if his sin was non-existent, in so far as it could
condition or interfere with the flow of the divine mercy?
And I may say, further, we need a definite divine assurance of pardon.
Ah! if you have ever been down into the cellars of your own hearts,
and seen the ugly things that coil there, you will know that a vague
trust in a vague God and a vague mercy is not enough to still the
conscience that has once been stung into action. My brothers, you
want neither priests nor ceremonies on the one hand, nor a mere
peradventure of 'Oh! God is merciful!' on the other, in order to deal
with that deepest need of your heart. Nothing but the King's own
sign-manual on the pardon makes it valid; and unless you and I can,
somehow or other, come to close grips with God, and get into actual
contact with Him, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude, as
from His own lips, the assurance of forgiveness, there is not enough
for our needs.
III. So I come to say, in the next place, that the incident before
us teaches us that Jesus Christ claims and exercises this divine
prerogative of forgiveness.
Mark His answer to these cavillers. He admits their promises absolutely.
They said, 'No man can forgive sins but God only.' If Christ was only a
man, like us, standing in the same relation to the divine pardon that
other teachers, saints, and prophets have stood, and had nothing more
to do with it than simply, as I might do, to say to a troubled heart,
'My brother, be quite sure that God has forgiven you'; if Christ's
relation to the divine forgiveness was nothing more than ministerial
and declaratory, why, in the name, not of common sense only, but of
veracity, did He not turn round to these men and say so? He was bound,
by all the obligations of a religious teacher, to disclaim, as you or
I would have done under similar circumstances, the misapprehension of
His words: 'I use blasphemies? No! I am not speaking blasphemies. I
know that God only can forgive sins, and I am doing no more than
telling my poor brother here that his sins are forgiven by God.' But
that is not His answer at all. What He says in effect is--'Yes; you are
quite right. No man can forgive sins, but God only. _I_ forgive sins.
Whom think ye, then, that I, the Son of Man am? It is easy to say "Thy
sins be forgiven thee"--far easier to say that than to say "Take up thy
bed and walk," because one can verify and check the accomplishment of
the saying in the one case, and one cannot in the other. The sentences
are equally easy to pronounce, the things are equally difficult for a
_man_ to do, but the difference is that one of them can be verified
and the other of them cannot. I will do the visible impossibility, and
then I leave you to judge whether I can do the invisible one or not.'
Now, dear brethren, I have only one word to say about that, and it
is this. We are here brought sharp up to a fork in the road. I know
that it is not always a satisfactory way of arguing to compel a man
to take one horn or other of an alternative, but it is quite fair to
do go in the present case; and I would press it upon some of you
who, I think, urgently need to consider the dilemma. Either the
Pharisees were quite right, and Jesus Christ, the meek, the humble,
the Pattern of all lowly gentleness, the Teacher whom nineteen
centuries confess that they have not exhausted, was an audacious
blasphemer, or He was God manifest in the flesh. The whole context
forbids us to take these words, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' as
anything less than the voice of divine love wiping out the man's
transgressions; and if Jesus Christ pretended or presumed to do
that, there is no hypothesis that I know of which can save His
character for the reverence of man, but that which sees in Him God
revealed in manhood; the world's Judge, from whom the world may
receive divine forgiveness.
IV. Jesus Christ here brings visible facts into the witness-box as
the attesters of His invisible powers.
Of course the miracle was such a witness in a special way, inasmuch as
it and forgiveness were equally divine prerogatives and acts. I need
not dwell now upon what I have already observed in my introductory
remarks, that our Lord here teaches us the relative importance of the
attesting miracle and the thing attested, and regards the miracle as
subordinate to the higher and spiritual work of bringing pardon.
But we may widen out this into the thought that the subsidiary
effects of Christian faith in individuals, and of the less complete
Christian faith which is diffused over society, do stand as very
strong evidences of the reality of Christ's professions and claims
to exercise this invisible power of pardon. Or, to put it into a
concrete form, and to take an illustration which may need large
deductions.--Go into a Salvation Army meeting. Admit the extravagance,
the coarseness, and all the rest which we educated and superfine
Christians cannot stand. But when you have blown away the froth, is
there not something left in the cup which looks uncommonly like the
wine of the Kingdom? Are there not visible results of that, as of
every earnest effort to carry the message of forgiveness to men,
which create an immense presumption in favour of its reality and
divine origin? Men reclaimed, passions tamed, homes that were
pandemoniums made Bethels, houses of God. Wherever Christ's
forgiving power really comes into a heart, life is beautified, is
purified, is ennobled; and secondary and material benefits follow in
the train.
I claim all the difference between Christendom and Heathendom as
attestation of the reality of Christ's divine and atoning work. I
say, and I believe it to be a valid and a good argument as against
much of the doubt of this day, 'If you seek His monument, look
around.' His own answer to the question, 'Art thou He that should
come?' is valid still: 'Go and tell John the things that ye see and
hear'; the dead are raised, the deaf ears are opened; faculties that
lie dormant are quickened, and in a thousand ways the swift spirit
of life flows from Him and vitalises the dead masses of humanity.
Let any system of belief or of no belief do the like if it can. This
rod has budded at any rate, let the magicians do the same with their
enchantments.
Now, Christian men and women, 'ye are My witnesses,' saith the Lord.
The world takes its notions of Christianity, and its belief in the
power of Christianity, a great deal more from you than it does from
preachers and apologists. _You_ are the Bibles that most men
read. See to it that your lives represent worthily the redeeming and
the ennobling power of your Master.
And as for the rest of you, do not waste your time trying to purify
the stream twenty miles down from the fountainhead, but go to the
source. Do not believe, brother, that your palsy, or your fever,
your paralysis of will towards good, or the unwholesome ardour with
which you are impelled to wrong, and the consequent misery and
restlessness, can ever be healed until you go to Christ--the
forgiving Christ--and let Him lay His hand upon you; and from His
own sweet and infallible lips hear the word that shall come as a
charm through all your nature: 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.'
'Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened; then shall the lame man
leap as an hart';--then limitations, sorrows, miseries, will pass
away, and forgiveness will bear fruit in joy and power, in holiness,
health and peace.