“The forgiveness of sins”

Thirteenth Sermon on the Apostles’ Creed

Ordinary Time VII; February 19, 2006

Mark 2:1-12

I have, of course, been thinking about this story this week. So I was pleased to notice the other day when I was at the Clarkson Tower of Nebraska Medical Center that the Chapel has this story portrayed at the front. The paralytic is lying on a mat with ropes tied at the corners; his friends have just let him down in front of Jesus.

Obviously this man’s paralysis had something to do with his sense of sin. Generally speaking, the people of the time assumed that if you were sick or some other bad thing had happened to you, you had done something sinful that caused you to deserve it. Many folks still think that way. A beloved colleague had taken excellent care of his health, never smoked, ate right and exercised well. He had a stroke; that astonished him. We don’t think of the connection between health and sin so much as the connection between health and self-care: people who don’t smoke don’t get lung cancer; people who exercise don’t get heart disease; and so forth. You know better, I hope. After all, as the bumper sticker says, “Bad stuff happens.” All right, that’s not what the bumper sticker says, but I’m not going to say it in church and you know what it actually says.

Let me drop in another bumper sticker: “Grace happens.” That’s the message of the affirmation in the Apostles’ Creed that we believe in “the forgiveness of sins.” I’ll come to that in a minute; first I want to deal with this man’s paralysis.

Obviously this particular case of paralysis did have something to do with his sense of sin, because the declaration that his sins were forgiven was sufficient to heal his paralysis. Jesus says that, in this case, to tell him to take up his mat and walk and to declare that his sins are forgiven are essentially synonymous. He does not make the same connection every time he heals someone, so let’s not generalize too much from this one man’s experience. The Chapel at Clarkson Tower emphasized the man’s healing; I chose this story for this sermon because of the dispute over the authority to forgive sins.

Jesus makes it clear that he has the authority to forgive sins. It’s not a question of mystical power; he waves his magic wand over you and your wickedness is gone. Rather, it’s part of his job description: the Messiah has the authority to forgive sins. And he freely exercises his authority whenever it is needed. In this vignette Jesus gets a twofer: an act of compassion helps his reputation, and he makes a rhetorical point about his authority. I’ll bet his opponents go away grinding their teeth, and wishing they could win one for a change.

It’s part of the character of Jesus that when his authority is challenged, he confronts the challenge head on by acting on his authority. That is, when the scribes start their grumbling, “Who does he think he is? Blasphemer!” Jesus does not start in with a disputation. He could drag out his biblical texts to argue that he does have the authority to forgive sins. Or he could argue logically from first principles. Rather, he simply says to them, “You think I can’t forgive sins? Just watch!” and then does it. It’s reminiscent of the conversation about Baptism two fellows are having. One of them asks, “Do you believe in infant baptism?” The other one answers, “Believe in it? I’ve seen it!”

So, Jesus has the authority to forgive sins. That’s the most important point for you to hang onto today. Three ideas come from that, and I wish to call your attention to them.

The first is that when we do a bad thing, it’s not merely a mistake or a lapse of judgment, but it is sin. I’m so tired of people in high places, caught doing what they should not do, tearily saying, “I made a mistake.” The implication is: Yeah, I goofed; I got caught. When you break a commandment, or fail in your duty, or act contrary to the way we are taught in the Sermon on the Mount you not only harm other people, but you harm God. That’s the implication of calling it “sin.”

God is so intimately involved in the life of the creation that anything you and I do that harms the creation is also a sin against God. Whether we pollute the waters or pollute the culture, if we cheat a friend or cheat the public, if we lie to ourselves, to our wives or to the IRS then we sin. We offend God; we hurt God when we hurt others. And we need to deal with not only the people we have harmed but also God, whom we have harmed.

The second idea, which follows from that, is that God himself decides what to do about our sin. And you know perfectly what God has done about it: he has taken sin into himself in the person of Jesus Christ and cancelled it out on the Cross. From one direction, when you look at the Cross you can see the horrible extent of human sin, that it led to the crucifixion of the Son of God. And from the other direction, when you look at the Cross you can see the magnificent extent of the grace of God, who has taken sin into himself and forgiven it.

Two comments about our religious life. First: whenever the people of God confess our sins in public worship, a minister of the Gospel assures us that our sins are forgiven. I recall when I used to sing at a Lutheran church, the minister would always assure us with the words, “As a called and ordained minister of the Gospel, I assure you…” and so forth. It is not that ministers are somehow more holy than other people and are therefore empowered to forgive sins; it’s that we work for Jesus and he forgives sins. Whenever I give a declaration of pardon, I use words from Scripture, words that point to the Cross. The authority to declare the forgiveness of sins comes from the Cross, because that is how God has dealt with sin. The assurance that your sins are forgiven does not come from good feelings, but from the Cross; your conviction that your sins are forgiven comes not from being such a nice person, but from the Scriptures.

The other comment is simply that the old Catholic practice of confession had something going for it. We ministers sometimes do counseling, and some are pretty good at it. But for the most part we’re not experts in psychology, but in forgiveness. We don’t know a whole lot about how to help you deal with your conflicted feelings about your father, but we do know how to talk with you about your sin. The Reformation made it clear that the people of God do not have to go to a minister to confess their sins; you and I can kneel before God in our rooms and confess our sins on our own. Sometimes it helps, however, to talk to someone else who will in no uncertain terms tell you in the name of Jesus Christ that your sins are forgiven. So we Presbyterians are not required to confess our sins to a minister, but Presbyterian ministers are required to assure people of their forgiveness if they do confess to us.

Anyway, the summary of that whole idea is to keep in mind that we Christians are honest about something deeper than mistakes, misjudgments and the psychobabble you read in the “Living” section of the newspaper; we confess our sins. And God forgives sin, assuring us of our forgiveness by the power of the Cross.

And so the third idea: God forgives sin. Isn’t that great? There are a whole lot of ways God could deal with us, and many of them sound painful. But God’s preferred mode of being is forgiveness. When we say that we believe in the forgiveness of sins, we’re making an affirmation about the structure of the universe that is at odds with the way most other religious traditions think. We are claiming that the universe is not karmic, as Hindus and Buddhists claim. We are claiming that you do not have a balance sheet toted up at the end of life, to see which direction you’re going, as the Muslims claim. We claim that God deals with human beings by forgiving sins. Of course, we may be wrong about that – but if we are, then the death of Christ on the Cross is meaningless.

I hope I don’t have to hit you over the head with the implication: since God deals with us by forgiving our sins, then we also ought to forgive one another. Your imagination can chew on that one for a week. I’ll summarize the point for this sermon, what I claim is important about the forgiveness of sins: Jesus Christ has the authority to forgive sins and Jesus Christ is the means by which our sins are forgiven. Let the scribes grumble; he’s going to go ahead and do it anyway.

Let us pray. Thank you, forgiving God, for opening to us the way of forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Teach us to confess our sins, to receive the grace of your forgiveness, and to forgive others; through Jesus Christ, the Crucified and Risen, amen.

Robert A. Keefer

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Clarinda, Iowa