The Authority to Forgive Sin

Introduction

The week of thanksgiving, my wife and I had been visiting her family in California. She had been feeling not very good for a while and she was starting to feel pretty nauseous. That night it had gotten so bad one night that we ended up at the E.R. And while we were in her room waiting for results to come back, we heard an older man begin to yell from across the hall. “HELP!” “HELP!” “HELP!!” “HELP!!!” He continued saying help for a while, and we assumed he had some kind of mental disability because he had no real problem when the nurses came in to check on him. After they did, he started back up again, “HELP!!” “HELP!!!! “GET ME SOMEONE WITH SOME AUTHORITY TO GET ME OUT OF HERE!” He was again, asking, begging for help, begging for someone with authority to meet his need, which he thought was getting out of the E.R.

Situation Scene

So, our text today comes right off of the events of Mark 1:38-45. Jesus has been classified by our author Mark as “The Christ, the Son of God” and “the Holy One of God” on two separate occasions in Mark 1. He had started in the coastal village of Capernaum doing miracles and preaching and then went on tour around the whole region of Galilee, preaching and driving out demons at all the local villages. He probably would’ve gone to Gennesaret, Magdala, Tiberias, Nazareth, Nain, Sepphoris, and Cana. A man with leprosy, a chronic skin disease, approaches Jesus as he’s visiting these villages and requests to be healed if Jesus wills. Jesus responds, “I am willing, be cleansed” and immediately, the leprosy leaves him. He sternly tells the man not to go tell everyone, but to quietly go to the priest (as commanded in the law of Moses). Instead, the man goes out and tells everyone, so much so that Jesus is drawing in huge crowds and can’t even enter a town openly without crowds. He retreats to the deserted places where he can accommodate larger crowds, and a few days later returns to Capernaum, the home of Peter and Andrew.

This is where we pick up in Mark 2. He comes into Capernaum and the text says it was reported that he’s at home. The Greek text, literally translated, says “that he was in a house.” So they come back to the town, probably back to Peter’s house. But given Jesus’s immense popularity, crowds start to form. People are gathering to hear his preaching and hoping to be healed! It says that there were so many people that there was no more room, not even in the doorway! Jesus takes this opportunity to start speaking the word to them. His preaching had become very interesting, because if you go and read Mark 1:21-27, you’ll see people mention he is preaching with authority, unlike the scribes. He had been preaching a message of repentance and confirmed his teaching with miracles and healing. And in Mark 1:15, he came into Galilee preaching “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” Since the good news of the kingdom of God was his main message, he takes this opportunity with the crowds to preach!

Then, we get to verse 3, where four men are rolling in with a paralytic. We don’t know much about this man, just that he was paralyzed enough to where he couldn’t walk. But there’s no way they can get through the crowd while carrying their paralytic buddy on his mat, which is probably his bed. Instead, they take the stairs up to the roof of the house Jesus is preaching in. They get up on the roof, which is made of branches and dry mud, and just tear into it. They’re able to break through the roof of that one-story home and lower the paralytic man down on his mat, right to Jesus.

So Jesus is preaching his message, his super important message, and some paralyzed guy is lowered through the roof, right into the house. Most of us, if someone interrupted us while we were on stage speaking, would be upset, and have the person removed. Even if they had illness or disability.

Stress Scene

But the first thing Jesus notices is their faith. The faith of the men who got the paralytic there, and the faith of the paralytic to get brought from somewhere in Galilee to a house in Capernaum and break through a ceiling, just to hope to be healed by Jesus. And seeing their faith, Jesus says “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Hold up. What? Jesus just forgave this guy’s sin? Why? He’s there to be healed!

Exactly. Jesus just met the ultimate need of that man, his sin, because he showed faith in Jesus.

Of course, some scribes, or your translation may say “teachers of the law,” are in the crowd. They overhear Jesus’s statement. And they question and think in their hearts,

“Uh, why did he just say that? He’s slandering God! He’s blaspheming! Only God can forgive sins!”

And on that last note, they’re right. Only God has the authority to forgive sin. But they think he’s blaspheming because the way he told the paralytic that his sins were forgiven would be implying he is more than just a healer or prophet. The scribes assumed he wasn’t God, and so for Jesus to claim he can forgive sins would be claiming divinity, therefore slandering God’s name.

Search Scene

And the text says RIGHT AWAY, IMMEDIATELY Jesus perceived in his spirit, or you could say, in his mind. God knows all things. A quick reading of Psalm 139 will reveal that God searches us and knows our thoughts, and in 1 Chronicles 28:9 it says The LORD knows all thoughts. God also gave this ability to prophets, which can be seen in 2 Kings 6:12 where Elisha tells the King of Israel the things the King of Aram says in his bedroom.

So Jesus knew their questions and thoughts in their hearts, and he says to them

“Why are you thinking those things? What’s easier: to tell the paralytic that his sins are forgiven, or to tell him to Get up, take your mat, and walk?

What’s easier? Well, in a way, it’s easier to say someone’s sins are forgiven than to heal them, because while the former is just saying something, in the latter the person must actually show that they are healed.

But really, forgiving/removing sin is what is harder, because it requires the authority to do so. He goes on:

“But, since you need proof that the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sin on earth,”

Now, this “Son of Man” title Jesus uses is Jesus’s favorite title for himself, and it’s the first of 14 times it shows up in Mark. Jesus is likely using it as an ambiguous title, because in the Old Testament, it both refers to regular men, as well as the divine, godly figure described in Daniel 7:13-14. It forces the listener to discern for themselves the true identity of Jesus: God or man? The truth is, he’s both. So he sets up what he’s about to do as proof of his authority to forgive sins.

Solution Scene

- He turns to the paralytic man -

“I tell you, get up, take your mat, and walk.”

And he does. The man IMMEDIATELY, RIGHT AWAY, gets up, takes his mat, and leaves, in front of everyone. So the whole crowd is of course blown away, glorifying God saying,

“This is a first! We’ve never seen anything like that!”

What he does in vs. 11, heal the man, is because he is asserting his authority to forgive sins. This is because some Jewish teachers would accept miracles as verification of representing God. God’s prophets before could heal people, but none could forgive sins. In a commentary on Mark, a man named Alan Cole writes “In any case, Jesus both healed and forgave on this occasion, leaving them speechless. If they had eyes to see it, here was the very sign they had wanted; but none are so blind as those who refuse to see.”

SIS

Jesus Shows his authority to forgive sins.

Illustration

When you have friends in this world you inevitably get into fights and disagreements. And oftentimes, we hurt our friends, even our best friends. Especially our best friends. In fact, the closer our friends are to us, the easier it is to hurt them, because we know them and love them, and they know us and love us. But when we hurt our friends, our close friends, we can’t force them to forgive us. And someone cannot forgive us on their behalf. They themselves must forgive us and choose to move past and not give us the consequences of our actions toward them. In the same way, God is close to us, and he loves us, and he knows us. And he is the only one who can forgive our sin because he is the who we sin against.

Argumentation

In 2 Samuel 12:13, after King David sins with Bathsheba, he tells the prophet Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Then Nathan replied to David, “And the LORD has taken away your sin; you will not die.” David sinned, and the only the LORD God could take it away.

2 Samuel 12:13 LSB

Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against Yahweh.” And Nathan said to David, “Yahweh also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.

Application

How does this matter to us? Well, it means we should respond to Jesus’ message: “Repent and believe the good news!” That first part is the focus: repent. We should respond God’s calling to turn aweay from our sin, and put our faith, believe, in the good news. That means believing in the power and authority of Jesus and his work. His death bears the consequences of the sins of those with faith in him, and they are forgiven accordingly. The Christ event, the crucifixion, forgives all sins, before and after its occurrence. So even their faith in Jesus before he dies forgives their sins. We can see this in in the Old Testament when Abraham was justified in Genesis 15:6 for trusting God and in Acts with people putting faith in Jesus and having their sins forgiven. The paralytic and his friends had faith, so his sins were forgiven. And when we have faith in Christ, our sins are forgiven. Jesus is the one who can forgive our sin. He is the one with authority, because he is the one who has been sinned against.

John Calvin Quote

There is nothing holier, or better, or safer, than to content ourselves with the authority of Christ alone.

John Calvin

Conclusion

That man from the E.R. never stopped yelling for help. He yelled and yelled, nurses came by, and one even shut the door on him. But he kept yelling. And eventually, he said “GET ME OUT OF HERE BEFORE I DIE!” He was in no danger, but he truly thought he needed help to escape before he died. But us, we need Jesus, the one with ultimate authority, to forgive our sins and get us out. We were already dead in our sin, but his resurrection brought us new life, so we can live forgiven and free from sin.

Let’s pray.