The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity (October 10, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.

“I absolve thee from all thy sins in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen” These are the words a priest pronounces to the penitent after they make a confession. But this raises a question: Why does the priest have the ability to make this pronouncement? Where does he get this authority? To answer, it’s important to remember that a priest is a priest because they have been ordained into the High Priesthood of our Lord. All priestly authority is derivate and delegated by our Lord himself in John 20:23 when he instructed his Disciples that “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” But this raises a further question: How does our Lord have the authority to forgive sins? This is what today’s Gospel answers for us.

St. Matthew 9 contains a story that’s told in six panels.

In the first part of the story, a lame man is brought to Christ. In Mark’s version of the story, his friends brought him and because they couldn’t maneuver him through the vast crowds, they took him to the roof of the building in which Jesus was speaking to crowds, dug a hole into the roof, and lowered him in front of Jesus. Matthew shortens the account but we still get the sense of the paralytic’s desperation: he couldn’t come to our Lord without the help of his friends, a good reminder of our dependence on and interconnectedness with others.

Confronted with the paralytic , Our Lord sees the faith of his friends and is moved to speak: “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” This may have been surprising because they don’t bring him for forgiveness, they brought him to be healed. You can see the puzzled looks from the friends and the cripple — this didn’t work out the way they expected. This isn’t to say the healing is unconnected from sin. In the Jewish mind, illness was often viewed as a punishment for sin and healing was a breaking of sin’s power. There’s a sense in which Christianity embraces something like this. We see sin, sickness, and death as evidence of the fall, all of which have been destroyed by the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ and he will ultimately defeat them when he comes again. Unlike the Jews, we don’t draw direct connections from illness to sin; when a person gets sick, we don’t accuse them of sinning. But we do recognize that sickness in general is a symptom of the brokenness of the current world. Still, you can understand why there might be some confusion amongst the paralytic and his party.

But the text doesn’t focus on these puzzled reactions they may have had. Instead, the scene shifts its focus to the Scribes who complain amongst themselves, saying, “This man is blaspheming.” Their problem is the fact that forgiveness of sins can only be given by God. In conveying the forgiveness of sins, our Lord is making an explicit claim to be divine. The text indicates that this objection is private, not public, but Jesus addresses it, nonetheless, by posing a question: “Which is easier to say: ‘Your sins are forgiven” or ‘Rise and walk’?” The answer is that it’s easier to say that sins are forgiven because how can you check? What is the way to verify that someone’s sins have bee forgiven? We won’t know until the final judgment. If a self-proclaimed miracle-worker says, “get up and walk” to a paralytic and the lame person can’t do it, it becomes evident that the miracle-worker is a fraud.. So Jesus decides to answer the Pharisees’ objection head-on: “But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” he tells the paralytic, “Rise, take up your bed and go home.”

The lame man follows through: he picks up his bed and walks under his own power. That he was brought by friends and the miracle was performed and verified in the public leaves little room for anyone to doubt its authenticity. Further, it’s a fulfillment of Messianic expectations, as Matthew confirms in 11:5, “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them." In our reading today, Jesus’ argument is lesser to great: Jesus has pronounced the man forgiven of sins, and now heals him as a sign that he is forgiven.

The lesson ends with the reaction of the crowds. They’re afraid because they have seen a sign from God. Fear, here, isn’t bad necessarily; it comes with a recognition of how unique our Lord is. Note how Matthew ends the lesson: “They glorified God, who had given such authority to men.” The Gospel according to St. Matthew is known as the ecclesial Gospel because it heavily revolves around the Church. This has led some scholars to speculate the Gospel may have functioned as a pastoral manual for new leaders in the early Church. So, in many ways, the crowds at the end of the lesson are marvelling at Jesus’ authority as the God-man to forgive sins but those crowds marvelled then and continue to marvel that that authority has been delegated to the Church through Apostolic Succession and the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

So what do we learn from our reading this morning? I think we learn three things. First, we learn that the lame man represents each and every one of us who have been wounded by sin. Like any sick person, we cannot heal ourselves of our own power; only God can remedy our sad, fallen state. But we also see that healing comes to us through the Church. And finally, that healing is not just an event but a process that is completed through our participation.

The first lesson, that our healing cannot come from ourselves but only through God is a theme emphasized in today’s Collect of the Day: “O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.” The helpless leper being brought to Christ is a mirror in which we see our dependence on him for our healing. Without him, we cannot please him.

But God makes this healing available to us through means that we can see: in the waters of baptism, the bread and wine which become his Body and Blood in Eucharist, in the words pronounced by the priest at Confession. God knows that we’re feeble and fragile; that, if it was up to our own imagination, we would be constantly second-guessing ourselves. Did I really pray hard enough? Did I really mean it enough? He gives us visible signs to confirm the inward grace he bestows on us. There is no need for second-guessing: these are the ways God makes it possible for us to be pleasing to him because each of the sacrament immerses us into the story of his Son and applies the benefits he won to us.

But we are not entirely passive. Jesus healed the paralytic, but the paralytic had to get up and walk away; so we who are forgiven of our sins and enlivened by the Holy Spirit through the Sacraments must participate with that grace as we live our lives by co-operating with God in our pursuit of holiness. St. Paul speaks of this in the Epistle reading this morning from Ephesians 4: we put away the futility of mind that alienated us from God due to our ignorance and hardness of heart. We put off the old nature and are renewed in the spirit of mind and put on a new nature created after the likeness of God. That means that we put away falsehood, speak the truth; we should avoid the occasion of sin, even when we’re angry; we should give up theft, escape evil talk, put away all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander, and malice, while embracing kindness, tenderheartedness, and forgiveness. What is the foundation for this ethic? Christ: “forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Our goal is to take the sacramental grace we receive here, the drama that we participate in in the liturgy, and take it out into the world. As we pray in the prayer of thanksgiving at the Daily Office during the week, “that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days.” The goal is a beautiful harmony between our liturgical lives and our vocations. He healed us and made us well. And we ask the Holy Ghost to rule our hearts so that we may be pleasing to him. “The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them."

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.