Your Debts are Forgiven
Isaiah 43.18-25; Psalm 41; 2 Corinthians 1.18-22; Mark 2.1-12

Let me begin this morning by asking a question.  What is the biggest, the most significant sin that a human being may commit against themselves, against others or against God?  Is it theft or murder?  Is it the misuse of one’s sexual organs?  Is it, perhaps, the refusal to help someone in trouble or, more invisibly, a passive complicity with any government that refuses to help people in trouble?  Could it be the sin of pride, or envy, or malice?  And let’s not forget the sin of greed, arguably the most influential sin of our times.  When you pause to think about it for two seconds, the list of possibilities is rather large.  Overwhelmingly large.  But which of these many sins is the most deadly?  Which of these troubles God the most?

I ask that question because I believe it is one that pervades our society and culture, and I extend that claim even to the church.  Whether we call ourselves ‘Christians’ or not, I think we live in a society and culture that is obsessed with the not only the finding of fault, but the condemnation of people on the basis of these alleged faults.  There is a huge debate going on—one can observe it in the daily papers—about which of our many faulty people are the worst or least forgiveable.  Some examples from the media and from talkback radio will give you a sense of what I mean.  ‘Single mothers and people on disabilities ought to work for a living to reduce the burden they represent for the public purse.’  Translation: it is wrong to need the financial support of other people; people who depend upon others for support do not deserve the favour or understanding of the wider community.  Here’s another one.  ‘Workers who are stingy with their contributions to superannuation will find that retirement will be quite a struggle.’  Translation:  it is wrong to live life frugally; it is also wrong to believe that the community ought to support those who have contributed to the community all their lives.  And what about this one:  ‘People ought to invest in private health insurance so that public hospitals will bear less of the burden.’  Translation:  there is no such thing as community; in the end we are all individuals who must look after our own interests; people who believe they are part of a community are just freeloaders who won’t pay their way.

I presume you catch the drift?  Whether the message comes across starkly or subtly, whether it comes to us from friends and family or through the incremental shifts of government policy, many members of our community are today receiving the ‘sinner’ tag simply because they believe in community.  For isn’t this exactly what the privatization of pensions, education, public transport and healthcare represents in the end: a movement away from the Christian notion of community at the heart of European culture (in which all are responsible to contribute and therefore all are entitled to receive), towards the modernist notion of the individual at the heart of American culture (in which everyone is ultimately alone, and must therefore stand alone or sink alone)?  In this brave new (American) world of ours, the worst sin is this:  to believe that you are responsible for others and that they are responsible for you, that each of us might actually belong to each other.

Now I say all that to preface a discussion of the gospel story we heard a moment ago, the story in which Jesus tells are paralysed man that his sins are forgiven and then proceeds to heal his unresponsive legs.  It is a story that we modern readers often find both perplexing and disturbing, not least because we object to the association of sin and disease.  To the modern mind it is simply absurd to put the two together.  ‘Wrongdoing and sickness are two different things’, we tell ourselves, ‘we do not get sick because we do wrong, and neither do we do wrong because we are sick’.  That message has been reinforced by generations of enlightened preachers who, in reading this text, have sought to reassure their audiences that Jesus did not associate sin and disease either.  ‘While the Jewish people believed that sickness was the result some kind of sin, Jesus himself did not share this belief.’  That is what we have been told for several generations now. 

But surely that is to gloss over and simplify a real difficulty in the gospel story at hand, a story in which Jesus himself clearly does associate sin and disease.  Why would the first words Jesus spoke to a crippled man be ‘your sins are forgiven’ if he did not believe that sin and disease were somehow connected?  Would he not, rather, leave sin out of it altogether and say, simply, ‘take up your mat and walk’?  The exchange between Jesus and the scribes would seem to reinforce the difficulty.  When the scribes object to Jesus’ forgiveness of this man’s sin, on the grounds that only God may do such a thing, Jesus’ response is to identify the subsequent healing as the primary evidence of such authority.  The association Jesus casts between the two is unmistakable, surely:  to heal is to forgive sins, to forgive sins is to heal.

So then, what are we to do with our modernist sense of dissonance and perplexity?  What are we to do with our rage at God or the text for suggesting that sickness and sin might well be connected, and intimately?  Well, there are three options as I see it.  We could decide that God and the text have nothing to do with each other.  That God, being a good person, would never say such a thing, so the text must have got it wrong.  That is to believe that Scripture is an entirely human document that only guesses, often wrongly, at what God may or may not think.  But how, then, can we know what God really thinks?  On what basis can we know that the Scripture has it wrong?  So much for the first option.  A second option is not so very different to the first.  That the real or ‘historical’ Jesus and the text have nothing to do with each; that Jesus own words and actions have been twisted by Mark, the evangelist, to say something that Jesus would never have said himself.  To that one must ask the same question, I think.  Where is the evidence for what the historical Jesus ‘really’ said or did?  Where is there any evidence that is not in the form of some kind of testimony about Jesus?  Some, like the authors of The Da Vinci Code or Honest to Jesus, may point to extra-biblical sources such as the Gospels of Thomas or of Mary Magdalene.  But this is to believe and confess, apart from any independent evidence, that a minority testimony is more faithful to Jesus than that of the majority.  How does that help the cause?  It doesn’t.  So here is a third option.  At the risk of great scandal, let me suggest that the biblical text is the both the word of Jesus and the word of God, and that our modern assumption that sin and disease have nothing to do with each other might therefore be at risk.

In the perspective of the New Testament, disease is indeed a sign of sin, and sin a sign of disease.  But how easily we misunderstand the New Testament’s understanding of both sin and sickness.  Let’s take sickness first.  In the New Testament, sickness is usually seen as the manifestation of a society and cosmos that is out of kilter with both itself and God.  When people no longer honour God, they no longer respect God’s values.  When they no longer respect God’s values, they no longer respect either the environment or each other.  And when they no longer respect either the environment or each other, people suffer.  One dimension of that suffering is sickness or, to put it in terms of the Latin etymology, dis-ease.  Let me give you a modern example.  El Salvador is a poor country.  It is deeply indebted to the World Bank and so cannot afford to provide safe, adequate housing for its citizens.  This means that many of the very poor are forced to work for illegal loggers, and to live in settlements where sanitation is poor.  Because sanitation is poor, children get sick and die.  Because logging proceeds in their back yards, when the floods come there is nothing to stop the earth from sliding away and injuring or killing many members of the community.  Here dis-ease is clearly and obviously linked with human sin, with a fundamental lack of care for community.   I could talk about more subtle examples too.  How convenience foods, refrigeration, preservatives and radiation are contributing to a rise in the prevalence of cancer.  How the social pressure to ‘succeed’ in consumer terms is contributing to the growing levels of mental illness within our society.  Whatever the evidence cited, I put it to you that the New Testament may actually be right:  that sin and sickness are related.

But let’s now connect that to a more biblical understanding of sin.  For the New Testament there is no hierarchy of sins.  There is no sin that is worse than any other.  And there are no sinners that are, at least in principle, more sinful than any other.  Rather, all sins are manifestations of one basic problem:  a refusal to admit that all of us are indebted, to God and to each other; and a further refusal to accept that God has remitted or forgiven our debts.  In the story from the gospel, the sin that Jesus forgives should be understood as a debt.  In Greek, the word for ‘sin’ and the word for ‘debt’ are closely related.  The man’s ‘sin’, in this context, is the debt he owes to those who look after him, who care for his needs.  It is the debt he owes to those who do for him what he cannot do for himself.  In that sense, this man’s indebtedness is certainly not something he has chosen for himself.   It rarely is.  Yet, the debt is there, and it is entirely unpayable. 

Now, listen carefully, for this next bit is very important.  We are all of us indebted to one degree or another.  Indeed, everything we have is given us, at considerable cost I might add, from the hand of God. But this does not mean that God expects us to repay the debt, because what is given is not a loan but a gift.  And gifts do not need to be repaid.  In the strange and wonderful logic of the gift the only response God calls for is a desire and intention to pass the gift onto others.  Have you got that?  Not to repay the giver, but to imitate his giving in the way we treat others.  In God’s eyes, therefore, all of us have only one responsibility in this life, and that is to forgive each other our debts as God, in Christ, has forgiven our debts.  For that is what Christ came to show us.  That God has forgiven the debts we owe; so that now we are free to give to others and not count the cost.  Now we are free to forgive each other’s debts. 

So, to circle back to where we began today, sin and disease are connected in this sense:  that our refusal to give freely or to forgive each other’s debts can have its social, medical and anthropological consequences.  It can mean that people are excluded from the community, that they suffer alone, that their suffering finds no relief.  Healing, therefore, is not only about the relief of physical suffering.  It is a word and a sign that your debts are forgiven, that you are worthy to share in the life of the community, that you are loved and accepted by the community.  To be healed is to know that you have received a costly gift, but that you are under no obligation to repay that gift.  To be healed is to know that God’s promises are yours, even though you cannot aspire to them on your own.  In Christian terms, then, forgiveness, inclusion and acceptance are a form of healing.  They heal the sin of debt and indebtedness.  They heal the division of one from another.  They heal the suffering that unsues from our failure to take responsibility for another, or from the failure to accept another’s care out of the fear of becoming indebted.  When Jesus told the paralytic that his sins were forgiven, he also healed him of all these very significant social, political and fiscal wounds.

May God continue to heal us, and to forgive us.  And may God give us courage to heal and forgive each other.  Amen.

Garry J. Deverell
7th Sunday after Epiphany, 2006
 
back to homily index