When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”
****
So this is where I start to lose the story; as soon as Jesus acts, as soon as he but speaks, the narrative thread starts to unravel. For these words do not seem to fit, if we are honest. This is not the expected turn of phrase. To come all this way, to carry a paralyzed man on a mat all the way to the shore! or, rather, to have one’s broken body paraded through town, with curious eyes, all-too-perceptive eyes seeing more than your body, but seeing the inability which shames and defeats you daily, just to arrive and to then receive what? Forgiveness? But what of healing!?
Jesus has directed his attention (or at least his words) to the paralytic alone, and the action focuses in on this exchange for just half a verse. It is as though Matthew did not think these strange words needed explaining, or maybe the explaining is yet to come by way of the scribes...
But as the story stands at this moment, I think what is most shocking is that what is offered by Jesus, what is proclaimed on that shore, is not this man’s physical healing, but the forgiveness of his sins. And therein lies another point of confusion:
Is Jesus actually forgiving him or is he stating what is merely already the case?
In the Greek (and in the vast majority of translations), Jesus is not saying “I forgive you.” Jesus does not technically put himself anywhere in the equation, he seems to be merely stating a fact. But is this to imply his words are any less effective, that by merely stating a proposition - something that philosophers of a certain tradition could reduce to symbolic logic (Xa) - Jesus has stopped short of actually doing anything effective?
But I think it is we who stop short, not Jesus, if we take his words as merely designative or assertive. That one could stick Jesus’ words into a formula might not make them less true, but it would make them meaningless (and what is truth without meaning?). This is because we find meaning between us, in that common space that we occupy but do not and never could fill. It is because meaning exists here and is shared between us that we do not own or determine the meaning of our words.
My words are not packages in which I must wrap my meaning in order to give that meaning to you. We inherited our words (and their meaning) when we inherited our world (of meaning); we can no more determine the meaning of a word on our own than we could lay claim to our own private world (which is not to say these are not done, but that they are illusions). So to put Jesus’ expression (and most, if not all, of our ordinary expressions for that matter) into a formula is to remove that expression from the space between people, to say that the true essence, the true meaning of the expression, does not depend on that space or those people.
So returning to Jesus’ words to the paralytic, what seems to be happening is neither Jesus’ offering of his forgiveness, nor a banal assertion of facts. For how can one “take heart” in an equation? Rather, the paralytic is to take heart because Jesus is declaring an ultimate reality that, in that very declaration, alters the experienced reality.
By way of analogy (but beautifully more than!) Jesus saying “your sins are forgiven” is like the abolitionist who says to the newly-freed-slave, “you are free.” The abolitionist’s words did not loose the physical chains, they did not affect the rights of ownership, but in making this new reality real-ized, are those words not truly effectual? Are those words, repeated a thousand times to blinking, tearing eyes, not liberating? For isn’t it having those words now exist outside one’s own head, having those words now enter that space between where reality and meaning truly exist, to find those words in the mouth of another, to have that which was almost rejected because it sounded so ridiculous, dreamt, be confirmed and acknowledged by another, is not this what we need in order to believe? Is not this what we need for meaning to take root, for truth to be not known, but acknowledged?
Jesus radically changes this man’s reality, for Jesus’ pronouncement is the breaking-in of a new Kingdom. And so Jesus’ words are a declaration of freedom, offered to one who had offered himself, in all his brokenness and vulnerability, to the possibility and reality that Jesus was and is. The mystery of Jesus is that he is not merely the one who declares the reality of forgiveness, but is the one through and by whom that forgiveness comes. Jesus simply is that forgiveness. In his physical person, in the reality of God’s human existence, Jesus is forgiveness. To be in the presence of Jesus is to be forgiven.
This is a truth to be acknowledged, a meaning to be found in the presence of Jesus. So would not Jesus’ saying, “your sins are forgiven” be as for him to say, “I am here, you are with me”? Would not all of us need to “take heart” in such a presence? And what is more, for Jesus to say “your sins are forgiven” is to say who that “I” is which is there present, for it is to collapse into a singularity presence and forgiveness.
And perhaps it is that faith which Jesus saw, the acknowledgment of brokenness and human vulnerability, which gave Jesus hope that his words, that forgiveness, could be acknowledged, shared. Which is to say, hope that he would be acknowledged, shared. And hope that in this broken man the Kingdom, in a small but incomprehensible way, may be realized, between people, the only way it can be.
I do not think I have yet sufficiently answered my own discomfort at why there is not a physical healing. But I think this is a start, in that there is something profound about Jesus’ words here that this reflection has hopefully served to bring a flickering candle to. Hopefully there will be more to come...
No comments:
Post a Comment