What Would Jesus Do?

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

When Jesus said this to the lame man the religious experts who overheard him said it was blasphemy, since only God is entitled to forgive sins. This is true, and the Gospel, presuming that we all know this truth, wants us to draw the obvious conclusion that when Jesus acts God acts, that Jesus is God incarnate in human being. We saw last Sunday that this means we should not identify with Jesus as we read these Gospel stories but with those, like the leper, whom he addresses. He is the creator we are the creatures, he is the Lord we are his vassals. So today again we are to learn more about God by studying what Jesus says and does, and initially we learn that God forgives sin in response to faith.

Before we isolate the several important details of the story I want to place it in the context of our current life and culture. Today the learned folk who might overhear Jesus say, “Your sins are forgiven,” would react not to the apparent blasphemy of claiming to be God, but rather to the concept of sin. They would ask, “What do you mean by sin? What is sin?” and they would be reacting out of two possible patterns of thought, one religious and one secular.

The religious reaction would come from those who do not believe that we could presently or in the past do anything so dreadful as fatally to damage our relationship with God. Human action cannot break that relationship decisively and cast us adrift on the sea of life alone, where we perish unless God comes to save us. Our sins are merely mistakes that are easily forgiven by a loving God and easily corrected by our moral effort. There is no need for God to become incarnate and to go through unimaginable suffering and hellish death to rescue us from our forlorn little raft floating alone on that solitary sea. Christ died unfortunately, and his death was just one more instance of the bad luck that seems to dog good people in this world. It is not a vital part of God’s great labor to save me from sin, death and the devil, just a great example of heroic fidelity to principle, set as an example to us. This version of Christianity really does not need Jesus, and especially not his suffering and death, because it does not believe that sin in the biblical sense of affronting and injuring God and cutting the self off from life, exists.

The second and secular objection is that the whole scheme of God, sin, guilt, salvation and forgiveness is a fantasy we invent, along with many other similar fantasies, to give meaning to a meaningless existence. Part of being human is the need to know why bad things happen, and since everything happens for no reason at all, we invent dramatic explanations rather than accept that things just happen, for no reason and that no one is responsible. We would rather be guilty than empty, and so invent the drama of sin and punishment, redemption and reward. In traditional societies when someone died it was always assumed that someone had caused the death and so witch hunters were brought in to smell out the witch who cast the spell. Pathetically the accused usually confessed, because it attributed power to them, and it is better to be falsely and fatally accused of power than to be ignored and treated as irrelevant. Our current society behaves often in this primitive way; nothing just happens, there must always be someone to blame and someone to sue. Even obesity is the fault of the fast food purveyors.   

The President has brought back the rhetoric of good and evil into public discourse, and that brings to the forefront again what our Western philosophic tradition calls “the problem of evil.” I recommend Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton 2002) if you wish to follow up this discussion, although it might be too technical for the amateur reader. It used to be generally accepted that bad things happen to bad people and good things to good, that there is a moral quid pro quo to history and that it can be rationally discerned. Now, however, since the Holocaust, we can no longer find any rhyme or reason to what happens. Human reason is unable to discern any moral order at all. History is just one thing after another, the good suffer the wicked prosper, or vice versa; and the mouth is stopped by the carnage of methodical mass murder committed by ordinary people like you and me just doing their job in a civilized country like yours and mine.

This analysis, which began in the 18th century Enlightenment, is powerfully persuasive, and after Auschwitz is conclusive. Paradoxically the sustained attack on arguments for the Providence of God, the reasoning that supported the notion of morality in history, destroyed not only the god of the philosophers but the reason of the philosophers as well. For instance, when David Hume (18th century) showed that the idea of causation – that a prior event A causes an immediately subsequent event B, - is due to habit of subjective thought alone and had no necessary objective counterpart, that we have grown used to seeing the two events together and so unwarrantably assumed that they are related by something called cause and effect when in fact they are related only by concinnity  - that causation is a subjective fantasy, when Hume showed that he demolished not only the arguments for the existence of God from the order of the world, and from the necessity of an uncaused first cause, but also the very possibility of rationality itself. Not only is there no first cause, and no ordered network of cause and effect, there is no such thing as cause at all, and things merely lie there unrelated except by being near each other in space and time. So it is true that the world of nature and history cannot be accounted for rationally, but must be logged empirically. We record what we see whether we can explain it by fitting it into a rational whole or not.

So our options are twofold, either the world, and our life in it, is indeed “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury and signifying nothing,” “just one damned thing after another,” and the fact that we die at age six, sixty or ninety-six is just a matter of luck having no meaning in the grand scheme of things, which does not exist in any case. There is not ultimate reason why, just the many little apparent reasons, that may or may not be involved. The Preacher, Koheleth, whose book in the Bible is called Ecclesiastes is right, all is smoke and mirrors, and the best thing we can do is to enjoy our sex life, our food, our work and our children, to cultivate our gardens and hope for nothing more than a quick and painless death.

The other option is the one that the Church, when it really is the Church and not merely a social club, holds out, that into this deserted sea of the soul, where nothing stands out as significant, and the relentless waves lap, lap us like the Chinese water torture, God has come and revealed Himself. There is revelation! This is the good news: there is revelation! God has come in Jesus and shown Himself to be a God who forgives sins, rectifies our world and rescues us from the loneliness of the castaway. For that reason we turn again to the Gospel reading of Jesus healing the lame man.

Note these points in the story: Jesus acts because of the faith of the intercessors, and astonishingly it is not the faith of the cripple himself that counts but the faith of his friends who made such an effort to bring him to Jesus. They climbed on the roof, removed the tiles, broke open the ceiling and lowered his stretcher, “Seeing their faith, Jesus said, Son your sins are forgiven.” Our faith can prevail for the healing of others. In that spirit we include in our fellowship those who do not fully believe in Christ. Of course a congregation would be stronger if every member really believed and practiced the Christian faith, but God is so gracious that He will do good even to those who are here in doubt and unbelief, because of the faith of those who are here with full and adoring hearts. We are all from time to time cast down and in doubt; at those times we can rely on the faith of others in the Body of Christ to bring us to Jesus and plead for our healing.

Jesus says it is the same thing to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” or “Get up, take your bed and walk.” The former is a statement about the cripple’s status before God, the latter a command to do something. That they occur together here shows that they belong together. The experience of reconciliation with God, of a restoration of our primal relationship to our creator and thus to being itself, takes the form of a new action not just a new self-understanding, in other words, life is one, action and understanding cannot be separated. 

One could speculate that the man was paralyzed by what used to be called a hysterical symptom stemming from a great sin he believed himself to have committed, and so hearing his sin forgiven he dared to walk again. I heard two weeks ago from Jeff Halper, the Israeli head of the group that rebuilds Palestinian houses demolished by the Israelis, of a fifteen year old girl who went blind for two hours when an Israeli tank appeared in the street outside her new home, this after she had twice been bulldozed by the IDF out of her previous homes. Perhaps the man’s paralysis was like this, perhaps he was lame for hysterical reasons; but that is not the point here, so such speculation is idle. Here the point is that Jesus is God in action, doing what only God can do, forgiving sins, and that such removal of sin restores life in all its fullness, because it restores our relationship with God the source of life.

The third thing I want us to notice is that Jesus says that he has power on earth to forgive sins.  “But that you may know that the Son of man (a title Jesus used of himself, meaning the ‘human being’) has authority on earth to forgive sins – he said to the paralytic…. “ (2:10). Jesus is God in action in this world, here and now, and can restore your relationship with God and revitalize your life, here and now. We do not have to wait until the final judgment.

This is good news for many reasons, not least of which is that we do not have many options. Modern philosophy has shown conclusively that there is no possibility of finding meaning for life, in human thought about human experience as we have lived it in the last hundred years. Auschwitz gave the coup de grace to a rationality that was already in extremis. That is an important reason why most people have ignored philosophy for a long time now, and, while that ignorance is a serious omission, because it helps us maintain the illusion that life has rational meaning, that we can answer questions about why things happen as they do, when we cannot, it is not as serious as our ignorance of history. Most of us have no idea of how nasty and brutish civilized life has been for the last century or so in the civilized nations of the West. Today we have an ahistorical culture whose model of human life is the video game, and which is armed to the teeth with weapons of mass distraction. In this abyss of double ignorance we bravely become the meaning of our own lives, or live without meaning, or go shopping. I sometimes think that the most culturally relevant part of Stanford is the Stanford Shopping Center, where when reason fails and the going gets tough the tough go shopping.

As I have said recently in our Bible study group, our big options are few, and urgent: they are three; either despair, delusion, or disclosure - the three D’s. Either we accept that there is no rational explanation for anything important and life is dumb luck, we muster the courage to endure in the dark – and periodically go shopping; or we cultivate delusions of meaning like progress, democracy, freedom, and justice, all of which history has treated unkindly; or we accept the disclosure of God in Jesus Christ and come to him in faith. In the end our option is only Either/Or, either nothing, or everything!

So let me advise you; We speak of what we know; we have canvassed the alternatives and it is the case that since Auschwitz there is no place to hide from the pointlessness of it all, no way to tell why. At the point where why falls silent the proper question arises and it is not “Why?” but “Who?” “Who will bring the balm of grace to this wounded, sin-sick and senseless world?” There is no answer to the question “Why?” but there is an answer to the question “Who”? There is a balm in Gilead, and his name is Jesus. We testify that Jesus is God in action in our humanity, that he really does forgive sins, not only hereafter but also here and now. So what shall we do? We shall if we are prudent, get ourselves to him and ask him to reconcile us with God, and if we are too paralyzed, - with fear, boredom, arrogance or self-deceit, - we shall ask our friends to take us, to drag us, if need be to carry us and batter a hole in the roof to get us there. Better, however, would it be to get on over there under our own steam and quietly ask for the grace of reconciliation, the healing, soothing balm of the divine love. Jesus will give it to us, will smooth it on with his own hands, touching us as he touched the leper, because he is the Son of Man. He is the true and perfect human being, he is God forgiving our sins and healing our souls.

Amen.