Life and sermon preparation always intersect. This week, I found myself at the crossroads of one of Jesus’ healing stories and my own medical journey.
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As we were finishing up with my hearing test on Friday, I commented to my audiologist that in the year and a half since I received my first implant it seems more people are getting them. My words were fed, in part, by Rick sharing with me that one of his colleagues was preparing for the surgery, and I do feel like the implants are more common.
“Maybe,” she said, “or perhaps you just notice them more because you have one.”
She’s right, in that the circumstances of our lives often help to focus our attention and bring things to the forefront that we might not otherwise notice as easily. The themes in whatever passage I am studying to prepare for my sermon from week to week raise my awareness about different things and I make connections I might not otherwise have seen, as happened this week when I was reading the account of a paralyzed man being brought to Jesus alongside of being told it was time to get my second cochlear implant.
Also during this week, as I was reading about the religious legalists challenging Jesus’ compassion and inclusivity, news broke about one of the white male leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the denomination I was born into, making political moves for the group to double down on its ban of allowing women being ordained as ministers or serving in any position of leadership in a church.
I’ll come back to both of them.
Matthew says that Jesus made yet another trip across the Sea of Galilee and, once again, people were waiting for him when he got to the other side. This time, a group of people (family, maybe friends?) had carried a paralyzed man on a stretcher so he could meet Jesus. Matthew says that when Jesus saw the trust of those who carried him, he turned to the man and said, “Be encouraged,” or, “Take heart,” and then he said, “You are forgiven,” (our translation reads, “You are absolved from your offences.”) which I imagine caught most everyone there by surprise.
His words harken back to the first thing most every angel said every time they show up in the gospels: “Don’t be afraid!” Jesus, however, was doing more than trying to calm the man. He actively called him to be brave, to lean into the trust of his friends, as though he was about to have the chance to do that.
The next sentence gives us an idea why. Some in the crowd of people were legal experts connected to the religious establishment. They were the kind of people, it seems, who walked around with scorecards looking for ways people were messing up so they could issue demerits and put it on the permanent records, focusing on judgment rather than forgiveness. I’m not sure what the Hebrew word for nitpicker is, but it would have fit them.
We will come back to them. Right now I want to stay close to what happened between Jesus and the man on the cot. It’s worth noting that the man was in the middle of the scene, though in some ways he was never a part of it. His people carried him in; Jesus spoke to him; the legal experts spoke about him; Jesus forgave him and healed him, and finally the man got up, as he was told to do, and went home without ever being identified by name or saying a word.
Those details offer us a chance to learn something that may not be at the heart of the story but is worth attending to: When we are trying to help people, it matters that we give them the power to make their own decisions rather than assuming we know what is best for them. Even the best intentions can run over someone else. Our illnesses and disabilities may slow us down or make life more arduous, but they do not make us less human.
With everything going on, Jesus noticed the man and spoke directly to him. He didn’t use this man as a prop to make a point or to win a theological argument. Though I am sure Jesus knew the nitpickers were in the crowd, he acted out of compassion for the man who had been placed at his feet by his friends. “Take heart,” he said, which sound like the opening to a conversation that perhaps was the beginning of a conversation that was not recorded, and then added, “You are absolved from your offences,” you’re forgiven.
Now I’ll go back to my implant. One of the questions I get quite often is people ask me what caused my hearing loss. It is not a bad question, but does underline of a general feeling about diseases and conditions that has been passed down and is hard to get over, and that is that illness is some kind of punishment. I’ve actually felt that judgment more related to my depression than my hearing loss, as though the depression is somehow my fault.
I am using my personal example to get to the larger systemic issue that people who live with physical or mental disabilities or chronic illnesses are assumed somehow to be broken humans or have done something wrong. There’s another story in the gospels where the disciples come upon a man who had lost his sight and ask, “Who sinned and caused this man’s blindness?”
Jesus’ words were a direct challenge to the common thought in Mediterranean societies that illnesses were God’s punishment, which also meant those people were left on the margins of society, and that takes me back to the denomination of my youth being so hateful toward and frightened of women in leadership—or just women in general—as though their gender is sinful, or at least makes them less than fully human.
Jesus made it clear God wasn’t punishing the man or ostracizing him. When the legalists challenged him, Jesus said, “The Human One” or “The Son of Humans,” which was a name Jesus called himself that has roots in the Hebrew Bible and also simply means “human being.” Jesus acknowledged that forgiveness came from God, yes, but it was delivered by the things human beings do for each other and say to each other as the means of relational healing and connection, as Jesus taught and we pray in the Lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive each other.”
The church—and by that I don’t mean the institution, I mean the myriad bundles of relationships that happen in gatherings like ours all across the world where people are working together to incarnate the love of God—is called to be a community of forgiveness and restoration. That’s not a byproduct of God being with us and our being with each other. That’s the point. We are sharing life together in Christ to heal and help each other, to attend to each other, to forgive each other, not to evaluate and nitpick each other to death.
The man on the stretcher was physically paralyzed, and he was relationally incapacitated by the way the judgmental ones who claimed they were speaking for God treated him. The legalists looked at him and saw a hopeless outcast rather than a human being who was paralyzed. His friends looked at him and saw someone they loved whom they wanted to help. Jesus looked at him and saw someone created in the image of God and worthy of love, forgiveness, and healing.
How do we look at each other?
How quick are we to look for ways to forgive, rather than keeping score of perceived offences and injuries?
How quick are we to carry each other to where the help is?
How well do we look beyond ourselves to see those on the fringe of things who needs us to offer them a place to belong?
I began with talking about the ways in which the circumstances of our lives often focus our attention raising our awareness of certain things. I often use the example that if someone says, “Have you seen any red bicycles?” we may answer that we have not, but then it feels like that’s all we see for the next week.
What if we chose to make the focus of our attention a less passive activity, that we chose to not wait for the suggestion, but chose to listen to God’s call to notice one another and actively looked for those who are sidelined by circumstance or illness or injury or the damage done by all the things in life that assault and diminish our humanity?
May we be those who train our gaze to pay attention people, no matter the moment, just as Jesus did, and when we see them, may we be those who incarnate love and offer words of forgiveness and acts of healing. Amen.
Peace,
Milton