It was their own firm belief that sin and sickness were indissolubly linked together. Those who were sick had sinned. So Jesus asked them: ‘Is it easier to say to this man, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up and walk”?’ Any charlatan could say, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ There was no possibility of ever demonstrating whether his words were effective or not; such a statement was completely uncheckable. But to say, ‘Get up and walk’ was to say something whose effectiveness would either be proved or disproved there and then. So Jesus said in effect: ‘You say that I have no right to forgive sins? You hold as a matter of belief that if this man is ill he is a sinner and he cannot be cured till he is forgiven? Very well, then, watch this!’ So Jesus spoke the word and the man was cured.
The experts in the law were caught at their own game. On their own stated beliefs the man could not be cured, unless he was forgiven. He was cured, therefore he was forgiven. Therefore, Jesus’ claim to forgive sin must be true. Jesus must have left a completely baffled set of legal experts; and, worse, he must have left them in a baffled rage. Here was something that must be dealt with: if this went on, all orthodox religion would be shattered and destroyed. In this incident Jesus signed his own death warrant – and he knew it.
For all that, it is an extremely difficult incident. What does it mean that Jesus can forgive sin? There are three possible ways of looking at this.
(1) We could take it that Jesus was conveying God’s forgiveness to the man. After David had sinned and Nathan had rebuked him into terror and David had humbly confessed his sin, Nathan said: ‘The Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die’ (2 Samuel 12:13). Nathan was not forgiving David’s sin, but he was conveying God’s forgiveness to David and assuring him of it. So we could say that what Jesus was doing was that he was assuring the man of God’s forgiveness, conveying to him something which God had already given him. That is certainly true, but it does not read as if it was the whole truth.
(2) We could take it that Jesus was acting as God’s representative. John says: ‘The Father judges no one but has given all judgement to the Son’ (John 5:22). If judgment is committed to Jesus, then so must forgiveness be. Let us take a human analogy. Analogies are always imperfect, but we can think only in human terms. We may give another person power of attorney; that means to say that we have given that person the absolute disposal of our goods and property. We agree that the other person should act for us, and that that person’s actions should be regarded precisely as our own. We could take it that that is what God did with Jesus, that he delegated to him his powers and privileges, and that the word Jesus spoke was none other than the word of God.
(3) We could take it in still another way. The whole essence of Jesus’ life is that in him we see clearly displayed the attitude of God to men and women. Now that attitude was the very reverse of the way God’s attitude had been perceived. It was not an attitude of stern, severe, austere justice, not an attitude of continual demand. It was an attitude of perfect love, of a heart yearning with love and eager to forgive. Again let us use a human analogy. Lewis Hind in one of his essays tells us of the day that he discovered his father. He had always respected and admired his father; but he had always been more than a little afraid of him. He was in church with his father one Sunday. It was a hot drowsy day. He grew sleepier and sleepier. He could not keep his eyes open as the waves of sleep engulfed him. His head nodded. He saw his father’s arm go up; and he was sure that his father was going to shake or strike him. Then he saw his father smile gently and put his arm round his shoulder. He cuddled the boy to himself so that he might rest the more comfortably and held him close with the clasp of love. That day, Lewis Hind discovered that his father was not as he had thought him to be and that his father loved him. That is what Jesus did for humanity and for God. He literally brought men and women God’s forgiveness upon earth. Without him, they would never have even remotely known about it. ‘I tell you,’ he said to the man, ‘and I tell you here and now, upon earth, you are a forgiven man.’ Jesus showed perfectly the attitude of God to all people. He could say, ‘I forgive,’ because in him God was saying, ‘I forgive.’
THE CALL OF THE MAN WHOM EVERYONE HATED
Mark 2:13–14
So Jesus went out again to the lakeside, and the whole crowd came to him, and he went on teaching them. As he walked along, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting in the office where he collected the customs duties. He said to him, ‘Follow me!’ He rose and followed him.
STEADILY and inexorably the synagogue door was shutting on Jesus. Between him and the guardians of Jewish orthodoxy, war had been declared. Now he was teaching, not in the synagogue, but by the lakeside. The open air was to be his church, the blue sky his canopy, and a hillside or a fishing boat his pulpit. Here was the beginning of that dreadful situation when the Son of God was banned from the place which was regarded as the house of God.
He was walking by the lakeside and teaching. That was one of the commonest ways for a Rabbi to teach. As the Jewish Rabbis walked the roads from one place to another, or as they strolled in the open air, their disciples grouped themselves around and walked with them and listened as they talked. Jesus was doing what any Rabbi might have done.
Galilee was one of the great road centres of the ancient world. It has been said that ‘Judaea is on the way to nowhere; Galilee is on the way to everywhere’. Palestine was the land bridge between Europe and Africa; all land traffic must go through her. The great Road of the Sea led from Damascus, by way of Galilee, through Capernaum, down past Carmel, along the Plain of Sharon, through Gaza and on to Egypt. It was one of the great roads of the world. Another road led from Acre on the coast away across the Jordan out to Arabia and the frontiers of the empire, a road that was trodden by the regiments and the caravans.
Palestine at this time was divided up. Judaea was a Roman province under a Roman procurator; Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas, a son of Herod the Great; to the east the territory which included Gaulonitis, Trachonitis and Batanaea was ruled by Philip, another of Herod’s sons. On the way from Philip’s territory to Herod’s domains, Capernaum was the first town to which the traveller came. It was by its very nature a frontier town; because of that it was a customs’ centre. In those days there were import and export taxes, and Capernaum must have been the place where they were collected. That is where Matthew worked. True, he was not, like Zacchaeus, in the service of the Romans; he was working for Herod Antipas; but a hated tax-collector he was. (The Authorized Version calls the tax-collectors publicans; that is because the Latin word was publicanus. The translation publican, which is of course nowadays quite misleading, actually goes back to John Wyclif’s translation in the fourteenth century.)
This story tells us certain things both about Matthew and about Jesus.
(1) Matthew was a well-hated man. Tax-gatherers can never be a popular section of the community, but in the ancient world they were hated. People never knew just how much they had to pay; the tax-collectors extracted from them as much as they could possibly get and lined their own pockets with the surplus that remained after the demands of the law had been met. Even a Greek writer like Lucian ranks tax-gatherers with ‘adulterers, panderers, flatterers and sycophants’. Jesus wanted the man no one else wanted. He offered his friendship to the man whom all others would have scorned to call friend.
(2) Matthew must have been a man at that moment with an ache in his heart. He must have heard about Jesus; he must have listened often on the outskirts of the crowds to his message; and something must have stirred in his heart. Now he could not possibly have gone to the orthodox good people of his day; to them he was unclean and they would have refused to have anything to do with him.
The story is told of a woman from the dock district in London who came to a women’s meeting. She had been living with a Chinese man and had a baby whom she brought with her. She liked the meeting and came back and back again. Then the vicar came to her. ‘I must ask you’, he said, ‘not to come again.’ The woman gave him a questioning look. ‘The other women’, said the vicar, ‘say that they will stop coming