To be honest - I'm a little annoyed with Jesus again today in these verses. It's probably stemming from the fact that the news from Haiti is so grim, so some of the harder words in Luke are jumping out at me.
The story in v. 17 screams out at me today. Although I can mentally agree that the forgiveness of sins is a greater need in everyone's life (with eternal ramifications and touching the soul rather than just the temporary body) I really sympathize with the need for an immediate physical cure. If Christ walked into Port-au-Prince today and started forgiving sins - I'd be livid. And in the history of Christian mission work, the churches have come to see that the work of the gospel is intermingled with the work of creating human dignity and bodily health (and the church has struggled to figure out how to do that without westernizing the world).
Jesus telling the man that his sins are forgiven but not healing his paralysis would be like the churches of the 1830s telling slaves to rejoice because their reward was in heaven. Pie-in-the-sky rewards to help us overlook the injustices and the cruelties of reality. And not the whole gospel.
Luke is the gospel most concerned with the poor, outcast, and disenfranchised. In that sense, Luke is more in-tuned with the immediate physical realities than any of the other gospels. So the more I ponder it, the more I think Luke uses this story to make a point, more than to relate actual facts. In the end, Jesus heals the paralytic - who is now able to earn himself a living and cease being a burden on his family. Jesus is compassionate, does heal, does worry about the practical physical issues that govern our daily lives - but Luke wants us to see that Jesus does more than that. I think Jesus always intended to heal the paralysis - but wanted to have the conversation. Jesus wanted to be more than a simple healer - in a string of healings, Jesus wanted to stop a bit and take the conversation deeper. "Yes, I will heal, and I know how important that is....but this goes deeper - deeper even than what you think is your greatest need - I offer even more."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I underlined the same thing wondering why Jesus phrased it in such a way! The odd thing is wondering how common are "simple healers" in this time that forgiving sins was more interesting than making a paralyzed man walk?!
ReplyDelete