Fr. Kyle’s Trinity XIX Sermon

They marvelled, and glorified God, who had given such power unto men.

+

The ninth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew opens in the middle of a travel narrative. Jesus had—just in the previous chapter–gotten into a boat with his disciples to cross the Sea of Galilee when a storm suddenly overtook them. Jesus, asleep below deck, only wakes up after being roused by his disciples. He awakes, goes up, and he stops the storm and calms the sea with only the words of this mouth. And the disciples are shocked by this. What manner of man is this? they ask. They marveled at his actions. Later, when they arrive on the other side of the Sea of Galilee in the area of the Gadarenes, Jesus heals the man who is possessed of devils, sending the evil spirits into a herd of swine who plunge themselves into the sea. This must have been a shocking scene. But it is still surprising to us as readers that the crowds are very unhappy about this. They are so unhappy that they ask Jesus to leave. Who wouldn’t want to be relieved of a neighbor who is possessed of devils? But, then, we, too, might be tempted to irritation when Our Lord has accomplished some spiritual victory and, as a result, we have lost some material wealth, like the owners of those pigs which represented some significant capital to the people who lived there. This sort of thing happens all the time, though usually in a less dramatic fashion.

This relationship between the spiritual and the physical realities of life will be treated more directly in the next story, the third of this section, which is the subject of our Gospel reading. Symbolically, the crossing from one side of the sea to the other suggests a kind of crossing over between the physical and the material. And, we should recognize that this three-part miracle narrative belongs to a series of three-part miracle narratives that make up this middle section of the Gospel, which include healing of people both of bodily and spiritual ailments. So, we ought to draw some connections between them—both between the separate miracle accounts and between the crossing-over-the-sea context of these stories. By paying attention to these narrative relationships, we pay attention to what the Evangelist is trying to accomplish in his story telling.

So here we are, Jesus has arrived on the other side of the sea, in the area of his own town, we are told. This is the area of Capernaum. It is worth noting that Matthew calls this area Our Lord’s own city. From the Gospel accounts of Mark and Luke where this story is also told, we know that this is not the city of Nazareth. But it is the area of Galilee where he has made a home base for his ministry. His own city of Nazareth rejected his ministry—his spiritual power—which is why St. Matthew can say that this city is his own city, his adopted one.

There, he encounters a group of crowds. They are gathering around him because of the miracles that he has done. It’s a chaotic situation. We might imagine that his disciples are concerned about the chaos of the moment. They are receiving a lot of attention, which is both a good thing and a dangerous thing. More people are there to hear the message of Jesus, which is good. And more people are there to pay attention to Jesus, which makes him a threat to the religious leaders, which is dangerous. And the religious leaders are there in force that day.

This great crowd gathered around to hear Jesus speak makes it difficult for anyone from the outside to enter into his attention. Consider the nature of crowds. They are unruly. They are difficult to organize. Masses of people have a kind of life of their own. And into this chaotic scene, a group of friends enters. They are bringing a man on a mat. We know from St. Mark and St. Luke’s accounts that they lower him down through a roof into the midst of a group of people in the interior of a house.

And what is wrong with this man? Why are they doing this? He is sick. He is paralyzed. He has probably been in this condition for a very long time. They draw the attention of Jesus. And notice what the text says, “and Jesus, seeing their faith….” Jesus is drawn to the situation of this man because of the friends who brought him to his attention.

This should tell us something important. This should tell us three things. First of all, Our Lord does not treat us as isolated individuals. We are not alone. This should be encouraging to us. Our path through this life is not one that we forge by ourselves. Our friends and family and other companions matter in the life of faith.

The second thing we need to pay attention to is the fact that God will listen to us when we bring other people to his attention. Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation of weakness. Even sometimes we are in the grip of despair. The man in the story is in the grip of paralysis, but apparently it is not only a paralysis of the body but also of the soul. You might find yourself someday, God forbid, in a moment in which you not only cannot do anything for yourself physically, but also you cannot do anything for yourself spiritually. What do you do in that moment? What can you do? Our Gospel tells us that we must rely on our fellow believers who will lift us up in prayer.

The third thing that we need to pay attention to is that God will respond to the prayers of people on the behalf of another person. This is the ministry of intercession. It is our responsibility to be on the lookout for those who need prayer, particularly in moments when they cannot look out for themselves. This is one reason why we pray for those, for example, who are near death. Why do we pray for them? Because they cannot pray for themselves.

Notice what Jesus says:

Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.

This is a remarkable statement. The first reason that it is a remarkable statement is because he makes known his power to forgive sins. This becomes a matter of controversy and we will get to that in a moment. The other reason that it is remarkable is that neither the man who is sick of paralysis nor the friends who brought him to Jesus were, apparently, motivated by his spiritual condition. The text does not say this exactly, but we might suppose that they did not bring him to Jesus to have his sins forgiven. In other words, Jesus is solving a problem that they did they were not seeking a solution for.

But just like the people of the Gadarenes who lamented the loss of the swine in the sea, they were missing the point. Just as Jesus crossed over the Sea of Galilee, Jesus can easily cross over from the spiritual to the physical—he sees both perfectly.

And Our Lord’s ability to see both the physical and the spiritual—the mental and the material—is on full display in this narrative. He notices that the scribes—the religious leaders—who were in this crowd of people listening to his every word and watching every action, they begin thinking in their hearts, what in the world is this man Jesus saying? He blasphemes.

The scribes are on to something, in a certain sense. They are correct in the sense that they recognize the seriousness of the statement of Jesus. He is claiming to speak on behalf of God Almighty about matters that God Almighty alone has authority to speak. Only God can forgive sins. And no one has the right to pronounce things about God that are not true. There is no reason to believe that anyone has the power to pronounce forgiveness who is not God. The whole formation of the people of Israel was based on this fact.

In the Old Testament, there is afforded a means for the forgiveness of sins. That is through the sacrificial methods of the Tabernacle and Temple system. And both of them rely on the repentance of the person who has committed sin. But Jesus is God Almighty. And he has power on earth to forgive sin. And, for him, it is enough to see the faith of the friends of this sick man to forgive sin. Their faith stands in for his repentance. That is enough for him to forgive sins.  This should tell us something about the power of intercessory prayer.

Jesus recognizes the criticism in the hearts of the scribes who are “thinking evil in their hearts.” And he responds to them:

Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?  For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? 

Jesus responds to their unspoken doubts and he tells all of us something important about the relationship between the spiritual and the physical realms. They are deeply interconnected.

But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

We need to see two things here, and they are both equally important. Jesus has authority over all things physical and material. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. There is no hidden secret of the spiritual life of man and no mystery of the bodily experience of humanity that is not under his authority. There is no passion, no vice, no lust, no acedia, no pride, no anger, no impatience, no fear, no anxiety, no greed nor envy, and no gluttony, and no variation of any spiritual malady that is not under his authority. There is no bodily ailment, no impairment, no inhibition, no frailty, nothing touching our head, shoulders, knees, and toes, nothing pertaining to our eyes and ears and mouth and nose—that is no under the authority of Jesus.

He may allow us to suffer under ailments. He may use these sufferings as tools to turn us to God. But his answer to us, whatever our ailment, spiritually and bodily, is both, Thy sins be forgiven thee; and, Arise, and walk.

These are the answers that Our Lord gives to us. They are firm. And they are true. We must not doubt them. Allow yourself, like the multitude, to marvel. We must respond to him in faith, asking for his healing for us and for those we carry with us, if not on a stretcher then on our hearts.

But we need to be clear about the nature of this healing. Just like those who were upset about the death of the swineherd, we might doubt the importance of the spiritual reality of Jesus’s healing. We might think that the bodily is the most important thing, to the exclusion of the spiritual. We live in a day in which people prize the extension of life and the health of the body above all things. That is mirage. The most miraculous healing is the healing of the soul and the forgiveness of sins. Out of that healing flows the restoration of all health of the body.

At the center of this understanding of healing and restoration is the one who is both God and Man, Jesus Christ, the Third Person of the Trinity, who in his very person crossed the sea of the material and the immaterial, the spiritual and the physical, the human and the divine. He is the one who has been given authority on earth to forgive sin and heal us of every infirmity.

They marvelled, and glorified God, who had given such power unto men.

+