Luke 5:21-24a (CEV)
21 The Pharisees and the experts began arguing, “Jesus must think he is God! Only God can forgive sins.”
22 Jesus knew what they were thinking, and he said, “Why are you thinking that? 23 Is it easier for me to tell this crippled man that his sins are forgiven or to tell him to get up and walk? 24 But now you will see that the Son of Man has the right to forgive sins here on earth.”
Only God
Remember the temple that we talked about way back in Luke chapter 1? (Yeah, yeah, I know that was weeks ago!) Well the whole point of the temple and its system was that it was supposed to be the path through which you could get your sins forgiven. The formula went something like this: take one sin, add one animal sacrifice, out pops one dose of forgiveness.
The system was simple and straightforward, if messy and expensive. The idea was that God needed blood to cover over the sins. It was a basic transaction – just like putting your credit card details into amazon.ca and expecting a book on your doorstep in two days – you knew what was required of you, and knew what you’d get out of the situation.
But here’s Jesus, sitting with all of these Pharisees, and throwing their entire system into an uproar. We spent the last two days talking about our definitions of sin and forgiveness, and now we can start to see how different what Jesus is saying and doing is from what the Pharisees were used to. And although we don’t go in for the temple system much these days, so might miss how big a deal this is, to the Pharisees, Jesus has just taken everything that is holy, turned it upside down and doused the thing in fire lighter.
Sins can only be forgiven with the right payment. And only God can forgive sins.
But God is supposed to be safe a long, long way away from us. Way back when the people were first brought out of Egypt, God called them round the mountain and said he was going to talk to them. Well, actually God said He was going to talk to Moses in their presence. But even that was enough to completely freak them out! And so they begged and they pleaded to have God talk just to Moses, and then to have Moses tell them what God had said.
And yes, I know that you weren’t allowed to call yourself God. I know that was breaking one of the many rules, and I get it – how would you feel if someone came up to you on the street today and said they were God? You wouldn’t be too keen on believing it either.
But I think there’s more going on than this.
I think maybe they can tell that this crippled man in front of them has actually experienced forgiveness.
And I think that scares them, because if that’s true, and if God’s the only one who can forgive sins, than it would mean that they were in the presence of God, and that would be terrifying!
I know people who get very scared by the idea that God might actually be real.
I know people who get very scared by experiences that make it hard to pretend that God isn’t right there in the midst of life.
I know people who will come up with any excuse to push God away, because the thought that God might see them, and know them and be real in their lives is utterly terrifying.
And I can’t help but wonder whether that’s part of what’s going on in this story. Whether all of the Pharisees’ questioning and theological arguments aren’t just one more way of trying to push God away, of trying to put God back into the nice, safe box they’d constructed for Him.
I wonder, too, how often we might end up doing exactly the same thing.Journal Questions:
- Have you ever found yourself wanting to put someone else between you and God? Maybe asking someone else to pray for you for something you didn’t feel you could ask God for?
- Has God ever shown up in ways that threatened to break your idea of how God was supposed to work?
- Have you ever tried to put God into a nice, safe box?
- How well did that work?
