This is how God forgives sins

Sermon for Trinity 19

Ephesians 4:22-28  +  Matthew 9:1-8

Last week we heard Jesus’ answer to the question about the greatest commandment in the Law: You shall love the Lord with all your heart, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. But, as we discussed, the greatest commandment is still not the greatest teaching in the Bible. The greatest teaching is the Gospel: how Jesus, the Christ, by His perfect life and by His innocent death on the cross, earned the forgiveness of sins for all who have broken the greatest commandments, and how the Lord now promises to forgive sins to all who believe in Jesus. We see a brilliant example of the forgiveness of sins taking place in today’s Gospel—what it is, how it takes place, and who has the authority to forgive.

We’re told that Jesus came to His own city. Now, we think first of Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. He’s known, after all, as Jesus of Nazareth. But, as Mark and Luke make clear, “His own city” is no longer Nazareth. It’s now Capernaum. Because not too long before this, the people of Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown, tried to kill Him, tried to throw Him right over a cliff. But Jesus is more than welcome in Capernaum. So welcome, in fact, that the people crowded into the house where He was teaching, crowded in so tightly that there was standing room only. That made it impossible for the four men carrying the stretcher with the paralytic on it to get in to see Jesus. So they climbed up on the roof of the house, hoisted the stretcher up to the roof, dug a hole through the roof, and lowered the paralyzed man down through the hole in the roof to where Jesus was.

What an amazing scene that must have been! But Matthew doesn’t bother with those details that Mark and Luke record. The way they entered Jesus’ presence wasn’t the important part of the story. What happened next was.

When he saw their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take heart, son! Your sins are forgiven you.”

You heard those same words this morning after you confessed your sins and your faith in Christ Jesus. Let’s take a step back and look at what it means to forgive sins.

There is such a thing as personal forgiveness. When someone hurts you in some way, you either hold it against them, so that your relationship with them remains fractured, or you forgive them and your relationship is repaired, although some consequences of the sin may remain.

That’s not what Jesus was doing in today’s Gospel, offering personal forgiveness. The paralytic hadn’t sinned against Jesus personally, not against Jesus the man. He had sinned against God directly, as all people have, and he had surely also sinned against other people, which is also a sin against God. He, like everyone else, had broken the greatest commandments in the Law, and, as a sinner, he deserved to remain separated from God for eternity. He deserved to die.

But Jesus takes all the man’s sins committed against God and against other men, lumps them all together, and simply says, “Take heart, son! Your sins are forgiven you!” Or, in other words, “You’re forgiven for all the wrongs that you’ve done!”

What does that mean, “You’re forgiven”? It means, God will not hold your sins against you anymore. God, the holy Judge, hereby releases you from your guilt and from the punishment you deserve for your sins. You are no longer condemned. You are no longer a subject of the devil’s kingdom. You are no longer going to hell. No, you are justified before God. You are declared righteous in God’s courtroom. You are now a subject of God’s kingdom, a beloved child of the heavenly Father, a member of Christ, an heir of eternal life. All of that is included in the statement, “Your sins are forgiven you.”

Are there any conditions given for this forgiveness? Not a condition, as in, “You have to do something first to earn it!” No, there’s a reason why the Holy Spirit sets a paralytic before us as a prime candidate for receiving the forgiveness of sins. Like paralytics, we are unable to move, unable to earn the forgiveness of sins. But there is a condition, or a component, or an ingredient that does have to be there. All three Gospel writers give us this key detail: When Jesus saw their faith. The Holy Spirit had all three Evangelists record this event and this specific part of the event, because it’s important. When we’re talking about forgiving sins, faith is an essential part of it.

And what is faith? It’s the confidence of the heart that Jesus is good and merciful, willing and able to help, and always faithful to His Word and promise. And faith isn’t our work or our contribution to our forgiveness. It’s simply the thing that has to be there, and it’s worked by God the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the word of Christ. This is why it’s stated so clearly in Scripture that a person is justified before God by faith in Christ Jesus and not by any works of the Law.

That’s so different from what the world thinks is the path to God. Just do your best. Just be a better person today than you were yesterday, and you’ll be fine. Just love everyone. I assure you, that is what the unbelievers in your life think. They probably even think that’s what the Christian faith is all about. So why bother being a Christian? Just be a good person, and you’ll be fine. But you have to tell them the truth. If they would really please God by doing good things, then they’d have to be a whole lot better than they are now. Impossibly better. No, it’s not a person’s record of being good enough that will ever get them to be accepted by God. It’s only faith in Christ Jesus.

And contrition necessarily comes before faith. What does a person have faith in Jesus for or to do? For the forgiveness of sins. That implies that you acknowledge you have sins to forgive. If you want God’s acceptance through faith in Christ, that means you acknowledge you’re not acceptable as you are. And if you want your sins forgiven, that implies that you no longer want to cling to them or defend them or think fondly of them. “Oh, I know that was wrong, but it was no big deal, or it was so much fun!” There can be no faith in Christ for forgiveness if you don’t hate your sin, if you don’t really want that sin to be erased from your past. But where there is contrition, where you yearn for a clean slate, and where you look to Christ in faith for that cleansing, there God is willing and eager to forgive, as Jesus did for the paralytic in our Gospel.

That leads to the other key question. Who has authority to forgive sins—to change a person’s status before God from condemned sinner to forgiven child of God?

Some of the scribes and Pharisees who were crowded into that house in Capernaum raised that issue among themselves. As Luke tells us, they were thinking to themselves, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They were exactly right about that. Only God can change a person’s status before God. What they didn’t account for was that God was standing right there in front of them. Yes, Jesus even knew their thoughts, which only God can know. And to prove His divine authority to forgive sins, Jesus asked them, Is it easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Arise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then he said to the paralytic, “Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.” And he did, proving that Jesus, the Son of Man had authority on earth to forgive sins.

Jesus spoke of His authority in other places. The Father has entrusted all judgment to the Son. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. All judgment. All authority. The right to grant life as He pleases, or to hold people’s sins against them. That’s why forgiveness apart from Jesus is impossible, just as forgiveness apart from faith in Jesus is impossible. He and He alone has the authority to forgive sins.

But, if all authority and all judgment has been entrusted to Jesus by God the Father, then doesn’t that mean the same Jesus has the right to share some of that authority with others, if He chooses? And He has chosen!

The text before us is actually a perfect example of what Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 2 Cor. 5: God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting men’s sins against them. Now, reconciling the world to Himself doesn’t mean reconciling or forgiving the sins of everyone in the world—or everyone in the room. That’s not what Jesus did in today’s Gospel. But one by one, as the word about Christ brought people to faith, He reconciled them to God through faith. He forgave them their sins.

But then Paul goes on, and God has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Just as God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, so He has appointed ministers, who are Christ’s divine ambassadors to call sinners to repentance and faith in Christ Jesus, and to forgive the penitent and believing.

So Jesus said to His apostles, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. And again after His resurrection, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

And so ministers are set in place around the world by Jesus to keep carrying out this ministry of reconciliation, to keep reconciling sinners to God, first by preaching the Law to those who need to hear it, who are secure in their sins at the moment; then by preaching about Jesus, who offered Himself as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world; and then by acting in Jesus name to forgive sins to those who have faith in Jesus. We can’t “see” faith, as Jesus could, so we are left to rely on a person’s confession of faith. We practiced it again here this morning in a general way. But private confession is also available, if you wish to be reexamined according to God’s Word, have your personal confession of faith heard, and have the absolution pronounced on you directly.

Now, the Christian life doesn’t end there, receiving the forgiveness of sins from Jesus through His appointed ministers. The paralytic was healed. Then what? He got up and walked. Well, St. Paul, in today’s Epistle, touched on the “Now what?” of the Christian life. Now that you’re forgiven, now that you’ve put on the New Man and put off the Old, you get up and walk according to the New Man. Live like forgiven children of God, not like unbelieving children of the devil. You wanted forgiveness for the deeds of the Old Man, right? So why would you continue to live in those deeds? Why wouldn’t you strive to get rid of them, if you wanted forgiveness for them?

There’s much more we could say about that, but we’ll leave it for another sermon, because today’s Gospel gives us enough to think about for the moment. The Christian faith centers around Christ and the forgiveness that He earned for us on the cross and offers to us in the Word and in the Sacraments. So use the ministry of the Word that Christ has instituted! Live in repentance! Believe the Gospel! And then know that the words of Christ always apply to you: Take heart, son, daughter! Your sins are forgiven you! Amen.