Last month, 400 people attended a meeting in the Millennium Centre about the future of the town’s GP practices. Another 150 were turned away. Understandably, people are very concerned about their health, and where they can turn when they are unwell.
One related phrase we hear frequently is ‘As long as you have your health’. Financial disasters can be recovered from. Burnt down houses can be rebuilt. But if you get sick, your future is no longer in your hands. Sometimes your greatest hopes in life will be disappointed. But ‘as long as you have your health’.
It sounds like a good way of keeping things in perspective – but is it actually true?
As he often does, Jesus challenges the inherited cliches through which we view the world. Four friends once brought their paralysed friend to him. Given the huge crowd that had gathered to hear him, they weren’t able to get into the house where Jesus was. So they thought outside the box, went up on the flat roof, made a hole in it, and lowered their friend down. Imagine the surprise of those in the house as they started to hear banging and scraping above their heads! As bits of soil and sticks start falling onto the ground, and chinks of light appeared, and then daylight began to stream into the room.
But the biggest surprise is what Jesus says when the man on the stretcher reaches the floor. Think of the sense of anticipation as the crowd wait to see the paralysed man healed. But Jesus looks at him and says: ‘Your sins are forgiven’. It wasn’t what anybody was expecting! It’s as if Jesus was reading from the wrong script. Here is a man who can't move his limbs – who is crying out to be healed – and Jesus starts talking about sins and forgiveness. Can’t Jesus see that the man has more pressing issues needing dealt with?!
But actually, Jesus is dealing with his most pressing issue. As Jesus looks at this man he sees that he has two defining problems – and he deals with the most important one first. If what he chose to address first seems surprising to us, it only highlights that our priorities aren't always the same as his.
After all, if Jesus had only healed the man of his paralysis, what good would that have been to him in another fifty of sixty years? If, as the Bible teaches, we were made to live forever. And if, to quote the tagline of Russel Crowe’s film Gladiator, ‘what we do in life echoes in eternity’. Then surely our most pressing need in this life is to have our broken relationship with God restored. And to have the sins which separate us from him dealt with.
Many would say there is no such thing as sin. And yet when it comes time to die, many are overwhelmed by guilt. New York paramedic Matthew O’Reilly said in a TED talk that almost all the critically injured people he comes across respond in three ways when he is honest with them and tells them they are dying. He says: ‘The first pattern always kind of shocked me. Regardless of religious belief or cultural background, there is a need for forgiveness. Whether they call it sin, or they simply say they have a regret, their guilt is universal’.
Whether we ‘have our health’ or not is irrelevant in the face of this universal guilt. But amazingly, in Jesus Christ we have someone who claims to be able to deal with our guilt once and for all.
His claim to be able to forgive sins provoked scepticism then, as it does now. After all it’s one thing to claim to be able to forgive sins – but how do you prove it? And so Jesus followed up his claim by physically healing the paralysed man ‘that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’. He did the miracle that they could see, so they would know that he had done the miracle they couldn’t see.
I believe that the miracles Jesus and the Apostles did were unique and not ones we are called to try and replicate today. However, I have seen God’s miraculous power at work in the lives of those who haven’t had their health – for example, who have been wheelchair bound for decades – but have had an infectious faith and joy in Jesus despite their circumstances. ‘As long as you have your health’? I’m grateful for my health, but I’d take a faith like theirs over it any day.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 23rd February 2023