The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
St. Matthew 9.1-8
06 October 2024
Chapel of Our Savior, Lutheran Community Home, Seymour, Indiana
+ In the Name of Jesus +
The paralytic man on his bed says nothing in neither Matthew nor Mark’s nor Luke’s account of his healing. His friends fight through the crowd surrounding Jesus as He teaches them from the house in Capernaum, at least four of them we imagine carrying a mostly grown man on a bed or cot of some kind. In Mark and Luke’s Gospels they go up on the roof and tear apart the thatch roof, and lower the man down to Jesus.
Jesus sees the faith of the friends of the paralytic, and speaks an unexpected word to the man lying on the bed:
Be of good cheer, my son; your sins are forgiven.
Have courage. Don’t be afraid. Take heart. Comfort for the wearied heart, soul, and mind. Jesus’ concern for the man is not first and foremost the man’s physical condition. It’s the spiritual condition that Jesus attends to first.
We may have expected Jesus to say first, “Rise, get up and walk!” Go now to your home, O paralyzed one, I restore you healthy and whole back to your family and friends. Now the man would be able to work for a living, perhaps even be given a bride in marriage and able to start a happy and God-fearing family. And with that, we would all be tempted to say – he lived happily ever after.
Yet this man was really being crushed by his spiritual paralysis – that fear and torment he felt in his heart, mind, soul, and body, the crushing weight of his sinful condition before a just and holy God that lies upon the conscience of every man confronted with the Law of God and its demands. Here’s a person who hurts so much, he doesn’t say a word to the Lord, not a single out-loud prayer.
The physical disability in his life is real, and it was no doubt a mind and heart consuming issue for the man. Jesus knows just how much the body can hurt, for He Himself experienced every torment of the body possible in His own flesh, right down to bleeding out and dying a gruesome death upon a Roman cross.
We all know, especially here living in a senior care community like this one, that every day our bodies grow one day older and perhaps that much frailer. Sudden sicknesses rear their ugly head. In this corrupted world, our bodies follow the laws of science – they lose order and decay, they never truly make a gain. The death of our body, one way or another is inevitable. Dust you are, and to dust you are returning.
And yet, listen to Jesus carefully. Take heart, be of good cheer, in the face of sickness, every terror of this body and life corrupted by sin, and even in the face of death itself – you have a friend in the Son of God who is one with you in those sufferings and in death too, He knows what it means to live, to suffer, to die.
Be of good cheer, my son; your sins are forgiven.
Today, we heard of another man lying on a bed in our reading from Genesis 28. The patriarch Jacob – who was fleeing from his older brother Esau, when he had deceptively been given the birthrite inheritance and blessing of Isaac instead of his older brother. Jacob was sent away to his uncle Laban to avoid Esau’s wrath and vengeance, for Esau comforted himself with the idea of killing his younger brother.
On the way to the far away country of Haran, Jacob lies down on the ground for a bed, a rock for a pillow, and the same Lord Jesus who healed the paralytic appears to him in a vision, as the ladder from heaven to earth, upon whom the angels ascend and descend. Just like the paralytic, the same Lord Jesus assures Jacob – he will not die on account of his sins at the hand of Esau, rather the Lord assures Jacob that it was God’s will for the birth-rite of Isaac to be his, that is, that the promised Messiah in human flesh would be descended from Jacob. Through him, and his offspring, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Israelite, Gentile, men, women, children, paralytics, sinners one and all. Jacob would indeed live, and had nothing to fear from his older brother. The Lord was in that place to be with him, for He would indeed descend from Jacob.
If you didn’t know that Jesus was truly God and Man, you know it from these stories of Jacob’s vision of the ladder while asleep on his hard earthen bed, and the paralytic on his. Each man feared for their future. But Jesus knows the true fears and needs of Jacob, and of the paralytic. He acts to comfort them. To each He assures them of their forgiveness. He knows the wicked intentions of Esau, and He knows the wicked thoughts of the scribes – “this man blasphemes”– how is it, the Scribes mutter to themselves, that this Jesus can claim God’s place to forgive sins.
That is the joy of this story for you. Jesus Christ is no blasphemer, no fake; He is the one, true God. He proves He is God in the flesh and has authority to forgive sins by cheering the paralyzed man with the ability to walk again. And He deigns to cheer you with the forgiveness of your sins. The Son of Man has authority to comfort you and encourage you in your struggle against sin and the power of the devil, the Son of Man has authority to take away your sins, remove them as far as the east is from the west, drown them in the depths of the sea, never to be known again.
Jesus forgives your sins and comforts the sin-sick soul with the balm of His Word because out of His great love for you and every sinner, He bore your sins and your infirmities, bore all of the sins you’ve committed and the punishment, bore all of the pains and sadness and grief, was the Lamb of price led to the offering slaughter on the cross, and there, the holy Son of God through His innocent suffering and death paid for you, paid for your comfort and joy, paid for your forgiveness, paid for you to be His spotless bride, you, His Church, His chosen, His called and elect – that you would be His own and live under Him, forever, in His Kingdom, to serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.
Take heart and be of good cheer that death, and disease, and the heartache and misery and pain and tears and fears and sorrows of this temporal life are not the end of things for you or for anyone united with Christ – for just as surely as He gave the paralytic man the ability to rise, pick up his bed, and go home, just as surely as He sent Jacob onward in life from Bethel’s earthen bed with confidence, just as surely did Jesus Christ rise up from His three-day bed, and ascended home in our flesh, glorified, to the right hand of the Father, the most marvelous of all things, for where He is, there you who believe on His Name shall most certainly follow and go – you too will be called to rise, leave behind your bed, and come home.
God grant that wonderful day to come soon for you, His holy and righteous people, and grant you faith and confidence and good cheer to live out each day as you eagerly await His coming down for you and all believers in Christ. In Jesus’ name we pray this: Amen.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit +
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