“BAPTIZED AND FORGIVEN OF PALSY AND SIN”
Saint Matthew 9: 1-8
19th Sunday After Trinity: 2 October Anno Domini 2016
Father Jay Watson SSP
Because you don’t see a Galilean fishing vessel this morning does the text lose relevance for you? Only for your sinner self. The ship is here in Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Christ went nowhere on the Sea of Tiberius (Lake Gennesaret) without a ship, His ship, and its full complement of Apostolic disciples. He used that boat 2,000 years ago to travel to “His own city,” Capernaum. He uses His New Testament this morning to travel to your side—in your very midst!
This true historical miraculous healing occurred. It was of great benefit to the palsied man. It is of everlasting benefit to you. This is your Holy Baptism. This is your new life and new family. This is your daily contrition and repentance. This steels you for your life under the Cross and your anticipation of the Life of the World to Come!
You were a palsied little thing, 8 days old, or older. You too were sick unto death—conceived in sin. The wages of sin is death.
Lutherans have long claimed that the “text” has only one meaning. Okay. Matthew’s account recorded in the first 8 verses of his 9th chapter mean that Jesus by His Word alone healed a cripple. A man who could not walk, possibly a paraplegic of some sort, was instantly cured by Christ’s command. This was and is a sign that the Nazarene was no simple dispenser of wise aphorisms and gentle entreaties to be loving and “nice” to one another, but that He was in fact the very Christ of God—The God/Man—the enfleshed Logos—God in the flesh! The sign points to His invasion of Satan’s kingdom of mangled, diseased, rotting, and damned corpses as He says: “I have come to set the captive free!”
But Christians go beyond the obvious historical veracity and always ask with the Reformer, “what does this mean?” It doesn’t mean that The Lord always heals the sick, not even when they are His very own followers. Christians pray fervently for their loved ones to be healed. It doesn’t happen as often as one would think based upon reading the Four Gospels.
If Christ is for sinners, and He is, then He was for the palsied man, His “12,” and all of those other witnesses to that bodily cure. And, if Christ is for sinners then He is for you. If Christ both healed the palsied man, and forgave Him his sins, then that man will be in the heavenly sheepfold when Jesus returns to judge the quick and the dead. If Christ forgives you all your sins than you also will be in His mansions of splendor to feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the Eschaton! If you are forgiven your trespasses you have salvation—eternal life, regardless of whether you spend the remainder of your earthly life blind, depressed, cancer-ridden, or in an iron-lung. Forgiveness of sins is everything. The Gospel is atoning forgiveness in Words spoken declaratively over your bowed heads and placed reverently upon your cleansed tongues which He has opened. Baptism is forgiveness and life.
You don’t think of your own baptism enough. It needs to be the first thought that comes to your waking mind every morning. Luther’s Morning Prayer is a perfect discipline to norm your Christian Baptismal ethos.
The Churchly ship of Jesus sails on the waters of the Baptismal font. The wind and stormy waves are made still by His Word of Peace. He the Good Shepherd leads you by His voice exactly to those still waters of rebirth and regeneration. You too are carried on a bed by four friends—each, holding one corner of the four-fold Evangel—Sts. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You were made to receive good cheer, Peace and Forgiveness, by Christ’s own Good Message. He is The Lamb Who suffered for your bad. He is the paschal victim Who was slain for your release. He was struck with the devil’s palsy so that you can leap like the hart. He was blasphemed against so that the angels sing for you and with you at Holy Mass.
Did the palsied man, who was cured, ever think about Jesus after that liberating day? What do you think? There probably was not a day that went by that He did not praise God; and by praising God we mean—praising and thanking The Lord Jesus! This is another perfect picture of Holy Baptism and Holy Absolution. The man was only healed once but went on to live a life of repentant daily drowning of his “old Adam” and confessing his daily sins that He might continue to receive the oil of gladness—forgiving pardon and peace. So too, you who have been Baptized, come to the altar to be fed the Body and Blood of the Forgiver Himself. But it also means the Holy Ghost constrains you to come to the prayer kneeler on Thursdays to receive forgiveness from your under-shepherd in the Sacrament of Holy Absolution. “I believe that, when the called ministers of Christ…absolve those who repent of their sins…this is as valid and certain, in heaven, as if Christ, our dear Lord, dealt with us Himself.”
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost
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