JESUS FORGIVES THE CRIPPLE
HARD OR EASY?
In Matthew 9:5 Jesus asks the Jews what they think is the easiest, to make a cripple walk or to say to him that his sins are pardoned. He didn’t answer it. But he cured the cripple to show he could say it to the cripple. Nobody can see forgiveness so he needed to give evidence that the man was really pardoned. The evidence is the man walking again.
Is it really right for a man to be given the power to walk just so that we
can believe Jesus can forgive sins? That is using the man's sickness.
If it is easier to make the cripple walk then the cure doesn’t prove he could
forgive sins or declare forgiveness. You don’t say that winning an arm-wrestle
proves you could beat the world heavyweight champion in a boxing ring. If Jesus
thinks it does prove he could forgive sins or declare them forgiven, then if
Catholic priests can forgive sins they should be able to heal cripples as well.
If it is easier to make the cripple walk then forgiveness of sins is not
easy. God is not as generous about it as people want you to think.
If it is harder to make the cripple walk then the cure proves Jesus can forgive
sins or declare them forgiven. He certainly does not think that forgiving sins
or declaring them forgiven is harder. God can forgive sins as easily as he can
raise all the dead to life. If Jesus was denying that then he wasn’t the Son of
God at all but a fraud and because he was a fraud he couldn’t forgive sins and
so couldn’t enable priests to do it either. Some would say he was claiming the
power was his own as if he were a god or magician who didn’t have almighty
power.
Jesus may have meant by saying “Your sins are forgiven” that he was not
removing the man’s sins for that was God’s job. But if you cancel the punishment
of somebody you have already forgiven that is forgiveness in a sense. Jesus
forgave the man by making him walk. He had already told the man before he made
him walk that he was forgiven. Jesus was accused of forgiving sins but he had
perhaps only announced that the man had been forgiven by God. Then he objected
to the Jewish assertion that he could not forgive sins and decided to prove it
by removing the punishment there and then instead of letting the man get better
the slower and natural way.
Is forgiving sins as easy as making cripples walk? But Jesus denied this was an
option. He challenged the people about the easiest. Again if this
was Jesus’ option, then Jesus thinks it does prove he could forgive sins or
declare them forgiven. In that case Catholic priests then can forgive sins so
they should be able to heal cripples as well.
THANKING MEN FOR FORGIVING SINS
In Matthew 9:8, Rome thinks it reads that people thank God for giving men the
power to forgive sins. It takes from this that there were more men than just
Jesus forgiving sins. But Jesus was a man. If God gave him the power to forgive
sins he was still giving the power to men if only one man could do it. The
Church believes its priests didn’t get the power to absolve sins until after the
resurrection of Jesus and this was long before.
When one opens one’s Bible here one sees that the authority God is praised for
giving men is not stated. It may be the power to forgive sins or the power to
heal cripples and probably means the latter for the line only appears after the
cripple was said to have started walking. You need to tell what something means
by the lines NEAREST around it. The authority to heal filled the people with
awe. Absolving sins wouldn’t do that for no one can see if it really worked so
it must have been the miracle of healing. In Mark’s parallel passage, he says
that the praising and the awe were sparked off by seeing a paralytic walk by
Jesus’ power. Because Catholics believe that Jesus didn’t establish the
sacrament of absolution until after he returned from the dead, as John’s gospel
allegedly says, many of them cannot accept this verse as proof for priestly
absolution.