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Pastoral Perspectives

Son, Your Sins Are Forgiven

It has always fascinated me how the gospel stories told by the four evangelists contain surprising details that don’t always fit neatly into our tidy theological boxes. Try as we may to express the stories about Jesus in systematic theological propositions, and there’re always bits that stick out of the boxes and prevent us from closing lids completely. Perhaps that’s because we’re complex creatures interacting with each other in a complex world full of sin and suffering, and our lived experiences can scarcely be neat or tidy. Therefore, the story of a transcendent God who becomes like one of us and interacts with us in our world can’t possibly permit itself to be neatly systematized—in fact, that we have four of them tells us the event can’t even be captured in one single telling.

Allow me to reflect on one anomaly in the account of the healing of the paralytic in the Gospel of Mark 2:1-12 (also found in Mt. 9:1-8 and Lk. 5:17-26 with variations) which opens out to the intersection of human disability, community, grace, and salvation.

Four men are carrying their severely disabled friend on a mat to seek out Jesus to heal him. On reaching Jesus’ house, they see a large crowd gathered in front and listening to him preach concerning the Kingdom of God. No one at the back of the crowd is willing to make way for them to get through, and anxious they might miss the opportunity to have Jesus attend to their friend, they decide to do something unthinkable.

They make their way to the back of the house, climb up the roof, dig through the mud and thatch roof, hoist their friend up, and lower him down through the hole into the room where Jesus is speaking from. On seeing the boldness of the four men, Jesus is moved by their display of faith. He then looks at their disabled friend lying on the mat and says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

The anomaly here isn’t so much that Jesus initially pronounces forgiveness on the disabled man instead of healing him, but that he pronounces it on the basis of his friends’ faith in him (Mk. 2:5)! Wait a minute! Doesn’t Jesus forgive our sins only on the basis of our own faith in him? How can it be that Jesus forgives the sins of the disabled man because of his friends’ faith?

Of course, this anomaly has been explained away. Some claim when Mark 2:5 mentions Jesus seeing “their faith,” it includes the disabled man along with his four friends. Yet, this isn’t likely because whenever Jesus acknowledges the faith of seekers in Mark, it’s always because they did or said something that expresses it—it’s never in the abstract.

For example, in Mark chapter 5, the suffering woman believed in her heart that touching Jesus’ clothes would heal her, so she braved the crowd (and ritual purity restrictions) to do that. This won her Jesus’ affirmation: “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”

In our account, the severe disability of the man rendered him incapable of demonstrating faith because he wasn’t even able to get to Jesus on his own. All he could do was to sit on a mat and depend on his friends. Therefore, “their faith” in Mark 2:5 could only be referring to that of his friends who fought tooth and nail to get him to Jesus.

This interpretation, though it conforms to the text closely, makes us uncomfortable because it doesn’t seem to conform to our expectations that the remission of sins must be a result of an expression of faith. Most of us believe that someone must be able to affirm the Gospel in faith before she may be forgiven by God (cf. Rom. 10:9). From that perspective, to be forgiven by God minimally requires us to have “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ” (Calvin).

Yet, as the anomaly in our text reminds us, there are people who’re unable to come before Jesus in an act of faith. If who may be part of the Kingdom of God or not is dependent on an intellectual assent to the Gospel, then are we unwittingly excluding those who’re too intellectually disabled to have or demonstrate faith? If so, our understanding of the Gospel may just be prejudiced against people with intellectual disability.

Most of the time, we function with the understanding that disability resides purely in the mind or body of the individual. It’s a result of his disability that a person is unable to function “normally” and is excluded from “regular” participation in society.

Perhaps we need to change our understanding of disability. Perhaps disability isn’t so much what a person can’t do, as much as it’s a situation which the majority of more abled persons have subjected him to. The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) defines disability as “something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation from society.”

A person who’s wheelchair bound is only disabled insofar as he’s unable to go places in his wheelchair. Yet, in places with good wheelchair access, he can go wherever he wants and hence a lot less disabled. This definition by UPIAS may be too idealistic and runs aground when it comes to severe disability, but nevertheless, it rightly highlights the oft overlooked social dimension of disability.

Applying this expanded understanding of disability to the church, we realise we can contribute to disability if we hamper disabled persons from access to Jesus by an ableist theology (a theology favouring only non-disabled persons). The anomaly in our gospel account reminds us that the saving grace of God is able to reach even those with profound disabilities unable to demonstrate or profess faith by themselves—it reaches them by way of an inclusive community of faith. Not only did the four friends of the disabled man demonstrate great faith, they also demonstrated great love in going to great lengths to get their disabled friend to Jesus. Without them, he would remain in his sins.

Perhaps God’s grace can reach intellectually disabled persons through a community of faith willing to include them as equals and love them on their own terms. We must remember we’re complex creatures that aren’t just purely intellectual; and faith is more than just abstract propositional knowledge and intellectual assent to them. If so, then an infant can also have faith because she can know and trust her parents through their loving care even before much intellectual development has taken place.

In this way, intellectually disabled persons can also know God’s benevolence and trust in him when they’re are extended his love through the faithful actions of people in the covenantal community. No one truly stands before God alone, and our faith isn’t individualistic. All of us stand before God as a covenant community in Jesus Christ. As a result, our lives are not lived alone before God, but interact and intertwine with each other as they’re caught up in the larger story of God. I am not who I am without you; “I” am the result of our shared lives. To include the intellectually disabled into its own life as sharers in the full covenantal graces of God, the church first needs to proclaim to them the word of Jesus that says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Only then would their lives be truly included with that of the community, and by grace, be taken up into the larger story of God.