There is a picture of the crucifixion by Rembrandt in which the artist has included himself in the crowd that is standing around the cross. When you look at that picture of the crucifixion and suddenly recognize that Rembrandt included a portrait of himself in the painting, it is shocking and surprising until that surprise is overcome by a sense of what it means. Because what Rembrandt was doing when he painted himself into the picture was testifying in terms of his own profession as an artist that Jesus died for him. It was his of saying he was a Christian.
But I see something else in the story, and it’s this. It’s buried there just in a little sentence that Jesus says to the religious leaders. These teachers were not paralyzed, at least so far as one could see. They were the leaders; everybody looked up to them. But when Jesus knew their thoughts and spoke to them what is it that he said? He said, “Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts?” Their objection to Jesus is that he assumed the power to forgive sin, which they knew belonged to God alone. They failed to see what Jesus was claiming about himself.
There’s something else we do with our sin. We try to recognize it, but when we recognize it we try to blame it on someone else. We have different ways of doing that. We usually use the word determinism today to express what we do. That is to say, we try to explain why we are as we are by reference to something that is somebody else’s responsibility.
So the scribes took offense at Jesus because he claimed to be able to forgive sins, which his healing of the man was meant to validate as true. There’s another question I want to ask about this story, and then after I ask it I want to apply all of this in a very personal way. The second question is this: Why did Jesus link this man’s physical suffering to his sin?
Now in our story of the paralytic we have a fourth reaction, and this is a bit further along that spectrum—from indifference, to rejection, to what we now find to be anger or offense at Jesus’ sayings. This is the first time in Matthew’s Gospel that we actually find opposition to Jesus. Each of the Gospels has their own way of talking about it, and of course they need to because the flow of the story is from an initial acceptance of Jesus as somebody who’s speaking in a remarkable way and doing remarkable things to the crucifixion. And somewhere along the line between the initial response to him and the crucifixion there had to be a turning of opinion.
