Which is more important....forgiveness or healing?

On my way to work in the mornings I tend to arrive at the train station about 10mins early so I can sit in my car and read my bible and pray a bit (I know, I am so holy and I put you all to shame). I do this so I start my day the right way, focused on God and not on how tired, grumpy, wanting to be in bed I feel.

Sometimes I just go through the motions. I don't really take in what I am reading and/or I don't really care (maybe not that holy after all). But sometimes what I have read really gets me thinking.

Like yesterday for example.

I was reading Mark 2:1-13. For those who don't know their bibles off by heart (shame on you.....you are going stright to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200...jokes) this bit tells the story of a paralytic man. Jesus is chilling in a house, maybe eating some dinner or something, when the people of the town hear he is there. Like the celebrating swarming of the 1st Century, they all flock to see him, filling the house and the road outside and basically acting like people do around the Kardashians today, but for much better reasons (hopefully). 

In this town there is a paralytic man who is hanging out with his mates, who start to think to themselves that maybe they should get him to see Jesus and maybe something like a healing would happen (because by now stories of Jesus' healings have spread). So they pick up this guy on his mattress and start carrying to the place where Jesus is.

When they get there the doorway is full of people who are not gonna give up their precious opportunity to see and hear Jesus. Perplexed, these fellas start brainstorming and decide to climb up on the roof (which is flat in this part of the world, and usually has stairway access), and dig a hole through the roof (really hope the owner was pissed off that this) and then lowered the man, mattress and all, down to right smack bag in front of the great man himself.

Now I can imagine Jesus looking at the man on the mat, then looking up at the hole in the ceiling and breaking into a huge smile. He is really impressed with the faith and commitment they have all shown. So he looks at the man and says "your sins are forgiven." Some religious elders and stuff and kinda annoyed by this because in their reckoning only God has the authority to forgive sins and Jesus is a man. So Jesus (apparently reading their minds!!!) looks at them and says "which is easier, to forgive sins or to tell this man to get up, pick up his mat and walk. But so you know that the Son of Man [a title Jesus uses for himself] has the authority to forgive sins..." he looks at the paralytic man "stand up, pick up your mat and walk home." And the dude, who is paralysed remember, gets up, picks up his mat and walks out.

Now there are many amazing things about this story. I mean, the paralysed guy would have had muscles that were all shrunken and munted and yet he could get up and walk straight away! The full body healing that occurred here is mind blowing in medical terms. It is not just the cause of his paralysis that is healed, but all of the issues associated with that. All instantaneously!! Flippin wow!

But what struck me yesterday was not the healing. It was that the healing was almost an afterthought in the story. 

Jesus didn't heal the guy immediately. He forgave him first. And then he implies that it is harder to forgive sins than to heal this man.

The healing is not of the first importance to him!!

This made me think about the priorities I would have placed on this story. If I had been Jesus I would have healed the guy first then said something like "BOOM! Look at what I can do! Now believe all you peeps, because I am badass and,as a bonus, I will forgive his sins too!"

In churches I see the same thing. We pray often for people's healing, but how often is there salvation or relationship to God seen as more important than their physical ills. It is the mentality that says "show me a miracle first and then I will believe and ask to be saved."

And yet that is directly opposite to what Jesus does here. His main focus is on the spiritual ill of the man. He sees that the healing that had to occur between this man and God was more deadly, more disastrous than the physical disabilities he had. This reconciliation of man and God was the priority.

How would this attitude impact how we speak to people with disabilities and illnesses? If we adopted this attitude what would change in our hearts towards others? Would we stop seeing people with disabilities as something to be pitied but rather view the state of their faith as more important? Would their disability pale in comparison to their knowledge of God? Would we approach them differently? Would we approach our own issues differently?

I for one am someone who empathizes greatly with people who suffer from disabilities; I have been one and, but for the grace of God, would still be one. I remember feeling like if people prayed for my healing and it didn't happen, that I or they had failed in their faith. I stopped asking for prayer because I felt ashamed.

It was in the prayers of some ladies who prayed for God to be made known to me, not to be healed, that I was healed. They prayed for my salvation, and God, like in this story, forgave me first and healed me second. And the first was more important for me than the second. My shame and fear was lifted. Even if I had remained in my illness I believe that my experience with God in that moment would have changed my life anyway, even if not others perception of my life.

So when you pray for healing for others (and I am not saying not to) remember that of greater importance to God is that this suffering person would know the love and forgiveness of Christ. It is then that true, deep healing is found, that the broken is made whole, and the world is reconciled to its Creator.

Will You See God??

Last night I preached (prought??) at a church on Matthew 5:8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."

I had soooo much fun; there was laughing, I pretended to be a sneaky Jesus, and there was even reference to the Trinity doing a Jewish dance with one of them held up on a chair. Nearly heretical but not quite and that makes all the difference :p

Anyways, here is the transcript. Have a ready if you would like :)

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Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.

I know you have been looking at the beatitudes for the last few weeks, which I think is great! I love the beatitudes, they make me feel pretty good when I am in pretty bad places. Like knowing that I am blessed when I mourn, when I am persecuted, when I am struggling to make ends meet with money. It makes me feel good, makes me happy to know that God has an eye out for the weak and suffering.

Like I have this friend Albert who is a homeless guy. He lives in the city and use to sit outside where I would work. I got to know him pretty well as I would sit and share my lunch with him and it made me feel good that God had his eye on this young man whose life had been so hard. I would walk away each day knowing I left him in the best hands possible – God’s.

But this one, this verse, I find harder to talk about, harder to feel good about.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Being poor or mourning or persecuted are easy to see, easy to feel that those people deserve their blessing.

But who of us are pure in heart??

I mean really? Can any of you say that during an average day you don’t have naughty thoughts? That you don’t think of that guy or girl in a way that you would be embarrassed to share about? That you don’t think nasty thoughts about teachers or people who pick on you? Can you honestly say that those thoughts don’t sneak up on you in a ninja attack in such a way that you hope no one can read your mind?

Being pure in heart is a really big ask, and how can anyone actually be pure or even know that they are? 

Does that mean none of us will see God?

Maybe looking closer at what Jesus was saying will help us. Maybe if we step into 1^st century Israel there will be a loop hole or something.

So let’s go back in time a little.

We are standing on a hill by the sea. The air is warm with the multitude of bodies that surround us and press into us. Everything is dusty, dust hangs in the air and clings to our clothes. The smell of salt and body odour fills your nostrils and all around you is the noise of people murmuring and being shushed, bodies shifting their weight from foot to foot, children crying, and above it all, the sound of a lone male voice calling out that those that are pure in their hearts will see God.

His statement shocks you. You look around and see your own shock on the faces of those around you. You have been a good Jew for years, gone to the temple to atone for your sins, prayed and given tithes. And you know with certainty that no one at the temple or synagogue preaches like this. The holy men that you get out of the way for in the street are pure because they keep the hundreds of purity rituals. But you can’t do that, you have to work, you have to get your hands dirty and sometimes you break the rules a bit even though you try not to. You know you aren’t pure.

And this claim that people like you could see God is laughable!!! Not even the priests get to see God, because seeing the face of God, as every good Jew knows, means death. It is because no one is pure that God cannot be seen. So what this preacher man is saying doesn’t make sense. He makes it sound like that there are people who are pure in heart and, even more astoundingly, that people can see God!

What Jesus said that day in front of the crowd wasn’t just nice sayings that made people feel good. They were radical statements about the nature of humanity and the person of God. He effectively was turning the religious teaching of the day on its head. He couldn’t have been more radical!

But since then we have had 2000 years of people explaining Jesus’ words to us so the impact has worn off a little bit. Now his words seem like nice, feel good sayings to remind us that everyone is valuable.

But what if it meant something much much more? What if this simple saying could changes lives?

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Many of the things I read around this passage went something like this: “Live life seeking purity, living well and holy, and you will end up seeing God when you die.” Nice sentiment, but I think this is really off the mark.

For example, has anyone thought about how totally ironic Jesus is being here?! Think about it. There he stands, God incarnate, telling people who are sinners, who are broken, that the pure in heart will see God. Yet he is God! The very people who are impure are looking at God! What seems impossible is happening that very day!

How is this possible? The thousands that came to hear him are not all pure in heart! And yet there they stand looking at the face of God.

There must be something that they, that we, are missing, some vital link that Jesus forgot to explain.

Jesus, as he often does, is drawing on a story that is much bigger than the time and place which he finds himself in at that moment. Underlying all his words is the great story of God and his people. We can see that throughout the Bible story people try to see God.

They build a tower at Babel and get scattered over the earth.

The wrestle with a man from heaven and are given a lifelong limp.

They ask to see God’s face and are given only a glimpse of God’s back.

They try to be pure through their actions, their laws, their words when the temple is rebuilt.

 And they fail over and over and over again.

They are like us.

We try hard to do our “Sunday best”.

We try not to swear, to think badly about others.

We try to forgive and to love.

And yet we fail, repeatedly and often in a spectacular fashion! No one has managed to get it right, to live pure.

We are so good at trying to make rules and laws about how we should live in order to be pure that we miss the bigger picture. We forget that no matter how hard we try we will fall down. We forget that to love is much more important than to follow social conventions. We forget that it is not about keeping up appearances before each other.

We forget Jesus.

God took the initiative in something that he knew we would never accomplish. God stepped down into our history as a man that told people that it wasn’t about their actions, it was never about the actions, it is about their hearts.

And because we will never get our hearts right, Jesus sorted that out to. It is through him that we are made pure. It his through his life, death and resurrection that our broken sinful nature is made clean. Paul tells us that we are now holy, yet still being made holy. We have been proclaimed pure, and yet still striving for purity.

It is the miraculous and wondrousness of God that through his Son he sees us as sinless though we are still sinful!

Wow! That sounds totally complicated and ridiculous. At best it sounds like I am talking in circles, at worst that I am a crazy person!

I spent ages trying to figure out how to explain this better, and really I can’t do it by telling you all the theological who-ha, but more through examples.

The Message Bible states this verse like this: “You are blessed when you get your inside world – your mind and heart – put right. Then you can see God in your outside world.”

There is the story of Princess Catherine of Hungary who took pity on those who were poor and dying and so gave up her life of luxurious wealth to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and wash the dead in preparation of burial. She believed in Jesus as the Christ and his message changed her heart. And through that change she started to see God in the faces of the poor and starving that lived in her country.

Then there is the story of the black woman in South Africa whose son was killed during the years of apartheid by a young white man. At the trial later she asked not for retribution but rather that the young white man would come live with her and receive the love that she would have given her son. She said that the message of Christ changed her heart towards the young man.

See, she had let God s message of love and forgiveness change her heart and as a result she saw God in the face of the man who killed her child. Forgiveness for the senseless act that ripped her family apart meant that her heart and her mind weren’t filled with hate and anger. She had forgiven those who had hurt her and, though the hurt was still there, saw that everyone, even the man who had hurt her the most, was a child of God, someone whom she could love and who could learn to receive that love.

She saw reconciliation where others saw retribution.

She saw God where most people would see despair and death.

She saw love where others saw hate.

Or even my own story, one that has been filled with anger and hate to the point where I was at the point of drinking myself to death. And then I decided to give Jesus a go to see what he could make of me. I am no longer angry, no longer hate filled, and I have learnt to love those that I meet and see around me.

When the message of Jesus and the Spirit enter your life change just happens. When you let go of the need to be in control and let a man who loved and who forgives get inside your head with his ideas then your heart starts to change; towards God, towards others and towards yourself.  When you begin to accept the idea that God has proclaimed you pure, your actions begin to reflect that purity.

Although it is impossible for us to have a pure heart in and of ourselves, we can have a pure heart by the grace of God. What is impossible for man is possible for God. A pure heart is a gift from God, and it comes by a new birth, by a new creation, and by the Spirit living in us. We will never be perfect. But the message that Jesus gives us isn’t that we have to live to a strict set of rules to makes us perfect.

The greatest blessing and the noblest goal of the Christian life is to know God, to experience His presence in our daily life, and to live for His glory. Paul made this the goal for his life, as he said:

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him … I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming like him in his death (Philippians 3:7-10).

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are you, for Christ died to make you pure, and through him, you can see God.

Blessed are you for accepting Christ, for it will change the way you view your world.

Blessed are you for acting out of the faith in your heart and seeing the image of God on the faces of others.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Let’s pray

May God help us to strive for a purity of heart that transcends the division between interior and exterior that we so readily construct in order to guard our true selves from others and to appear different than we really are.  May God help us to live honestly and transparently before others.  Most of all, may God help us to acknowledge and depend upon him as the only one who is truly pure, the one in whom we place our trust and in whom our hope is found.