15.04 | Sin on the Tee
Mark 2:1-17
‘And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”’
Mark 2:5
For the golfer, there must be few things worse than a stag do on the golf course.
About ten years ago, I went to the stag do of a good friend. For some reason, he wanted us to go for a round of golf. I’d never known him to play golf before, and only one of our group was actually any good at it. And so we began, a fairly inept group of golfers for the day, hacking our way from hole to hole. We must have been a nightmare for the guys behind.
My first shot that day set the tone for my game. I decided to go big on the swing, and made what I thought was a good connection. But my pride lasted only a fraction of a second, as I watched my ball go sizzling out of the course to the left, in a majestic sweeping arc. Thankfully they’d given us a few spare golf balls, but as we kept going, this combination of extraordinary range and extraordinary inaccuracy meant that I was soon asking the other guys for their spares as I was all out.
Jesus is back in Capernaum today. As the crowds regather, we have this crazy scene of this paralysed man, carried by his four faithful friends.
You’ve got to love their tenacity. Climbing onto the roof with the guy on his stretcher, and the sheer audacity of ripping open the roof to find a way in. This is outrageous. It is scandalous. It is embarrassing. It is reckless. It is hunger. Such hunger pays scant attention to social niceties.
And as the man is lowered down to Jesus, Jesus has these words for him:
Son, your sins are forgiven.
Forgiven.
How do you understand this word?
Forgiveness is clearly an important idea. It appears many times across the New Testament, and is a deep theme of our faith.
However, we need to do a little translation work. Because if I say to you, I forgive you, what is usually meant is that I had a grievance against you, but not any more. I extend grace to you. You poked me in the eye or trod on my toes. But no worries. Let’s be friends again.
There’s a word for that kind of forgiveness in the ancient Greek language in which the New Testament was written.1 But it’s not the word used here.
The word used here is aphiemi.2 Aphiemi is a word that does not primarily mean ‘forgive’. It’s a compound of two words: apō, meaning ‘away from’ and hiemi, which means ‘to send’. It was a word more commonly used for ‘send away’, or ‘release’. It was used to describe how the disciples threw away their nets3 or how Jesus dismissed the crowds,4 or even for a husband who wanted to dismiss (divorce) his wife.5
And here Jesus uses it about the mans sins.
Your sins, Jesus says, are dismissed.
They are dispatched. They have been placed on the tee and smashed out of the golf course.
The idea of sin in the Scriptures is not simply a list of what we have done wrong, and it is not simply connected to God being offended. It is a far wider idea, encompassing each place of pain and brokenness that departs from the glorious beauty for which we were made. Sin encompasses not just every mistake, but every broken desire, addiction, and place in our bruised souls where we received less than the expansive love of the Father. In the biblical view, we don’t just need our mistakes to be overlooked; we need them, and all their connected pain, to be dismissed from our lives.
Did Jesus come to reconcile us to the Father? For sure, He most wonderfully did.
And yet, when our broken and paralysed lives are dangled before Him, His word to us is simple.
Your sins are dispatched. Every place of pain and shame and humiliation and grief that you have received, I came for that too. I came to dismiss it. I came to set you on your feet. I came to get you dancing and leaping again. I came to confront every single place of distortion and shame and pain, and to smash it out of the ground.
Take heart, child of God:
Your sins are forgiven.
Reflect:
Put myself in the situation of the paralysed man. Where am I in this story?
Am I hanging back, too intimidated by the crowd to let my hunger for wholeness get me to Him at all costs?
Am I dangling before Jesus, feeling vulnerable and exposed?
What brokenness do you bring? Hear the words of Jesus: ‘Your sins are forgiven. They are dismissed. I’m smashing them out of the golf course.’
Soak your soul in this truth today.
Pray:
Father,
I think if this story were me,
It might have gone differently.
I get quickly put off by the crowd,
Often more concerned to avoid embarrassment or awkwardness,
Than to risk it all for the potential of finding more of you.
Help me to live with the greater heart of the greater hunger.
And, Father,
With the parts of my life that are still so broken,
Would you, once again,
Send my sin far from me:
In the day-by-day healing of my heart,
And the eradication of every lingering feeling of shame.
For my Lord has spoken:
My sins are sent away,
And He calls me now to stand.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Judges 3:12-5:31 | Psalm 49
Charizomai, if you’re interested.
If you want to do a bit more research on this word, have a look at https://biblehub.com/greek/863.htm
Mark 1:18
Matthew 13:36
e.g. 1 Corinthians 7:11