Sermon CXXIX.
And Jesus seeing their faith,
said to the man sick of the palsy:
Son, be of good heart,
thy sins are forgiven thee.
—St. Matthew ix. 2.
These words of our Lord must have been something of a surprise to the paralytic and his friends; welcome they must have been, but still unexpected, and to some extent disappointing. For the sick man had not been brought to Christ to have his sins forgiven; and that favor had not been asked, at least no request had been made for it in words. The paralytic himself must have wished it, it is true, for God never forgives our sins unless we desire forgiveness; but he did not say so, and his mind, like those of his bearers, was probably more occupied with his bodily than with his spiritual cure.
It will be worth our while to see why our Saviour chose to give them this surprise; why he did not cure the sick man first and forgive him afterwards. That might seem to be the more natural way: to restore him first to bodily health, and then to move him by gratitude to repentance and conversion. Still, when we come to consider it I think we shall hit upon two very good reasons for his course, and that without very much reflection. The first reason, then, for our Lord doing as he did, was to show us that the health of the soul is more important in his sight than that of the body, and hence requires our first attention. The second follows from the first: it was to remind us that, such being the case, we cannot reasonably expect bodily health or any other temporal blessing if we neglect to reconcile ourselves to God.
Now, these are two things that all of us, my dear brethren, must certainly know very well, otherwise they would not occur to our minds so readily. But in spite of this we too often fail to give our knowledge a practical application.
How few there are, strange to say, who really act as if the health of their souls were of more importance than that of their bodies! Take, for instance, in proof of this, a fact which we have often seen recorded lately in the daily papers. The yellow fever, you will hear, has appeared in some Southern town, and what has been the result? All the inhabitants, who could leave the place immediately did so, perhaps taking the very next train, and, it may be, leaving their property in the hands of strangers. Well, we may think this a little cowardly and foolish, considering that, after all, there would not have been, perhaps, more than one chance in ten even of sickness, if they had stayed; but still we cannot blame them, for we feel that we should very likely have done the same ourselves. But how many would act in this way in the presence of a spiritual danger, though it were much more certain and imminent than that of the body in this terrible Southern plague? Ask yourselves the question, you who remain contentedly in unnecessary occasions of sin, with much more than one chance in ten, nay, with an absolute certainty, that your soul will be not only sick but dead as long as you remain there; ask yourselves if you value the health of your soul more than that of the body; see if you practise what you must believe if you are a Christian—that it is better to die even to-day in a state of grace than live for a moment in that of sin.
Well, whether you act on this belief or not. Almighty God does. He shows you that, as I have said, in this Gospel of to-day. And it follows that you cannot please him or be in his grace as long as you do not do for your soul what you would do for your body; that is, as long as you do not remove it from needless dangers. That is the first practical lesson to be learned from our Lord's action in the cure of the paralytic.
And the second is that, if we hope to obtain from God temporal favors out of the natural order of his providence, we must first provide for our souls, which come first in his estimation. And yet many people seem to expect him to reverse the order which he has established. They promise conversion if they obtain the temporal blessing which they want. They may succeed through his abundant mercy; but the better and the surer course would be to think of the soul first and the body afterward. "Seek first," and he says, "the kingdom of God and his justice, and all things shall be added unto you."