In the Name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus’ healing of the paralyzed man from Matthew chapter 9 teaches us about what we need the most in this life and how we get it. As some of you might know, this is one of the passages from Scripture that I like to share with people who are in the hospital when I go visit them for the first time. That’s because they usually have a lot of similarities to the man from our reading. Most of the time, when I come in the room, they’re lying in a bed just like he was, and they can’t get up. They’re experiencing all kinds of physical problems with their bodies and their health and maybe, in that moment, that’s all that they can really think about.

And yet, where does Jesus still start? What was the first thing that He did for the man before he did anything else? Jesus didn’t tell Him to “rise and take up his mat a go home.” At least, not right away. That came later. No, the first thing that our Lord did was look upon the faith of him and his friends and say, “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” 

This, of course, shows us that what we need the most from Jesus, and what we need the most in our lives, is to have the forgivness of sins. That’s what comes before everything else. That’s why our Lord came into this world to begin with and that was the whole point of His ministry. The Son of God didn’t come down from heaven just to give us momentary healing for our bodies. He came to bring us eternal healing for our souls. The primary purpose of His incarnation, and later on His suffering, death, and resurrection, wasn’t just so that we could “live our best life now,” but so that we could live forever with Him in eternity. And so, that’s the place where Jesus always starts.

What did that crippled guy really need from Christ? What would most people probably say just by looking at? They would probably say that he needed to walk again. If only he could just use his legs, then that would make everything better. But that’s not what Jesus saw. And that’s not what our Lord teaches us to see about ourselves when we look at our own lives too. 

You and I have a lot of different problems. I don’t know exactly what all of them are, but I bet I could take a guess about which ones bother you the most. Maybe you’re sick. Maybe you don’t have that much money. Maybe don’t always get along with your spouse or your kids. Maybe you’re estranged from some of your family members and haven’t talked with them in a long time. Maybe you have low self-esteem and no self-confidence. Maybe you struggle with impure thoughts and have trouble controlling your urges. Maybe you feel lonely and you just want to be married. Maybe you don’t like your job and you aren’t always satisfied with your God given vocations. I’m not saying that all of those things aren’t real problems, and neither is Jesus. But they aren’t your biggest problem, and they’re not the problem that you need taken care of first.

Your biggest problem by far is that you are a sinner. That’s why you have any of those other problems in your life to begin with. Why do people really get sick? Why do our bodies not always work the way that we want them to? Why do people get angry and fight and how come we can’t always get along? Why can’t you just be happy with what you have and why do constantly want more? When you boil it down, the answer to every one of those questions is the same. It’s because of sin. It’s because of the sinful nature that you’ve inherited from Adam and Eve, and because of the actual sins of thought, word, and deed that you and other people commit on a daily basis. 

There wouldn’t be any suffering in this world if there wasn’t any sin in it. But there is. And you’re part of the problem too. Even the sins that you see in other people are the result of the same fallen and sinful nature that resides in your heart too. And so, that’s why Jesus starts with forgiving you your sin.

Lots of people don’t care about getting their sins forgiven. That’s because they don’t see themselves as that big of a sinner. They haven’t learned to look at God’s law correctly, so they don’t understand the fullness of what it really demands. They don’t believe that as we say in the confess, we deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment. They don’t think that they’ve done anything bad enough to go to hell. And because they don’t think they deserve hell later they can never come to grips with why they might go through things that feel like hell. Even when they experience things in this life that aren’t even close to hell, they still get mad at God. They aren’t satisfied with His promise to forgive them. They don’t know how great of gift God has already put in their lap.

It doesn’t matter how bad your life gets, nothing can make it worse than not having your sins forgiven. When your sins aren’t forgiven, and you don’t have a clean conscience, there’s nothing in this world that can give you true peace and rest. It won’t matter how much money you have. It won’t matter how good your health is. It won’t matter how much pleasure your getting. Your bones will waste away, like king David talks about, when the hand of the Lord weighs heavy upon you. Behind it all, deep down in your soul, you’ll feel the weight of God’s judgment looming, and you’ll know that someday you’ll have to answer for what you’ve done wrong. 

But when you know that your sins are forgiven, then you can put up with anything. When you know that your sins have been taken away by Jesus, because He bore them as His own, then you can be at peace. Then you can joyfully carry your cross, and endure any kind of suffering, because you know that you’re not paying the real price for your sins when you do. Jesus paid that price for your sins already. And if He paid that price, and gave you that gift, He will surely give you everything else that you need too. No matter what He gives, even if He allows you to suffer, you can be confident that it is the best thing for you at the moment, because He gave you the best thing that can be had already.

Knowing that you need the forgivness of sins before everything else is important, but it’s also important to know how you get it. Lots of people don’t know that either. Just like they scoff at the idea that forgivness is more important than everything else, they scoff at the idea of how God chooses to give it to us. That’s what also happened in our reading.

After Jesus forgave the paralyzed man, a dispute arose between Him and the Pharisees about whether or not He really had the authority to do it. They accused Jesus of blaspheming because they said that who can forgive sins but God alone.

Jesus proved that He had the authority to forgive sins, by doing something that only God could do. He told the man to take up his mat and go home, and he did. Only God could heal a man of his paralysis like that. Only the maker of heaven and earth, who spoke creation into existence by the power of His Word, could use His Word to do something like that too. But Jesus has that power. He has the authority to reverse the effects of sin on the body, because He endured the punishment for our sins Himself. That’s why He can forgive us. And that’s why He can authorize anyone else to forgive in His name too.

As I’m sure you know, there are many Christians today who do not like the fact that our pastors in church say that they can forgive sins. Those individuals usually say the same thing that the Pharisees said about Jesus in our Gospel reading. They say, “who can forgive sins but God alone.” But our pastors don’t forgive sins on the basis of their own authority, they do it by the authority of Jesus.

Jesus has the authority to do anything that He wants. He can make people who are sick get better. He can tell crippled people to get up and walk home. He can cause people who are dead to come back to life again. And He can authorize his ministers to forgive people in His stead. 

What did Jesus say to the disciples in Matthew chapter 16? He said, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” That’s the office of the keys. That’s the special authority that Christ has given to His church on earth to forgive the sins of repentant sinners and to withhold forgivness from the unrepentant as long as they do not repent. Christ showed us that He has that authority in Matthew 9, with the healing of the paralytic. He promised that authority in Matthew 16, tell his disciples that He would give them the keys of the kingdom. And then, after He rose from the dead, e bestowed that authority in John chapter 20. Jesus breathed on His disciples and said, “If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven then, and if you withhold forgiveness from any it is withheld.”

That’s the reason why our pastors say what they do in church. That’s the reason why they forgive us our sins. It’s because Jesus tells them to. And when Jesus tells us to do something, we do it. We do it, and we can have confidence that it counts because the command comes from Jesus. When our pastors do what Jesus says, and forgive us our sins in Jesus’ Name, that is just as valid and certain even in heaven as if Christ our dear Lord did it himself. 

You need the forgiveness of your sins. You need it more than you need to get better from your sickness. You need it more than you need a promotion at work. You need more than you need extra food on your table or extra money in your bank account. You need it more than you need to be married. You need it more than you need to have friends. You need it more than you need anything. And Jesus gives it to you. He gives it to you by grace through His called and ordained servants of the Word. When you repent of your sins and confess them to God, He says that He will forgive you. And just to be certain that you hear it, He gives you a pastor to tell it to you in plain words. “The one who hears you hears Me,” Jesus says, “and the one who reject Me rejects Him who sent Me.” When you hear the words of your pastor forgiving you your sins, either in church or in private confession, that’s the voice of Christ. That’s the same forgivness that Christ purchased on the cross.

And if you have the forgivness of sins in Jesus, you have everything that you need. If you have God’s forgivness, then eventually everything else that you need will be added unto you too. The healing of your soul will result in the healing of your body on the last day. The suffering that you are going through now will gave way to the future glory that is to be revealed to you. But for now, if Jesus starts with the forgiveness, and makes you wait a little while before you get everything else, then so be it. You can wait. You know that it won’t be long before you take up your mat and go home too, because just like Jesus told the paralytic, He tells you the same thing: “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” In Jesus’ Name. Amen.