So you got the Sword of Damocles, it's this legendary metaphor for things that hang over your head or things that nip at your heels from the past, whether it's the cute, adorable, goofy stuff that you did at a time when fads were just different and now, ah, I can't believe you still have that picture, mom, or whether we're talking about stuff that you really honestly super shanked and screwed up, whether you went and got that stuff fixed and made right with the people you wronged, or whether you didn't, that stuff can still feel like it really lingers. And because of the linear nature of time and because we are bound by time, us going and atoning for things by unmaking the past just isn't a physical possibility. We can patch up the present, we can set things up to be good for the future, but guilt is very bound up with time. And of course, that kind of lobs a giant softball to the whole Bible Jesus thing. If there is to be any true reconciliation, any true atonement or resolution for the stuff that nips at our heels, it would have to come from an entity who is always right, always correct in his judgment, unbound by time, and truly in a position to dish out forgiveness. And that's what we get in Matthew chapter 9. This paralytic comes into the room and Jesus says, Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven. Take heart. I like that part, that you can truly lean into this and appreciate what is happening as we were talking about last week. But then there are people in the room who are mad about it and they don't want this to go on. They even accuse Jesus of blasphemy. And I want to think about why. So I've worked out some possibilities. I got five of them here. Maybe you can think of more, but let's just get after it. Possibility number one. They didn't want Jesus removing the sword of Damocles from this guy because they just didn't want this man to be disappointed. And they were looking out for him. And they didn't know if Jesus could actually do that. And they didn't want this guy to later be like, oh, I found out through some sort of existential revelation that I actually am still super guilty and I'm not actually forgiven. You know, they were just doing a good job of being pastoral and nurturing to this poor, wounded individual. Honestly, I'm making it sound really snarky, but maybe that is what a few of these people who were mad had in mind. Maybe they felt like Jesus was some kind of grifter and he couldn't deliver on his promises. I think there's an outside chance that's it, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that is one possibility for why they push back on Jesus' forgiveness of the paralytic in Matthew 9. Another possibility, number two, they just didn't want to see the whole system of religious currency upended without at least thinking about it. Yeah, they got this whole set of values on how naughty certain things are and how you make those things better and how that all works religiously and the role they play in it for a small clerical fee. And, you know, without time to really think on their feet about what's going on here, you can't just have the whole thing wrecked. We need some time to assess this. And if they don't object in a way that's at least a little bit demonstrative, so people in the room can see that they're grumpy about it, then people might take their silence as assent and think that there's some new equation here of forgiveness. We can't be having that. Possibility number three on why they pushed back on Jesus' forgiveness would be that they believed that if they affirmed Jesus' forgiveness, then they would be tacitly also affirming his only slightly veiled claim to deity here. Jesus doesn't refute the idea that God is the one who owns forgiveness that we see them throw at him in other parts of the Bible. No, God does own forgiveness. It's his idea. And if anybody else is given permission or blessing to forgive, that's only possible because the deity who's in charge of judgment and time and everything said that we can hand out forgiveness like he handed out forgiveness to us. So these are pretty sophisticated guys. Maybe they see what Jesus is hinting at here and they need to push back on it. Okay, possibility number four. Jesus' version of forgiveness seemed so quick and cheap to them, and they feared that people would behave badly if forgiveness became so easy. You gotta kind of work for it, you gotta earn it to prove that you're really sorry. And if we haven't evaluated you to see that you're really sorry yet, then what's to keep people from just being more naughty all the time, or even disregarding our entire social system, and the wheels come off the whole thing. Again, we get no account of this guy apologizing for anything or realizing his need for forgiveness in any way. I mean, he just lays there statically as Jesus does the forgiveness thing to him. I can't imagine he was grouchy about it, but that's the nature of the text. So again, possible reasons Jesus detractors, the teachers of the law, didn't want this forgiveness thing happening, wanted to keep the sword of Damocles over this guy's head would be that one, they didn't want him to be disappointed because he got fake forgiveness from a grifter. Two, they didn't want to see the wheels come off of their system and being quiet was the same as assenting to Jesus being authoritative. Three, they kind of caught that Jesus was sneaky, pointing to his own deity and they couldn't have that. Four, Jesus' version of forgiveness seemed cheap and they didn't want people to do naughty things if forgiveness came so easily. And the fifth reason that these guys straight up opposed forgiveness in this situation, in my opinion, is that consciously or subconsciously they knew that there's power in withholding forgiveness. Shame is a great weapon for shaping society, it's a great weapon for punishing your enemies, it's a great weapon for bringing anyone who might threaten your power or position or agenda to heal. These guys were political in nature. They knew that. Any of you who've ever been in a relationship, you know that on the sickest days in a relationship, one party might try to weaponize guilt against the other party. There's leverage in it. And if you just go around dishing out forgiveness, it wrecks that leverage. So it could be all or any of those, or maybe something I didn't even think of. But my experience with Planet Earth, which includes my experiences with me, tells me that that last one definitely came into play to at least some degree. So now you got two sides shaping up. And I'm fully prepared to say that one of the two sides comes off like the good guy, and the other people look strongly like the bad guy. And look, now it's time for the disclaimer. Every episode has one. I know that somebody out there is like, yeah, it's not right to just forgive somebody who hurt other people. I mean, where do you get off? They can't get off scot-free for what they did. I mean, that's victimizing the victims a second time. But in this scenario, we get no indication that this guy actually did some horrible, outstanding, offensive thing against others. So it's not really analogous or the questions in view. I mean, honestly, looking back at the Sermon on the Mount, even if he did do something egregiously wrong, it would still be right to give forgiveness. That is the kingdom value thing to do, and that is kind of the thing that Jesus does. But keeping the sword of Damocles in place forever is not some new innovation. This is an age-old power monger trick where you make lots of rules, you make people feel the weight of those rules, you make sure nobody can properly keep track of all of the rules, and then the place you want to be is somewhere where those rules get made and get enforced because you're always on the inside of whether or not they get enforced. So you create this state of perpetual guilt, whether you're doing the government thing or the social media thing or the really codependent, unhealthy, sick, gross relationship thing. You create this state of perpetual guilt, and then at the right moment politically, when the winds are blowing in your favor, you snip that thread that holds up the sword of Damocles and bring down the punishment that was just waiting to happen for all time. This is a dark, manipulative, cynical, and unfortunately very often murderous way to do things. So the good guy here is the one who's acting to liberate the person from the sword of Damocles that hangs over his head, and the bad guys are the ones who want to keep it there. Consider David, who really did do dark, horrible things that had very distinct victims, and then he gets called on it and he has to answer for it, and he wasn't cut off from forgiveness, but I mean there's a consequence to what he got wrong. And then when he received that forgiveness, he leaned into it hard, and this is what it sounded like for him in Psalm 32 when he received forgiveness for horrible stuff. Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him, and in whose spirit is no deceit. When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long, for day and night your hand was heavy upon me, my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Do you hear how it almost sounds like the sword of Damocles? This heavy weight on him, of this guilt, of this holding back confession and owning what he got wrong. But then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I didn't cover up my iniquity. I said, I'll confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. If you've never screwed anything up, that doesn't resonate with you. But if you have, that is such beautiful language. The contrast between this selfish, twisted up darkness of I got this thing or I got these things, and I'm holding on to it, and it's gonna nip at my heels forever, hang over my head forever, and the liberation that comes with trusting that to a God who is quick to forgive, squaring accounts, making things right, and leaning into that forgiveness. That sounds like good guy stuff. That sounds like the side of what is light and is right, but then consider Job. Consider Job. See what I did there? And the fact that the Hebrew word used for Satan in Job is the accuser. It's a title. And that's exactly what he does, not just in Job, but all over the place. And of course, he's not just the accuser, he's the tempter. So the character of Satan, whether you believe that this is a literal character, as a whole lot of Christians do throughout church history, or whether you might believe that Satan is some sort of embodiment or epitome of the brokenness of the world and the nature of guilt and darkness and sin and all of that stuff. Either way, the implication is pretty much the same. The game plan of this character, whether it's a personification or not, is to tempt into screwing something up and then heap on that guilt and never release the person from that guilt. It's like what Hades did to Meg and Disney's Hercules. You get somebody over a barrel and you can use them and weaponize them. And this brings about the general destruction of a person. And that's the whole 1 Peter 5:8, Satan goes around like this roaring lion that wants to devour people. So then, very simply, when we consider the question of forgiveness, the people who follow God and Jesus and the values of the kingdom, they're gonna give away forgiveness as God has given it to them, which is in keeping with their king, who is God, God of forgiveness and love and grace. And the people who don't give away forgiveness in the Bible and beyond the Bible, whether they know it or not, are imitating their king, and this is gonna sound really mean, who is Satan, the accuser. So the people opposing forgiveness here, they might be religious and very pious, but they are not the good guys. And it's not a passive thing, which might be more understandable, but rather it's an active thing where they've set themselves up as the gatekeepers of forgiveness. And according to Jesus, they'd put up obstacles that kept people from experiencing God and his forgiveness and love. And Jesus is hyper not impressed with them, and we don't have time. But over in Luke 11, he blasts these people for supposedly imagining they're the gateway to God, but really being the obstacle that exists between people and God. So to pound this a little bit harder and from another angle, you get the Lord's Prayer which says, Yeah, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. That is the kingdom citizen behavior. You forgave me, I'm gonna forgive like crazy in response. There's no amount of forgiveness that I can give away as a kingdom citizen that is going to outdo the amount of forgiveness that you have given me. But withholding forgiveness and keeping a careful count of the debts of others and memorizing what they did wrong and writing it down in a book and making sure that they are held to account for every single thing that they got wrong, especially while we want ourselves to be forgiven and shown grace, that is world kingdom values. So why am I hitting on this passage again? Why do we do seven episodes on one little passage here from Matthew chapter nine? And to answer my own question, I would say because I think the stuff in this passage speaks very compellingly to what's going on in our world right now. We live in this weird, unforgiving, divisive, difficult time where guilt is weaponized against other people, where forgiveness is very out of vogue. And that isn't just for, you know, the bad people who aren't a part of all the things that I think. It's me, it's everybody, it's all of us. This is a weird, dark, angry time in a lot of ways. And then we get a passage like this, it's just this ray of light and lightness. Take heart is the key phrase in it. Take heart. How good would it feel to be able to take heart? The kingdom strategy is the one that's weird and out there, but it's also the one that has the power to fix the mess that we're in. So you've got the Orwellian nightmare strategy going on, which is perpetual guilt. Guilt for stupid stuff from years ago, guilt over stuff that wasn't wrong years ago, but it doesn't fit somebody else's brand new standards that they just invented right now for right and wrong and evaluated through the lenses of those standards make people from a decade ago or two decades ago look suddenly super evil, or even guilt for stuff that other people did. Part of me wants to be angry and to crusade against this unforgiveness and this weird, angry, manipulative stuff. But people crusade about stuff all the time. And does that actually make much better? It doesn't feel like it, at least to me right now. No, I think the antidote for a culture of accusation and perpetual guilt isn't more accusation and more perpetual guilt, according to maybe just a slightly different set of standards. Rather, the flawless countermeasure for a culture of guilt and accusation is patient, continual, stubborn forgiveness, just like Jesus did. But I think these very hostile times that we live in right now are a lot like back then during the time of the Bible. And I think in both situations, accusation, perpetual guilt, and unforgiveness represent in people's minds this cheap, quick pathway to temporary power and this temporary good feeling of moral superiority. But that stuff is dark magic. It's a kind of dark magic that eventually consumes its user. You think you wield it, but you don't wield it. It wields you. But forgiveness is a different power. It's from beyond us, it's real, it's been given to us generously, and we've been given the blessing to use it on others. There's real lasting power in it because say what you will about the Pharisees, but they were right on this thing. That forgiveness is from God, and ultimately, forgiveness only flows from God. So the bad guys wanted to see the sword of Damocles hanging over every head forever. They felt like they could win in that environment. But the good guy looked past the social wars and the stupid political games, and he saw a busted-up human who is in need of forgiveness, and so he gave it. Kingdom citizens should come at it the same way. The ultimate countermeasure for addressing what ails the world right now is unending, continual, beautiful, life-giving, stubborn forgiveness in the likeness of Jesus who showed us how to forgive in the first place. Okay, semi-cermony internet rant over. I'm Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.