Evil in your hearts

This week's verses are Matthew 9:2-5:

Just then some people brought to him a paralytic lying on a stretcher. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Have courage, son! Your sins are forgiven.” Then some of the experts in the law said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming!” When Jesus perceived their thoughts he said, “Why do you respond with evil in your hearts? Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?

These verses take place in the midst of some "outreach" being performed by Jesus. He's out on the street praying for people, and prays directly for a man who is paralyzed. He tells him his sins are forgiven, which shocked some people.

I don't know why he started with that instead of healing his physical body, but I guess that's the order we should rank the things God does for us. Forgiving our sins is so much more important than our physical needs. It is an eternal gift, not a gift with a maximum lifetime that only matches our brief time on earth.

Sometimes people have been healed just in hearing God's words of forgiveness. I've heard about people being permanently injured in accidents and things that hadn't forgiven the other person or felt forgiven for what had happened and as soon as the words of forgiveness were pronounced they were healed. Maybe this was the case for the paralytic.

There was also the issue of people blaming the sick and injured for their condition. In Biblical times, they looked down on suffering people because they believed the suffering was just punishment for their sin. It's a bit like how hardcore vegans blame people for being sick if they eat animal products. "It's a shame that guy got brain cancer, but that's what you get for eating meat. If he wasn't filling his body full of murder he would have been fine."

But Jesus was the opposite here. He spoke forgiveness, not condemnation, when he encountered the paralytic man. For all we know maybe the poor guy did make a mistake that caused his own paralysis. Maybe he came home drunk and fell off the stairs. Maybe he was the town bandit and someone hit him with a club trying to rob the house. We have no way of knowing what happened to the man. We only know that Jesus encouraged and forgave him.

The experts in the law however were quick to condemn. There's something about education, even theology, surprisingly, which brings that out in people. Education makes us feel smart, like we're a higher level than others. We have more knowledge, which we can then use to find things wrong with others. And we got that knowledge through our own study, so we feel as if we've outdone others for having it. And then every time we put someone down, we feel a little endorphin rush, which trains our brains to look for more situations like that.

Have you ever been around some prudish religious person who always needs to virtue-signal in front of others? Anything they think is immoral, or racist, or sexist, or fascist, or offensive, out the mouth it comes. Often they're in full moral crusade against things even God himself doesn't condemn. (Shooting to be more righteous than God? You're probably doing it wrong.)

They're not doing it in love. They're doing it to be praised for the righteousness they feel they're demonstrating, even if they're the only ones who notice. In these verses, the teachers of the law didn't even speak it out. They simply thought the thoughts. The only audience they were playing for was themselves, but that was enough for Jesus to intervene!

Jesus asked them why they responded with evil in their hearts. Evil?? How is standing up for God and condemning blasphemy evil? The self-righteousness in their hearts is what was evil. It kept them from seeing the lesson Jesus was teaching about forgiveness and healing. Instead of learning, they stood in opposition to God's grace in a brazen attempt to puff themselves up with self-righteousness by condemning others.

Sometimes we're the religious prudes. We stand against something we see as evil, like racism, or pollution, or abortion, or some other depravity, and we end up sinning by doing it for the wrong reasons. We want revenge. We want to be the ones who made them stop. We want our outrage to be seen, so that we can be counted among the righteous, so we can be on the right side of history. We want to be the good guys, without Jesus, without his grace, without anything but the strength of our hard-won convictions. Our passion isn't driven by love, but by contempt. Nobody is saved by a gospel of contempt.

The teachers of the law probably honestly believed they were in the right, at least until the paralytic got up. And why wouldn't they? They had years of religious indoctrination, and a society which rewarded them for nitpicking. If you called out something that nobody else did, it meant your spiritual radar was more finely tuned. Meanwhile the worm of self-righteousness was gnawing itself deeper and deeper.

Which attitude do you want to have based on these verses? Encouraging and forgiving and healing, like Jesus? Or self-righteous condemnation like the teachers of the law. Only one of those attitudes helped the paralytic; and it wasn't the one that had a degree in studies to back it up.

It's good to call out what is wrong and speak against injustice, but what is in your heart is more important. Do you love the people you are confronting? Can you forgive the broken for making mistakes? Don't just examine what others are saying and doing. Examine yourself and see what is behind your passion. Confront the evil in your heart first.