The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God.Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.” (Luke 5:21-26).

Boy, which is easier to say? With the medical technology we have to replace knees and reattach ligaments these days, it seems increasingly easy to say “get up and walk.” And, with the stubborn determination we increasingly have to exact vengeance rather than restoration these days, it seems decidedly harder than it once was (if it ever was easy) to say “I forgive you.”

It really depends on how you take Jesus’ rhetorical question, I suppose. To think too hard about it is to miss the point all together, though. The point is not about which is harder: the point is that Jesus can do both. Why? He’s God.

A lot of questions swirled about Jesus’ authority to teach what he taught. In those earlier occurrences of folks making reference to Jesus’ authority in chapter 4—Jesus never steps into the fray to defend himself. He just keeps doing what he does. But with the religious leaders in the room, now Jesus begins to address the question of authority directly. Not his authority to teach, mind you, but something much more central: his authority to forgive sins.

This act of healing was a sign to the man, the leaders, the friends, the crowd, everyone that Jesus had the authority of God to set humanity free and make them well and whole again—addressing not only the physical ailments that constitute the effects of sin on the created world and its creatures, but sin itself.

Sin is that deeper, relational ailment at the heart of all our ailments: whether the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. When the right relationships of the Created world to itself and its Creator was broken by an act of two human creatures that stepped beyond the boundaries set for them, it knocked the whole thing off kilter in a way that imbalanced the relational world of the cosmos for generations to come: like a loose bearing that permits a wobbled spin that eventually serves to misshape the whole apparatus and all its connected components.

Jesus’ forgiveness of sin is equally far-reaching though. He does not only replace the initial loose bearings in the act of forgiveness, but he begins to restore the whole works. Everything knocked out of whack by the counter-formation of sin is brought under Jesus’ authoritative power to heal and make well.

And so Jesus forgives. Firstly, he forgives: he deals with the initial problem, not just the symptoms. But having done so, Jesus addresses the symptoms too. He sets us free in every conceivable way that we might be bound—in heart, mind, soul, or strength. There is nothing in all our creational, creaturely experience that does not fall under Jesus’ powerful word of healing. So: what thing—hard or easy—might Jesus be healing within you today?