Exodus 24
Matthew 9:1-8
“Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”
Words from the 9th Chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew.
The story that we have heard in this evening’s reading from the Gospel according to Matthew is spectacular. The story is told in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, of Matthew, Mark and Luke, but when we think of it we probably, without realising it, recall the Marcan version. In Mark we have the detail of the crowd being so dense that the bystanders break open the roof of the building to lower the paralysed man on his litter down to the ground level where Jesus is. Contemporary hearers of that version would have been struck by the vivid image of the roof being broken in as, indeed, are we today. Matthew does not have this detail. So in that sense Matthew’s version is less spectacular. But it is still spectacular enough, surely? The essence of the story is still there: Jesus forgives a man’s sins and the man is cured of his paralysis.
Now this is the sort of story with which that well-known enemy of religion Professor Richard Dawkins would have a field day. It may not be good manners to put words into other people’s mouths but I think we can hazard a well-informed guess at what Dawkins would say. The story is unscientific. It is a pretty story but, in the purest sense, nonsense non-sense. For a start, there is no such thing as sin how can selfish genes sin, after all? And even if there were such a thing as sin, what would it mean to forgive it? And, finally, how could anyone believe that any such utterance could effect such a cure? You can probably supply other likely objections from the Professor. One might be that it is morally repugnant to suggest that paralysis could be the result of sin, not to mention unscientific (that word again), ignorant and superstitious.
We all know that Professor Dawkins has embarked on a campaign I nearly said crusade against faith. He proclaims himself to be a materialist that matter is all that there is and that, perhaps, one day, we shall have the means to demonstrate the truth of this thesis, irrefutably and for ever. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when listening to the radio last Sunday, to hear Dawkins admit to having spiritual feelings. It is true that he spoke about having spiritual feelings in the context of being moved by the music of Schubert but I think you will agree that the proximate cause of these feelings is irrelevant. If Dawkins holds that his feelings are spiritual, how can he square this with his arch-materialist standpoint? For spiritual’, if it means anything, means relating to or deriving from spirit’. Dawkins is a man who is careful with his words. He could have described his feelings otherwise but he chose to call them spiritual. It does not, one might think, take the brains of an archbishop to point out that Dawkins has thereby implied that he possesses a spirit.
Now this matters because it goes to the heart of our Gospel reading today, which I suggest is what we know nowadays as the mind/body problem. The mind/body problem. If we talk of having a mind which is conscious and capable of having amongst other things spiritual thought such as are entertained by the good Professor, then we are at least making a distinction between the mind which does these things and the body which concerns itself with functions such as, for example, locomotion, ingestion, digestion, excretion, circulation of blood and the acquisition of oxygen from the air, to name but a few. Many of us tend to talk as if we adopted the dualist position of Descartes that the body is a machine inhabited by a mental, spiritual tenant. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously dismissed this Cartesian dualism as the theory of the ghost in the machine’. That was in the early nineteen fifties. It’s rather a shock to find Professor Dawkins embracing it in 2006. But you must not think me obsessed by Richard Dawkins. I may be obsessed but you mustn’t think it.
I do not know if there are any medically trained people in the congregation this evening but I am going to stick my neck out and say something about illness. All illness is psychosomatic. All illness is psychosomatic. Now I have to say what I mean by this. Everyone knows that the word psychosomatic comes from two Greek works, psyche meaning mind or spirit and soma meaning body. Thus, psychosomatic means no more than relating to both the mind and the body’. It is conventionally used and certainly colloquially used however, to mean that an illness is generated in the mind but manifested in the body. Thus hypochondriacs are dismissed as having merely’ psychosomatic illnesses and we say of them, “It’s all in the mind”. I wish to use the word in a way which reflects rather its literal meaning relating to both the mind and the body. That is why I venture to say that all illness is psychosomatic, as long as by that we accept that the body affects the mind and the mind affects the body.
Indeed, there is a complex interaction between them, which makes talk of one-directional causality misleading. People who fall ill often become depressed that is the body affecting the mind. People who are depressed often suffer from weakened immune systems, allowing infections to take hold that is the mind affecting the body. It is a commonplace amongst medical carers that a patient’s attitude of mind has an influence on the rate of recovery and even on the completeness of recovery. Thus illnesses have both mental/spiritual as well as bodily aspects: they are psychosomatic. How people feel about themselves affects how well they are, just as how well they are affects how they feel about themselves. In fact this goes beyond illness. Laughter is psychosomatic. If we are tickled, we not only feel certain physical sensations and produce certain noises we also have what even Professor Dawkins would, I suspect, call spiritual or mental sensations that delicious felling of pleasure on the one hand and wishing it would stop on the other. Why? Why should we have any mental feelings about this at all? Because the experience of being tickled is psychosomatic. If my car runs up against the kerb, the car does not have a sensation of pain. I certainly don’t. But if we stub a toe why do our mental processes have to be interrupted? Why can’t the body’ our basic means of locomotion – just cope with it as the car copes with hitting the kerb and leave us’ whatever that means to carry on trying to remember that phone number or cross that road? Even more mysteriously, if we hear, see or read something funny or distressing, why do we laugh aloud or burst into tears? If the mind and body inhabit separate realms, what purpose is served by these physical manifestations? Laughing at something funny or crying at something sad are psychosomatic. I rest my case.
“Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”
And so we move on to sin. We no longer believe that the paralytic man in this story was paralysed because of sins that he had personally committed although I would not rule out the catastrophic physical consequences of a sense of sin. It seems to me that here we are faced with the issue of original sin sin, that is, which besets the whole human race from the beginning, from our origin. Newborn babies have committed no sins and yet they bear the original sin of the whole human race. They are not individually culpable: they are just human. They do not yet know it, of course. But as we grown to adulthood we can and should acquire a sense of the sinfulness which besets our race. Realising the sinfulness of humanity is the first step towards having the burden lifted that is, of being forgiven. Remember the point that Matthew makes, When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven. The faith of the paralytic and his friends moves Jesus to declare that his sins are forgiven. The paralytic has opened himself fully to God’s unconditional love and, in doing so, has thrown off his physical weakness. He and they have come to terms with human sinfulness and made a choice to reject it. They have decided to acknowledge their brokenness and to seek wholeness.
Wholeness. Wholeness and health, of course, come from the same Germanic linguistic roots and are essentially synonyms. We talk of people being hale and hearty hale and whole are variants of the same word. We used to greet people in this country with the word, Hail’ an abbreviation of Hail be you’ or May you be healthy’. Let’s not get lost in philology. Nevertheless if we go back into the origins of our language we can see that ideas of health and wholeness reinforce the sense of our selves as coherent entities with interdependent mental, spiritual and physical aspects. So I think I may be forgiven for claiming these words as supporting the thesis that all illness and indeed, all wellness is psychosomatic. We are not ghosts in machines. Descartes got it wrong.
Thus it is that, notwithstanding the angry denunciations of Professor Dawkins, we can indeed hear this story from Matthew’s gospel today without embarrassment and without jeopardising our rational appreciation of the sources of physical symptoms. We do not know the full story of the paralysed man. Matthew gives us only the bare bones. But we can appreciate the underlying truths: that we are not spirits inhabiting automata, that mind and body are interdependent, and that acting on the spirit can effect changes in the body. If we are sinful, we cannot exclude the possibility of physical consequences attendant upon our sin. But that is not the end of the story. Matthew gives us words of Jesus to treasure and reflect upon: “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”
Amen.
Revd Cortland Fransella