William Sloane Coffin, Jr. - "Burdened with Erudition and Paralyzed with Indecision: A Sermon on Learned Paralytics" (March 12, 1967)
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Transcript
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Man | "And when Jesus returned to Capernaum | 0:42 |
"after some days, it was reported that he was at home. | 0:44 | |
"And many were gathered together, | 0:48 | |
"so that there was no longer room for them, | 0:50 | |
"not even about the door. | 0:52 | |
"And he was preaching the word to them. | 0:54 | |
"And they came bringing to him a paralytic, | 0:57 | |
"carried by four men. | 0:59 | |
"And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, | 1:02 | |
"they removed the roof above him, | 1:05 | |
"and when they had made an opening, | 1:08 | |
"they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay. | 1:10 | |
"And when Jesus saw their faith, | 1:14 | |
"he said to the paralytic, 'My son, | 1:17 | |
"your sins are forgiven.' | 1:20 | |
"Now some of the scribes were sitting there, | 1:24 | |
"questioning in their hearts. | 1:26 | |
"'Why does this man speak thus? | 1:29 | |
"It is blasphemy. | 1:30 | |
"Who can forgive sins but God alone?' | 1:31 | |
"And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit | 1:35 | |
"that they thus questioned within themselves, | 1:39 | |
"said to them, 'Why do you question thus in your hearts? | 1:42 | |
"Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven, | 1:45 | |
"or rise and walk? | 1:49 | |
"But I say to you, | 1:54 | |
"but that you may know that the son of man has authority | 1:58 | |
"on earth to forgive sins,' | 2:01 | |
"he said to the paralytic, 'I say to you, | 2:03 | |
"rise, take up your pallet and go home.' | 2:06 | |
"And he rose and immediately took up the pallet, | 2:10 | |
"and went out before them all. | 2:13 | |
"So that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, | 2:15 | |
"'We never saw anything like this.'" | 2:20 | |
The end of the reading, of God's holy word, | 2:24 | |
may God bless unto us this reading. | 2:27 | |
Earlier this week, an unseasonable warmth melted | 2:32 | |
most of Connecticut's remaining snow. | 2:37 | |
But thanks to a truly genial drainage system, | 2:41 | |
on what we call the old campus at Yale, | 2:43 | |
none of this snow was lost. | 2:46 | |
It simply rearranged itself in | 2:48 | |
an unending series of puddles. | 2:50 | |
While most of these were muddy, some few were clear. | 2:54 | |
And by that afternoon, it was possible to rediscover | 2:58 | |
the childhood joy of puddle gazing. | 3:03 | |
To wonder anew how so vast and expanse of earth and sky | 3:07 | |
could be contained in such a small body of water. | 3:12 | |
No less wondrous is how so much | 3:19 | |
of the story of earth and heaven | 3:23 | |
can be captured in small Biblical narratives. | 3:25 | |
We just read the story of Jesus and the paralytic. | 3:32 | |
How Jesus, the great disseminator of life, | 3:36 | |
healed the man whose life had become one long suicide. | 3:39 | |
Here we see the eternal disseminator of God's freedom | 3:45 | |
confronting the eternal paralysis of the human will. | 3:49 | |
Once again, we're prompted to reflect on that phrase | 3:54 | |
on which we cannot reflect too much. | 3:58 | |
Deo servire summa libertas. | 4:01 | |
To serve God is the highest freedom. | 4:07 | |
It is man's natural proper role, | 4:15 | |
to rebel against God. | 4:19 | |
And I think we can safely surmise that | 4:22 | |
in all of human history God never met an opponent | 4:24 | |
more redoubtable than Jesus himself. | 4:27 | |
With typical power and imagination, | 4:31 | |
Nikos Kazantzakis, in The Last Temptation of Christ, | 4:34 | |
has portrayed the young Jesus racked | 4:38 | |
with conflicting desires but with none more passionate | 4:41 | |
than the desire to escape the burden of divinity. | 4:46 | |
Sensing the nature of the struggle | 4:51 | |
and all excited by it, his rabbi, aged uncle | 4:53 | |
approaches his mother. | 4:58 | |
Hail Mary, God is all powerful. | 5:02 | |
His designs are inscrutable. | 5:05 | |
Your son might be, but Mary, | 5:08 | |
whose eyes by now are drained dry | 5:13 | |
with the agony of watching her son struggle, | 5:15 | |
cries out, have pity on me. | 5:18 | |
A prophet? No, no. | 5:20 | |
And if God has so written, let him rub it out. | 5:25 | |
I want my son like everyone else. | 5:29 | |
Nothing more, nothing less. | 5:33 | |
The rabbi leans heavily on his crosier and gets up. | 5:38 | |
Mary, he says severely, if God listened to mothers, | 5:43 | |
we would all rot away in a bog of security | 5:48 | |
and easy living. | 5:51 | |
Then he goes to her son and says, with all tenderness, | 5:54 | |
Jesus, Jesus my child, | 5:59 | |
how long are you going to resist him? | 6:02 | |
And then the entire cottage shakes | 6:07 | |
with a savage shout, until I die! | 6:11 | |
The soil of Israel is in labor. | 6:18 | |
Unable to give birth and screaming. | 6:20 | |
But out of the struggle of man with God, | 6:25 | |
a messiah comes. | 6:29 | |
Man's anxiety becomes God's love | 6:32 | |
in person on earth. | 6:37 | |
Jesus abandons the struggle of man with God | 6:39 | |
to take up the struggle of God with man. | 6:42 | |
Abandons all self protection | 6:46 | |
for utter vulnerability. | 6:50 | |
What I'm trying to say is that a submission | 6:55 | |
which comes too quickly is simply | 6:57 | |
a facade for repressed rebellion. | 6:59 | |
Jesus' struggle is long and hard | 7:03 | |
and ends in voluntary, total self surrender. | 7:06 | |
And that's why his authority is peculiar. | 7:13 | |
Hannah Arendt in a recent essay points out sympathetically | 7:17 | |
that truth has not only a persuasive | 7:20 | |
but a coercive nature. | 7:23 | |
With a result, the truth tellers tend toward tyranny. | 7:25 | |
Not so much because of a character weakness, | 7:30 | |
as because they are under a strange and strong compulsion. | 7:33 | |
This is something for good Christians to remember, | 7:38 | |
for when piety becomes fanaticism, | 7:41 | |
then faith becomes arrogance | 7:45 | |
and goodness inevitably becomes cruelty. | 7:48 | |
But Jesus is no fanatic, no tyrant. | 7:53 | |
While he confronts people with his and their beliefs, | 7:58 | |
never does he try to do their believing for them. | 8:02 | |
And I suppose what I'm really trying to say, | 8:08 | |
is that a truly strong man is always tender. | 8:12 | |
So it must have been this combination of strength | 8:19 | |
and tenderness that drew the crowds of Capernaum | 8:23 | |
to the home of Peter and Andrew. | 8:26 | |
And prompted the four friends to bring to Jesus | 8:29 | |
the man who had become such a burden to them | 8:32 | |
and to himself. | 8:36 | |
I think we must assume that the man was crippled | 8:39 | |
not by any lesion of a nerve, | 8:41 | |
a trauma of the cerebral cortex, | 8:43 | |
but by total paralysis of the will. | 8:46 | |
His was that paralyzing cramp of the soul | 8:51 | |
that one sees in mental hospitals, | 8:55 | |
more properly called in Russian hospitals, | 8:58 | |
for the soul sick because the mental derangement | 9:00 | |
is an effect and not a cause. | 9:04 | |
In short, as we can see in mental hospitals, | 9:08 | |
this man was quite literally scared sick. | 9:12 | |
Now as such, he lies there on his pallet | 9:18 | |
as a symbol of us all, partially paralyzed as we all are. | 9:23 | |
For whose hand here is free to be extended to anyone? | 9:28 | |
Whose eyes are free to see the truth as it is, | 9:33 | |
because all our eyes are in part paralyzed | 9:38 | |
by the status symbols about us. | 9:41 | |
Whose feet are free, free to walk in any walk of life. | 9:45 | |
No, in all honesty, we are not born into freedom. | 9:51 | |
We are born into lack of freedom, | 9:54 | |
and the church is right only with baptism | 9:56 | |
does freedom begin to enter in. | 9:59 | |
Only with God behind us does freedom lie before us. | 10:02 | |
So we must take our stand with baptism against birth. | 10:08 | |
Witness to our given freedom against our | 10:13 | |
inherited lack of freedom. | 10:16 | |
And this becomes strikingly clear when we realize | 10:19 | |
that the question of freedom is not the question from what, | 10:22 | |
but the question for what. | 10:26 | |
He is truly free, who is unhindered | 10:31 | |
for what he counts the good. | 10:35 | |
Freedom of choice, to be or not to be. | 10:39 | |
That is the form of freedom. But to be able to choose. | 10:43 | |
To be. That is the meaning of freedom. | 10:47 | |
Now we're coming nearer to the meaning | 10:53 | |
of deo servire summa libertas. | 10:55 | |
For modern technology, for instance, | 10:58 | |
cannot free us to serve what we count the good. | 11:00 | |
In a strange way, modern civilization, | 11:06 | |
far from solving our difficulties, | 11:08 | |
seems rather to internalize them. | 11:10 | |
We're better cared for, but we have more cares. | 11:14 | |
The physical support of modern society is | 11:18 | |
more than offset by the psychological pressures, | 11:20 | |
which is why Berdyaev correctly prophesied | 11:24 | |
that when bread has been assured | 11:27 | |
then God becomes a hard and inescapable reality | 11:29 | |
instead of an escape from harsh reality. | 11:33 | |
Modern education too cannot free us | 11:38 | |
for what we count the good. | 11:41 | |
For often as not education drives a wedge | 11:44 | |
between thought and action instead | 11:47 | |
of enabling action of a higher kind. | 11:49 | |
And modern education design's so often is | 11:54 | |
to help people meet all the demands | 11:56 | |
at the expense of their capacity to set inner goals. | 11:59 | |
It's turning out people who are burdened | 12:04 | |
with erudition and paralyzed with indecision. | 12:06 | |
The academic community is often as not a crowd | 12:11 | |
of learned paralytics. | 12:15 | |
But let us recognize that this is always bound | 12:19 | |
to be the case, for anguish is born of fear | 12:22 | |
and fear is born of knowledge. | 12:26 | |
And hence, the history of paralysis begins | 12:28 | |
at the foot of the tree of knowledge. | 12:33 | |
How unfree we are, | 12:39 | |
comes clearer yet when we realize | 12:43 | |
that this whole nation of the most advanced technology | 12:46 | |
and in many ways of the most advanced educational system | 12:51 | |
in the world, | 12:54 | |
is today paralyzed in a kind of lock step | 12:56 | |
to a world ideological view already doomed | 13:00 | |
beyond reprieve to belong to a bygone age. | 13:04 | |
Again and again, Europeans are shocked | 13:09 | |
at our paralysis of thought and action. | 13:12 | |
And I shall never forget how shocked I was | 13:16 | |
when two east European Marxists stopped by not long ago. | 13:20 | |
And their question was how do you do it? | 13:25 | |
How do you do it? | 13:27 | |
And knowing that they were just back | 13:30 | |
from the midwest I assumed of course | 13:31 | |
they were talking about our great agricultural achievements, | 13:33 | |
because if you know the Soviets are still planting | 13:36 | |
that miracle grain. | 13:38 | |
You plant it in the Ukraine, and it comes up in Canada. | 13:40 | |
(audience laughs) | 13:43 | |
But not at all. | 13:44 | |
What they had in mind, they quickly made clear, | 13:47 | |
was something quite different. | 13:49 | |
We have, they said, watched CBS, NBC, ABC. | 13:51 | |
What's the difference. | 13:57 | |
Your radio programs are equally uniform. | 14:00 | |
And they were nice enough not to say, uniformly bad. | 14:04 | |
With the expression of certain editorials | 14:08 | |
in the St. Louis Dispatch and the New York Times | 14:10 | |
and the Louisville Courier, all your editorial policy | 14:12 | |
across the country seems to be very much the same. | 14:15 | |
So how do you do it? | 14:18 | |
How do you achieve such effective thought control | 14:20 | |
without resorting to terror? | 14:23 | |
(audience laughs) | 14:26 | |
What an irony, that soon Communists will be coming | 14:27 | |
to the leading democracy of the world | 14:31 | |
in order to study effective methods of thought control. | 14:33 | |
So perhaps this nation has its symbol in our story. | 14:39 | |
Perhaps this nation is symbolized by Capernaum, | 14:44 | |
whose inhabitants apparently worse off | 14:49 | |
than the cripple because their pride-swollen face had | 14:51 | |
so closed up their eyes that they were unable | 14:54 | |
to perceive their own paralysis. | 14:56 | |
And so we read the prophecy, and you Capernaum, | 14:59 | |
will you be exalted in heaven? No. | 15:03 | |
You will be brought down to Hades. | 15:07 | |
The way that great powerful Roman is pictured | 15:11 | |
in Michelangelo's last judgment being brought down to Hades, | 15:15 | |
one hand over his eye and a look of dire understanding | 15:18 | |
on his face. | 15:21 | |
He understood, but too late. | 15:23 | |
And the prophecy was singularly fulfilled, | 15:28 | |
for one of the most difficult paths | 15:32 | |
in sacred typography is to discover the sight of Capernaum. | 15:34 | |
But let us get back to the paralytic. | 15:42 | |
For the problem we are dealing with is deeply personal | 15:44 | |
and deeply religious. | 15:48 | |
And the prayer we heard earlier, | 15:52 | |
which I think was said for most of us, certainly. | 15:54 | |
Intimated love, if we're talking about God's love, | 15:59 | |
it is not blind but visionary. | 16:01 | |
And as an x-ray pierces the body to perceive the disease, | 16:06 | |
so Jesus' love pierced the heart of this man. | 16:10 | |
Because he perceived that his will was paralyzed by guilt. | 16:14 | |
The guilt of all who dare to | 16:19 | |
fail to be themselves. | 16:22 | |
Who failed to dare to be themselves. | 16:27 | |
But Jesus does not judge him, | 16:30 | |
as no doubt the moralistic scribes expected him to do. | 16:33 | |
For that would have been to humiliate him | 16:38 | |
at the level of his deepest failures. | 16:39 | |
God is not trying to turn us all | 16:42 | |
into miserable little heaps of humanity. | 16:44 | |
Nor did Jesus punish him. | 16:49 | |
Because punishing by assuaging the guilt, | 16:52 | |
makes the old way of life bearable anew. | 16:56 | |
Rather he simply says to him, and his words combine | 17:01 | |
a kind of somber explicitness with a kind of vibrant warmth. | 17:05 | |
My son, your sins are forgiven. | 17:12 | |
And then the miracle takes place. | 17:17 | |
The man believes him. | 17:20 | |
Believed that there is more mercy | 17:23 | |
in Christ than sin in him. | 17:25 | |
And he is free, free at last | 17:29 | |
from the powers of death militant, | 17:30 | |
and one of the most joyful hieroglyphics | 17:34 | |
in early Christian art is a picture of a man | 17:38 | |
bouncing along the road with a terribly light | 17:42 | |
bed on his back. | 17:46 | |
But now the final | 17:52 | |
and crucial work. | 17:57 | |
Most of us are not like that cripple. | 17:59 | |
We don't think we're that paralyzed. | 18:02 | |
So we are more like the others in Capernaum | 18:06 | |
of whom we were speaking. | 18:08 | |
And therefore roles have been tragically reversed. | 18:10 | |
In the story, it is the cripple who is in agony. | 18:17 | |
Not Christ. | 18:20 | |
But when we meet Christ, it is not in the house | 18:22 | |
of Peter and Andrew, but at calvary. | 18:25 | |
And the pain that is ours because we cannot love is | 18:30 | |
totally overshadowed by the pain of him | 18:35 | |
who can but love. | 18:37 | |
And what is so killing to Jesus of course | 18:41 | |
is not the nails and the spear | 18:43 | |
but having so much love to give | 18:46 | |
and so few to receive it. | 18:49 | |
Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I | 18:51 | |
and you would not. | 18:56 | |
It is man's natural role to rebel. | 19:00 | |
To argue with God. To shake angry fists at God. | 19:04 | |
But let's be honest in this Lenten season. | 19:09 | |
Take your bed to the foot of the cross. | 19:13 | |
Look up. See what's going on. | 19:17 | |
And hear that great cry from the heart, | 19:21 | |
still calling out father, forgive them. | 19:24 | |
And go ahead and argue. What have you got to say. | 19:29 | |
What have any of us to say. | 19:35 | |
Except perhaps, oh lamb of God that taketh | 19:38 | |
away the sins of the world, | 19:42 | |
have mercy upon us. | 19:45 | |
Let us pray. | 19:48 | |
Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open. | 19:54 | |
All desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden. | 19:58 | |
Plan the thoughts of our hearts | 20:03 | |
by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit. | 20:06 | |
That we may perfectly love thee | 20:09 | |
and worthily magnify they holy name. | 20:12 | |
Through Jesus Christ our lord. | 20:15 | |
Amen. | 20:18 | |
(somber music) | 20:22 |
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