Canter Bridge

When sick people are made well and the deranged are freed of the forces and persons that enslave their minds, we are meant to shout, clap, sing, and dance.

There are a thousand reasons not to do so. Most of them are a subset of the large sin called blasphemy, writ small on the canvas of stingy little men and women.

Jesus set so many paralytics to walking and speechless to talking that people, overwhelmed by the scope and scale of it, concluded that he has lost his mind.

The most religiously astute went a step further. They decided he was evil, the dangerously deceptive scion of Satan himself. He made well in order to make sick. He liberated in order to enslave. The light and clarity of those he had just touched was taken for the confusion of the undiscerning:

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.’

Jesus refused to suffer this intimidation. He not only backed up his words by pointing to the indisputable recovery of people who minutes ago had languished in hopeless misery. He also called the cultivated skepticism of his opponents blasphemy against God himself:

‘Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’—for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’

To praise God for his liberating deeds is natural, fitting, and a delight to body and soul. Yet, in the face of goodness too large for our small envelopes, we too often lean on skepticism as though it was our finest virtue.

Often it is not. Too frequently for comfort it is the most damning evidence that we have become enemies of God himself. There is no remedy for that illness. Though its onset is subtle and even the cause of self-satisfaction, it corrodes like no cancer knows how. Better to rejoice, better to be struck down, better almost anything than to die of that great, pathetic sadness.