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At a critical moment in the hall of Theodin-King in Tolkien's The Two Towers, the good wizard, Gandalf, sheds his gray mantle to reveal that he has become "Gandalf the White." In this new role he has power to hurl the evil Sauron backward and cast him out of the enslaved king. This scene comes to my mind when I read of an event which followed Jesus' blockbuster words to a paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven you,” and then authenticated the statement by healing him.
The power to actually forgive sin, take away guilt, and provide some way to shield the sinner from his justly deserved doom, put Jesus in a new light in the eyes of his critics. It was nothing short of a declaration of godhood. He who can forgive sins exercises life-and-death jurisdiction of eternal consequence over every soul in the whole human race and over the cosmos in which the race dwells.
As
soon as Jesus made this claim he sought an occasion to reveal the implication of this newly revealed authority; and he started with the Sabbath enforcers: those masters of contrived ritual correctness who
took a major command God gave to the Jewish nation and made it into a whip of their own nanny laws - laws which kept the “sinners” in line; with their bureaucratic overkill .
His strategy was masterful. First, he allowed his disciples to snatch some grain as
they passed through a field. This was permissible by the Law. The problem for the committee of the concerned was,
they rubbed off the chaff in their hands. That had been decreed as “work”
and, therefore, was a violation of the Law.
When
challenged, Jesus brought out an illustration from the Old Testament which may
well have left the Pharisees as confused as it does modern readers. He
referenced the time when David and his men ate the holy bread of the tabernacle. That bread, by God's decree, was reserved for the priests. Following that, Jesus (like Gandalf in the hall of Theodin King) dropped his mantle of rabbi-hood and stood before them in the light of his real authority. His words were unmistakably clear:
Then he left them to fume until another opportunity came to drive home his point.
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