Thoughts for the Day

Luke 5: 23-25 “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 paralysed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”

How were the Pharisees to respond when asked which was the easier of two things that were both impossible for them?  Jesus really knew how to put them on the spot!  However, I quote this passage today because it’s the first time Luke records Jesus calling himself, ‘Son of Man’.  It appears to have been his favourite way of referring to himself.  Why and what did it mean?  I immediately think of Ezekiel whom God frequently called ‘Son of Man’, and I find it means little more than ‘human being’.  It seems Jesus consciously gave himself a humble title, although to us who know he was God it is a striking reminder that he identified himself as fully human as well.  In the charged national and political environment in which he was raised, it was clever of Jesus to choose a title that didn’t have messianic implications, a blank canvas almost on which to layer his identity, starting here as one demonstrating his authority to forgive sins.  But it was also clever because, although it meant so little usually, Daniel 7:13 refers to a vision of “one like the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven”.  In this passage ‘son of man’ may be a representative of humanity, but ‘coming on clouds’ was an imagine of divinity.  It is therefore a hugely internally conflicted image … except, of course, in Jesus!