7th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

If you were the paralytic in today’s Gospel story, how would you have felt after Jesus said to you: Your sins are forgiven?  While the others were murmuring away behind Jesus’ back, how would you have felt?  Would you have felt short-changed?  Your friends had probably told you of others whom Jesus had physically healed.  Might you have hoped for that?  Would that have meant more to you?

With ourselves, do we appreciate sin and forgiveness?  The word “sin” in Greek, the language of the Gospels, means “missing the mark”, to be heading in the wrong direction, ultimately to be heading somewhere else altogether – to have turned in the direction of self-interest, self-focus, of the superficial and the ephemeral, instead of towards genuinely loving.  Head for love and we’re heading for God (even if we don’t consciously realise it).  What is God but love!

If only we could get the sense of who we truly are.  We were made by God who is love.  To live humanly is to love deeply.  Love is the energy that permeates us.  We come from love.  We are made for an eternity that is essentially the experience of  deeply loving.  And the way that we get there is by loving.  When we don’t love, we are out of sync, out of harmony with ourselves.  Everything else is secondary.

And what about forgiveness?  We talk about it enough, but  just what it means isn’t always clear.  We can have a fairly miserable sense of forgiveness, a bit like a magistrate ruling out the charges made against us.  We might get a sense of relief, but little else.  A more helpful way to appreciate forgiveness is to see it in the context of a close relationship, a really close relationship, like that of husband and wife.  To forgive is to say: You have hurt me, deeply.  You have wounded me precisely because I loved you so deeply.  Well, I still love you, and I want our relationship to regain the wonder it had before.  That is something like what God’s forgiveness involves.

Where we have headed in the past does not matter.  Where we are heading at the moment doesn’t matter.  As Jesus said: Your sins are forgiven.  What matters is where we are heading from this moment on.  To feel in our truest depths the straining towards love – towards personal integrity, towards family and community solidarity, towards justice, towards respect for the life of every human person, towards peace...  to go for it!

What a pity it is to sin!  What a pity to “miss the mark”, to confuse the whole point of being alive!