7th Sunday Year B
See Commentary on Mark 2:1-12
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!
Homily 2 – 2012
Jesus had been on the Galilee circuit for some time before today's incident. Over that time, he had healed a lot of people, and set many free from their compulsive, destructive demons. I wonder how he felt after so much of that? whether he reflected much on it? How fruitful had it been? What had it achieved? Was that what he had come to do? Was it what people really needed? what the world needed? Had Galilee become a happier, more peaceful place? We might ask: What does our world need? What do we need to be saved from? Is our world a happy world?
I wonder if today's Gospel incident reflects a change in perspective, and a deeper insight, on Jesus' part? His spontaneous response to the paralytic was to focus on his sin and to respond to it by affirming the availability of God's forgiveness. There are two significant issues here.
The first is the reality of Sin. And let's be concrete. Our concrete sins are all practical expressions of deeper sin [or sinfulness]. They reflect a generalised hostility towards others, a rivalry, a competitiveness, a choice for, or affirmation of, self-interest at the price of others. On the world scene it is obvious – just tune in to the evening news: a constant barrage of hostility and violence. What has driven/is driving the economic crisis? And, in the fall-out, who looks after whose interests? A similar dynamic operates at national and state levels: self-interest, lobby groups, power-seeking, hostility – generating little more than negative criticism, adolescent bad mouthing, and refusal to cooperate. It all so easily happens wherever people group together – in business, in Church, in family, etc..
At the heart of the world's problems lies sin. The dominant factor undermining people's peace and happiness is sin. People can be as healthy as can be, as wealthy as can be, as famous and as powerful as can be, and, yet, desperately unhappy, unsatisfied, eaten away by envy, resentment and bitterness. What we need is to be set free from the sin that takes over our hearts and destroys us and our world.
I wonder if it was this growing insight that led Jesus to respond to the paralytic with the message: Your sins are forgiven? [Interesting to note, too, in passing, the response of the scribes sitting there and observing everything: He was stepping on their turf, challenging their expertise – so: resentment and criticism.]
This brings us to a second point in today's Gospel. Jesus' response to the paralytic's sin, [indeed, to the world's sin], was not stronger law-enforcement measures [which can never touch the heart], not even insistence on sorrow or purpose of amendment; but simply affirming God's offer of forgiveness, unconditional forgiveness. God's remedy, Jesus' remedy, for the pervasive destructive mess of our world begins with forgiveness. The world's salvation from its own inescapable unhappiness and absence of peace is forgiveness.
Remember the message of the risen Jesus? As the Father sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven, and [sadly, because we can totally ignore it], whose sins you retain are retained. Our mission is not complicated, though perhaps we have done more retaining than forgiving, because, despite its simplicity, forgiveness is very difficult. What society needs, if people are ever to enjoy true peace and happiness is to learn to forgive, to prioritise forgiveness, to run the risk of forgiveness, to try what seems , at times, impossible – but may not be.
And now we move into Eucharist, hearing in our hearts the voice of Jesus assuring us where he is at, at least: My child, your sins are forgiven!