SEVENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR Cycle “B”
Mk
1, 1 - 12: The Healing of the Paralytic
Last Sunday we
heard the prayer of faith expressed in eight monosyllables: “If you want
to, you can heal me.” Today we observe an act of faith in eight key monosyllables:
they stripped the roof, let down the man. Faith has that wild, unrational
quality that makes you say and do things quite out of the ordinary, like
stripping the roof to let down a man, like Peter jumping into the water and
walking on it, like stripping yourself of possessions to embrace the life of
poverty. People of faith sit lightly to their possessions
In
today’s Gospel the unexpected happens. Why does Jesus first pronounce the
forgiveness of the man’s sins? Surely
the man’s more obvious need is for healing. For the people of Jesus’ day there
was a mysterious link between illness and sin; and both were the opportunity
for conversion and restoration by God’s
love. If Jesus healed the sickness only, he would have implicitly taken away the sin, as per their thinking.
But he had to make it explicit: “Your
sins are forgiven.” Notice that the
forgiveness of sins is not what the paralytic’s friends have in mind at all.
What they want is a good old miracle. They haven’t understood what the kingdom
is all about; but they do believe in Jesus’ power, and he rewards their faith
by giving them something better than they had the wit to ask for. Men and women
have messed up God’s world by their arrogance and stupidity, their selfishness
and greed, symbolised by the sick man’s paralysis. So the real point is that Jesus’ many
miracles of healing are a sign of the presence of God among his people,
enabling them to recover their health and restoring the goodness of creation.
“Your sins are forgiven.” The phrase, “Your sins are forgiven” carries the same
authority as “With this ring I thee wed” – producing what it stated. One phrase
initiates a permanent bond, called marriage; the other phrase restores a broken
bond, called reconciliation.
Someone has said that marriage is a community
of mutual forgiveness; and he wasn’t talking smart!
Our sins can
paralyse us with guilt. In our minds we know that Jesus offers us forgiveness.
Bur do we believe it in our hearts?
Jesus says to each one of us, “My child, your sins are forgiven.” He wants to offer us a new beginning, beyond
our limited expectations, beyond the lines of our history. “See, I am doing a
new deed; even now it comes to light. Can you not see it?” We can if we have faith that God is acting in
our lives. Why be afraid or discouraged?
Faith is so
fundamental that without it we can see nothing. TIME magazine “Man of the
Century”, Albert Einstein, once said,
“The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the
sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this
emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as
good as dead.”
It has been said
that without faith we are like stained glass windows in the dark. Faith is that
source of light that illumines our lives just as the stained glass windows
transform the light they receive into meaningful images. Gospel faith is not
easy or simple-minded but a
profound
commitment to the truth revealed in Jesus Christ. It is neither stupid nor
misguided to put our faith in Jesus.
So the good news
is that Jesus Christ is God revealing himself as invincibly loving and rescuing
human beings from every kind of evil that they do or happens to them. And the
Resurrection of Christ assures us that when the worst happens the best happens
as well. The resurrection tells us that our basic belief in life is quite
right, that we are pushing in the right direction into the ever open future.
Here is a little
story. Some scientists in Scotland offered a boy a handsome sum of money if he
would allow himself to be let down by a rope over a cliff in a precipitous
mountain gorge. The boy needed the money
since he was very poor, but when he looked down into the two hundred foot
chasm, he said, “No.”
After further
persuasion, he said, “I will go if my father holds the rope.” His father did, and the boy earned the money.
Here finally is a
little inspirational entitled “By Faith, not Sight”, composed by Ruth A. Morgan.
Sometimes I’m
sad, I know not why.
My heart is so
distressed,
It seems the
burdens of this world
Have settled on
my heart.
And yet I
know...I know that God
Who doeth all
things right
Will lead me thru
to understand
To walk by faith ...not sight.
And though I may
not see the way
He’s planned for
me to go,
The way seems
dark to me just now
But oh, I’m sure
He knows !
Today He guides
my feeble step
Tomorrow’s is His
right,
He has asked me
never to fear
But walk by faith ... not sight.
Some day the
mists will roll away,
The sun will
shine again,
I’ll see the
beauty in the flowers
I’ll hear the
bird’s refrain.
And then I’ll
know my Father’s hand
Has led the way
to light,
Because I placed
my hand in His
And walked by faith... not sight.
SEVENTH SUNDAY OF YEAR ‘B’
Is 43; 2 Cor 1; Mk 2
Introduction: We
cannot escape the burden of our sin.
Either
we are unable to get it out of our minds or,
to
our shame, our conscience brings it up
from
time to time.
God
knows that we carry the weight of our sins;
and
He alone can lift that burden off us.
We
are incapable of doing it ourselves:
We
cannot absolve ourselves.
God
alone will fill us with a sense of being clean,
of
freedom, and of peace.
Let
us surrender ourselves to Him.
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