SEVDENTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "B"

           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.

MATTHEW 9:1-8

Friends, in our Gospel today Jesus heals a paralytic, but not before first forgiving his sins: "People brought to him a paralytic lying on a stretcher. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Courage, child, your sins are forgiven.’" Jesus read the hearts of scribes who had decided he was blaspheming, and so he replied, "Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk?’" When no reply came, Jesus sent the man off home carrying his stretcher. The story affirms that Jesus offers us forgiveness and healing. Even though we are sinners, even though we are hopeless in our hatred and stupidity, even though we had gone (and would still go today) to the limits of killing God’s own Son, God still loves us; God still forgives us. We know that nothing can possibly separate us from the love of God because we hear in the greeting of the risen Jesus that any and every sin can be forgiven.