Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

If you could start a chapter of your life over again, is there anything you would do differently? We know, however, that we can never go back in life. We can only go forward. For those who find this universal law of life a burden, Jesus Christ has good news. Though we can never go back, in going forward we do not need to drag behind us an ever lengthening tale of guilty mistakes. There is One who came to lift this burden from our shoulders. His name is Jesus Christ. For this Jesus was born. "Child, your sins are forgiven," Jesus says as he looks with tender love at the paralyzed man lying before him in the gospel reading we have just heard (Mk 2:5). Jesus' words do not imply that illness is always the result of sin. The words suggest, however, that Jesus saw in this particular man a spiritual burden that needed to be loosed before the man could be healed physically.

"We have never seen anything like this," the onlookers exclaim in astonishment as they see the formerly paralyzed man pick up his mat and walk (Mk 2:12). For Mark the true miracle, however, is not the man's physical cure, but the spiritual healing of forgiveness.

Perhaps you're thinking: "What is so miraculous about forgiveness? Don't people forgive each other every day?" Thank God, we do. Between our forgiveness and God's, however, there is this great difference. When we forgive, there is always a memory of the injury done, a "skeleton in the closet." The wrong needs only to be repeated, or one like it, for the memory to be revived. God doesn't keep any skeletons in his closet. God's forgiveness is total. "Your sins I remember no more," God says in our first reading, through the prophet Isaiah (Is 43:25). That is the miracle: that there can be, that there is, a forgiveness so complete that not even the memory of the sin remains. Jesus brings us this total forgiveness. He is the representative, and the Son, of the God who tells his people, through Isaiah: "You burdened me with your sins, and wearied me with your rimes. ... [But] I wipe out ... your offenses; your sins I remember no more" (Is 43:24-25).

As Lent approahes (this Wed is Ash Wednesday), let us come before God with our need for forgiveness and healing. May God bring healing and forgiveness to us. with God there is always a new beginning.

- Fr. Satish Joseph