Ordinary Time - Week 07b
Paralytic carried by four men
(From Conversation with God, Fernandez Carvajal)Mankind has never been so eager to be free, to throw far away all forms of oppression and slavery. Christ appears in today's Gospel as the only true liberator. Four friends bring a paralytic whom they are eager to see rid of a disease that keeps him on a stretcher. After strenuous effort to carry him to Jesus, they listen to these words addressed by our Lord to their friend: My son, your sins are forgiven. It is unlikely that they expected to hear this kind of address from the Master to the invalid, but Christ lets us see that the worst of all oppressions - the most tragic of all slaveries from which man can suffer - is sin. It is not just one evil among the many other evils that afflict creatures, but the gravest, the only thing that is evil in absolute terms.
The men carrying the paralytic understand that Jesus has given their incapacitated friend the greatest good - freedom from his own sins. And we cannot forget what a great contribution to the common good it is to do everything possible to exile sin from the world. On many occasions the greatest favour, the greatest good we can do to a friend, to a brother, to parents, to children, is to help them see the beauty of divine mercy in the sacrament of penance. It is a good for the family, for the Church, for the whole of humanity, even though here on earth very few know about it.
Christ frees from sin with his divine power: Who can forgive sins except God? It was for this that He came on earth: God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (Eph 2:4-5). After forgiving the paralytic his sins, Jesus also cured his physical infirmity. The man must have understood in that very instant that his great good fortune that day had been the first cure: to have felt his soul pierced through and through by divine mercy, and be able to look at Jesus with a clean heart
The paralytic was healed body and soul. And his friends are an example for us today of how we should help others - through our friendship mainly, cooperating in apostolic initiatives, and fostering the good of society with all the means at our disposal: working for the common good, for a decent life and culture, offering positive solutions when faced with evil. We should do this in our own professional circumstances as well as in any other environment in which we happen to be involved; it is here that we can cooperate in the building up of good and avoid cooperation in anything that is evil.