Thursday in the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time, June 30, 2022

Matthew 9, 1-8

After entering a boat, Jesus made the crossing, and came into his own town. And there 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.” At that, some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” Jesus knew what they were thinking, and said, :Why do you harbor evil thoughts? Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”– he then said to the paralytic, “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.” He rose and went home. When the crowds saw this they were struck with awe and glorified God who had given such authority to men.

“Courage, child, your sins are forgiven.”  In the Mosaic Law, God commanded various sacrifices to be made to him as “sin offerings”, and after the construction of the Temple by King Solomon and the centralizing of religion to Jerusalem, the Israelites had to go up to the Temple to make these sin offerings in order to obtain forgiveness.  But in fact, the sacrifices ordered in the Law were signs of the Sacrifice of the Lord Jesus for our sins.  They did not take away sin: “For it is impossible that with the blood of oxen and goats sin should be taken away” (Hebrews 10, 4).  The Lord fulfilled the sign of these sacrifices when he offered himself for us.  But already, during his Public Life, he was forgiving sins: here, with the paralyzed man; in the case of the sinful woman (Luke 7, 48); Zachaeus the tax collector (Luke 19, 9); and others as well.

Jesus angered the Pharisees by forgiving sins because they rightly understood that only God can do this, but they erred in not recognizing Jesus as the Son of God.  They should have known that this was who he was because of the signs of divine power he performed.  The miracles themselves acted as signs of the forgiveness of sins.  In the case of this paralytic, he may have become crippled through some sin he was committing at the time.  Repenting of his sin, what could be a more apt sign of God’s forgiveness than by restoring his ability to walk?

We ought to ask the question, What does the “forgiveness of sins” mean?  For some Protestants, it means that God covers up our sins and attributes Christ’s righteousness to us.  But the Church teaches, as the Lord reveals to her, that our sins are truly wiped out.  In the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18, 21-35), a servant owed his king an impossible amount of money.  He begged for forgiveness and the king, pitying him, canceled his debt.  For the Protestants, the servant still owes the debt; the king only overlooks it.  But the Lord is saying that the debt was actually canceled — wiped out (though afterwards reinstated) — so that the servant ceased to be in debt to the king.  The Blood of Jesus does not merely hide our sins; it erases them.  To think otherwise is to minimize the power of the Lord’s Sacrifice and to make sin so horrible that it cannot be affected even by divine power.

“Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.”  With these words the Lord assures the former paralytic that he is healed and forgiven.  It is the same when the priest says to us after he absolves us: “Go in peace.”