“My
friend, your sins are forgiven,” Jesus says to the paralyzed man in today’s
gospel. Jesus is not saying that every illness is the result of sin. His 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 seen incredible things today!” the onlookers exclaim in astonishment as
they see the formerly paralyzed man pick up his mat and walk. For Luke, the
gospel writer, 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 we forgive
others 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
class=Section2>
the injury done, a “skeleton in the closet,” we call
it. The wrong needs only to be repeated, or one like it, for the memory to be
revived. God doesn’t have any closets. And even if he did, there wouldn’t be
any skeletons there. God’s forgiveness is total. Jesus brings us this total
forgiveness. In the sacrament of penance, Jesus uses his priests to bring us
this gift.
Some of
the things we priests hear in confession help us to repent. Across the distance of almost sixty years I can still
hear a child’s voice saying: “I stamp my foot at my mother and say No.” And I
thought: that little one has greater sorrow for that small sin than I do for my
sins, which are far worse. Telling you that is no violation of the seal of
confession. I haven’t identified that child. I believe the Lord sent that
little one into my confessional, to teach me a lesson. I’ve never forgotten it.
“What
will the priest think?” people sometimes ask. Let me tell you what one priest
thought, a young man newly ordained and in his first parish assignment. In a
letter to a friend, still in seminary, the new priest wrote: “I go into the
confessional now, Jack; and I experience God in a completely new way.”
No comments:
Post a Comment