Today’s readings: Is. 43, 18-19.21-22.24-25; 2 Cor. 1, 18-22; Mark 2, 1-12.
Thomas Merton claimed that “there is in all things a hidden wholeness”. This hidden wholeness in us can remain hidden. We can persist in hiding our true identities from each other. But that will only make us live divided lives, separated from our souls.
Today’s account of the healing of the paralytic in Mark’s gospel, with the prelude of Jesus forgiving his sins, is the paramount gesture of Jesus restoring integrity where it was hidden or lacking. This is one of the few instances in the gospel where a healing is preceded by the gesture on the part of Jesus of the forgiveness of sins.
Sin is a reality in our life. We can ignore this fact, but that would be also living in denial. So we need to come to terms with what sin and sinfulness are in our lives.
Beyond the infantile understanding of sin as the breaking of a religious or moral law, or as an offence towards a God who is often depicted as a most ‘touchy’ and vulnerable person, sin basically stands for that deeper and darker side in us all where God is kept out and where we may hold ourselves to be self-sufficient.
This is the vision Isaiah gives in the first reading where he says: “There is no need to recall the past, no need to think about what was done before”. This is also the in-depth reading Jesus makes of the paralytic carried before him to be healed. The people around could only see one side of the coin in the man and that was that this man needed to be restored from his paralysis.
For Jesus, the healing of the soul precedes in importance the healing of the body.
Very often in religion our image of God is subjected to our sinfulness and we end up believing that our sins are more powerful than God’s love and mercy. But what need is there to believe in God if we hold our sinfulness to be greater than His love and even capable of cancelling it?
Belief in God’s infinite love and mercy does not mean sin does not exist or that everything is permissible. We often lament the loss of conscience in our culture and the lack of sensibility towards what is sinful and what is not. Isaiah writes: “Woe to those who call what is bad, good, and what is good, bad, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness”.
What ultimately remains important in the way we come to terms with our sinfulness is not the simple admission that this or that action is bad and sinful, but that in our weakness we acknowledge that God loves us passionately, deeply, and unconditionally. God’s love for us does not depend on our behaviour. We cannot earn God’s love.
This was precisely the novelty of Jesus in his times and this is what should continue to be new about Christianity in our times. Jesus was surrounded and continuously confronted by the Pharisees and the Scribes whose main criterion in judging people was the law, or even narrowly the letter of the law.
But Jesus had other criteria. His message was that human reality is lovable in its vulnerability and sinfulness. His ministry was not first and foremost meant to punish sin, but to restore integrity to the human person.
This is what Christ’s salvation is about. The religion of his time was about morality and focused on the dos and don’ts.
The Christian religion is meant to be a saving religion. In other words, this was the simple answer given by a peasant woman to the question ‘What good is the Christian faith?’ in a survey taken a few years ago. She said: “Religion is good for making you happy, or else it’s good for nothing”.