A Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ Confide, fili, remittuntur tibi peccata tua. “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” With these words recounted in the Holy Gospel of this morning’s Mass Our Blessed Lord sparked a controversy. He was accused by the scribes of blaspheming in claiming such power and authority—for only God can forgive sins. In the end, Our Lord judged it apposite to underline His divine authority by healing the paralytic man, a physical act of mercy which is clearly of secondary importance to the forgiveness of sins already granted—a priority that remains instructive for we who often seek physical healing from illness before anything else.
 
It is utterly instructive that Our Lord’s response to the faith of those who carried the paralytic to Him was to forgive his sins: for that is what was necessary first and foremost. In comparison, physical healing—even from something as serious and debilitating as paralysis—takes second place.
 
For Our Lord Jesus Christ was ‘obsessed’ with sin, as it were. And so too is the One True Church He founded—or at least it should be! For Our Lord became incarnate in order to suffer and die in loving sacrifice so that our sins may be forgiven—nothing less!—and gave to his Apostles the power to continue His ministry of the forgiveness of sins, a power passed on through the centuries to bishops and priests down to our own day. When we kneel in the confessional and humbly and integrally confess our sins and receive absolution, Our Lord Himself says to us: “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.”
 
Why this obsession about sin? Why does Our Lord speak so often about it? Why does the Church insist on teaching and preaching about it? The answer is simple: sinning in grave or serious matters, chosen with full knowledge and free consent is mortal—it brings about spiritual death, something far worse than paralysis or any other physical malady. We would do well to ponder the clearly stated teaching of the Church: “Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God's forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ's kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1861)
 
This is why Our Lord was ‘obsessed’ with sin. This is why He regarded the forgiveness of sins as having priority over physical healing. This is why His Church cannot stop teaching and preaching about it. This is why we must not hesitate to confess our sins in the Sacrament of Confession when we fall from God’s grace. It is a matter of our eternal life or death—of heaven or hell—nothing less. This is why the salvation of souls—the saving every human person created by Almighty God from the eternal damnation that mortal sin justly deserves—is the first and ultimate mission of the Church, taking clear priority over care for the body, saving the environment or political and social agitation in respect of local or global problems. (All of these latter can serve the salvation of souls, most certainly, but they are not ends in themselves; they are not the primary or fundamental content of the Gospel.)
 
Our contemporary world is also obsessed with sin—that is, it is obsessed with cancelling sin. For consciousness of sin, of objective good and evil, of the possibility of eternal damnation, rightly interrupts the pursuit of our base desires and our gluttonous consumption and exploitation of resources and even at times of people. The world will go to almost any length to save the body—as we saw only too clearly with its response to COVID—but it will never concern itself with the salvation of souls.
 
At times even the Church seems to have inverted the priority taught in the Gospel (as we also saw during COVID). We have Catholic Bishops’ Conferences who have decided that they will publicly bless same-sex unions, and even one bishop calling this week for the acceptance of Euthanasia in certain circumstances. Many faithful Catholics—lay people, monks, religious and clergy—who strive daily to fulfil the duties of their vocation, to avoid sin and grow in virtue, are deeply concerned about the cult of ‘synodality’ that is being promoted far and wide by the highest authorities in the Church as if this process is an end in itself. It almost seems that Our Lord, on encountering the paralytic, should have told him to go and engage in a synodal process before anything else!
 
No. The only process that is fundamental to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that of converting one’s life from sin and of thereby entering into and living in the loving embrace of God’s abundant mercy. Daily. In all the little details—indeed, according to the ‘little way’ of Saint Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, whose feast we celebrate on Tuesday.
 
If we strive to do this, if our priority is the priority of the Gospel—if we work first and foremost for the salvation of our souls and of those of others—we shall experience the comfort and healing of Our Lord’s words Confide, fili, remittuntur tibi peccata tua. “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” And we shall experience a healing and peace that shall endure beyond any suffering of body or mind this world can inflict—a foretaste and a pledge of which we shall receive from this altar this morning. +