Diseases of the soul must be healed and the medicine is to ask for forgiveness. Pope Francis said this at the morning Mass celebrated on Friday 17 January at Casa Santa Marta, commenting on the Gospel account of Jesus' healing of the paralytic. It is right, said the Pontiff, to cure the diseases of the body, but "do we think about the health of the heart?"
Presenting the passage from the day's liturgy, taken from the Gospel according to Mark, the Pope reproposed the image of Jesus in Capernaum with the crowd gathered around him. Through an opening made in the roof of the house, some bring him a man lying on a stretcher. The hope is that Jesus will heal the paralytic, but he displeases everyone by telling them: 'Son, your sins are forgiven. Only then does he order him to get up, take the stretcher and go home. Francis commented by saying that with his words Jesus allows us to go to the essentials. "He is a man of God," he said; he healed, but he was not a healer, he taught, but he was more than a teacher, and before the scene before him he goes to the essential: "He looks at the paralytic and says, 'Your sins are forgiven. Physical healing is a gift, physical health is a gift that we must guard. But the Lord,' the Pope continued, 'teaches us that we must also guard the health of the heart, spiritual health'.
Jesus also goes to the essence with the sinful woman, of whom the Gospel speaks, when in front of her weeping he says to her: 'Your sins are forgiven'. The others are scandalised, Francis said, 'when Jesus goes to the essential, they are scandalised because there is prophecy, there is strength'. Similarly, 'Go, but sin no more,' Jesus says to the man in the pool who never arrives in time to immerse himself in the water in order to be healed. To the Samaritan woman who asks him so many questions, - "she was playing the theologian a bit," said the Pontiff - Jesus asks about her husband. He goes to the essentials of life and, the Pope emphasised, 'the essential is your relationship with God. And we forget, many times, this, as if we were afraid to go right there where there is an encounter with the Lord, with God'. We do so much, he noted again, for our physical health, we give ourselves advice on doctors and medicines, and that is a good thing, "but do we think about the health of the heart?" So he said: 'There is a word here from Jesus that will perhaps help us: "Son, your sins are forgiven". Are we used to thinking about this medicine of forgiveness of our sins, of our mistakes? We ask ourselves: 'Do I have to ask God's forgiveness for something? "Yes, yes, in general, we are all sinners", and so it gets watered down and loses its force, this power of prophecy that Jesus has when he goes to the essentials. And today Jesus, to each one of us, says: 'I want to forgive you your sins'".
The Pope went on to say that perhaps some people do not find sins in themselves to confess because they "lack the consciousness of sins". Of "concrete sins", of "illnesses of the soul" that must be healed "and the medicine to heal is forgiveness". It is a simple thing that Jesus teaches when he goes to the essentials, Pope Francis said, concluding: 'The essential is health, all of it: of body and soul. We guard well that of the body, but also that of the soul. And let us go to that Physician who can heal us, who can forgive sins. Jesus came for this, he gave his life for this".
[Pope Francis, St. Martha, in L'Osservatore Romano 18/01/2020]
