(Mt 9:1-8)

The episode bears witness to the harsh clash between synagogue and early Faith fraternities, where without prior conditions of ritual or legal purity all were invited to share the table and the breaking of bread.

On the Lord's ideal delegation, in the churches of Galilee and Syria, a fraternal practice (unknown to others) of mutual forgiveness and even cancellation of contracted debts, up to the communion of goods, was already in force.

Realities capable of putting any person back on their feet and moving forward, even the wretched - starting with their conscience (v.2), stifled by a religion that accentuated the sense of unworthiness.

According to popular belief, conditions of penury or misfortune were a punishment.

Jesus, on the other hand, is the One who restores a horizon of authenticity to believing, new awareness and hope to the person suffering from paralysis - that is, unable to go towards God and towards men.

"Having risen, take up your bed and go to your house" (v.6; cf. Mk 2:11; Lk 5:24).

Starting from what we are - already resourceful, beyond all appearances - we live by Faith the state of the "Son of Man": that of the risen, those who manifest man in fullness (in the divine condition).

In Christ we can free ourselves from the constraints that made us live horizontal and ankylosed.

Recovering dignity, we can now stand upright and promote life; thus return to the House that is truly ours (vv.6-7; cf. Mk 2:10-12; Lk 9:24-25).

For the experts, the forgiveness announced by the Lord is not only an offence against their supposed prestige and spiritual rank, but a sacrilege and blasphemy.

After all, how to appeal to the masses - on the part of these destructive leaders - if not by intimidating them and making them feel inadequate, sterile, incapable, unempowered, with no way out?

The whole life of the people was conditioned by obsessions of impurity and sin.

Instead, the Master reveals that the divine propensity is only to forgive in order to enhance - and the attitude of - the man of Faith, to be born again and to help do so.

Indeed, the Father's gratuitousness is seen in the action of expectation and understanding exercised by the men of God: those capable of chiselling healthy environments.

Not only by their own virtue, but because tolerance introduces new, unknown forces; different powers, which overturn situations.

They allow other creative and regenerating energies to flow through the unhealthy - vice versa deadly, unfortunately, where one does not promote oneself.

Only Jesus is the One who makes visible and manifest the healing that seemed mission impossible. And before the physical, making us flourish again from the fears of false devotion, which imposes absurd curbs on autonomy.

His proposal does not drown us under a heap of impersonal arrogance. It heals the blocked, puts them back in the race.

"Jesus has the power not only to heal the sick body, but also to forgive sins; and indeed, physical healing is a sign of the spiritual healing that his forgiveness produces. Indeed, sin is a kind of paralysis of the spirit from which only the power of God's merciful love can free us, enabling us to get back up and get back on the path of good" [Pope Benedict, Angelus 22 February 2009].

The Lord's "brothers" (cf. parallel passages Mt 9:1-8 and Lk 5:17-26) do all they can to lead the needy to the Master.

Often, however, they find themselves before a crowd of hijackers of the Sacred that does not allow for a face-to-face, personal, immediate relationship.

The critical impetus and love for the needs of the needy for a full life must then overcome the sense of 'cultural', moral, doctrinal and ritual belonging - which only traces and reiterates.

No sign of joy from the authorities (Mt 9:3; Mk 2:6-8; Lk 5:21) - but the people are enthusiastic (Mt 9:8; Mk 2:12; Lk 5:26). Why?

Jesus teaches and heals. He does not proclaim the God of religions, but a Father - an attractive figure, who does not threaten, nor punish, but welcomes, dialogues, forgives, makes grow.

The opposite of what was conveyed by the official guides, linked to the idea of an archaic, suspicious and prejudiced divinity, which discriminated between friend and foe.

The Father expresses himself in non-oppressive forms, in the manner of the family and inter-human covenant: he does not enjoy the perfect, sterilised and pure - he offers his Love to all without requirements.

For imperfection is not an expression of guilt, but a condition - and in any case sin is not an absolute force (v.3).

It is this awareness that gives rise to liberated people and a new order: 'to forge bonds of unity, of common projects, of shared hopes' [Fratelli Tutti, n.287].

The Lord's co-workers bring to Him all the paralytics, that is, those who are stuck and continue to lie in their stretchers (where perhaps those of common opinion have laid them down).

These are people whose lives seem to proceed neither in the direction of the true God nor to others. Nor can they meet themselves.

Only personal contact with Christ can release these vegetating corpses from their depressing pond.

The friends of God "presented him a paralytic, lying on a bed" (Mt 9:2): they come from everywhere, from the four cardinal points (cf. Mk 2:3); from very different, even opposite origins - which you do not expect.

They expose themselves to lead the needy to the Master, but sometimes find themselves in front of an impermeable crowd (precisely, of kidnappers of the Sacred) that does not allow a direct, face-to-face personal relationship.

They do not let us in - instead we want to put ourselves before Him (v.4): sometimes we are like blackmailers and subjected to procedures, otherwise you do not pass; you are out.

Paraphrasing Pope Francis's third encyclical again, we could say that even in the selective or hierarchical access paths of the Faith "the lack of dialogue means that no one, in the individual sectors, is concerned with the common good, but rather with obtaining the advantages that power procures, or, at best, with imposing one's own way of thinking" [no.202].

The Faith thinks and believes in "an open world where there is room for everyone, which includes the weakest and respects different cultures" [FT no.155].

Some insufferable 'synagogues' conversely advocate 'a binary division' [FT No.156] that attempts to classify.

There are exclusive, refractory cliques and clubs which claim to appropriate poor Jesus... backwards.

Hence their 'synagogues' or 'houses of prayer' must be uncovered and thrown wide open (v.4) - with extreme decision.

Such 'seats' turn God's presence on earth upside down and disrupt the lives of the derelicts, who have real urgencies - not interest in cultivating unintelligible formulas, cultic purities or other sophistications.

No more proper compliments, and 'proper' customary procedures!

Only in this way does man regenerate and discover his own divine powers - which are then the humanising ones: to put himself and his brothers and sisters back on their feet.

With Christ, one advances without any more regulated authorisations to beg (sometimes to scandalous dummies) that make life pale.

So, let us note that there are no steps taken, but only the unusual initiative overcomes the pond of devout structures taken hostage by regulars or disembodied thinkers. Where one would only have to queue up, wait one's turn, be content... and doze off or disperse.

The critical impetus and love for the full, discerning life needs of all of us in need must overcome the sense of feigned collective compactness. 

It must outclass all 'cultural', moral, doctrinal and ritualistic affiliations - which it only makes up and reiterates.

Indeed, no sign of joy from the authorities (Mt 9:3; Mk 2:6-8; Lk 5:21) - but the people are enthusiastic (Mt 9:8; Mk 2:12; Lk 5:26).

It is obvious that the customary people judge Jesus a blasphemer: they have been educated "in this fear and distrust" [FT no.152].

They do not love humanity, but rather their doctrines, their codes, their milestones; a few beautiful rubrics - from purely ritualistic holiness. All papier-mâché.

They do not protect people, but only their self-interested connections, correct protocols, and acquired positions; possibly fashions of thought for their own benefit - that hinder our development.

In short, we are called to choose in a very unusual way, compared to the cliché of popular moralistic preaching - which has never been able to reconcile esteem... with imperfection, error, diversity.

According to the Gospels, there is another, decisive crossroads: the path of the defence of the privileges of a caste that gags God in the name of God, or the path of the impelling, universal desire to live to the full.

To this we are called, as opposed to conformist ways: to choose in an unusual, profound and decisive way, to reconcile uniqueness, truth, imperfection, our exceptionalism.

Otherwise, the soul rebels. It wants to be with Jesus in a frontal position, not behind the crowd, albeit of believers (whether démodé or à la page).

The passage from the Synoptics makes it clear that the problem of the 'paralytic' is not his discomfort, his sense of oppression, his apparent misfortune.

These are not the breaks in his relationship with life and with God.

On the contrary, the impediment becomes a paradoxical motive for seeking 'therapy', and vis-à-vis. Unthinkable, perhaps offensive, for the outline.

In fact, eccentric configurations - considered miserable - contain secret doors, immense virtues, and the cure itself.

Indeed, they lead to a new existence. They urge, and 'oblige' us to an immediate relationship with our Lord. Almost as if seeking His likeness.

Breathing in the common thought and tracing the trajectories of others, even those considered "intimate to God", the stiffening would have remained.

No unpredictable Salvation would have broken through.In short, according to the Gospels there is only one non-negotiable, crossroads, decisive value: the desire to live fully, in a truly integrated way; in the first person.

Unusual crossroads of Tenderness and Faith.

To internalise and live the message:

What arouses your sense of admiration for the Power of God? Are you excited by physical or inner miracles?

Where do you most frequently hear: "My son, your sins are forgiven (...) Rise up and walk"? Do the others seem to you to be healthy spiritual civilisations?

What kind are your works of faith? In sectors?

Marked by successful milestones and negotiations with the wary installed (so that they are accepted and mistaken for Tenderness)?

Double Healing

The passage from the Gospel of St Matthew, which is read on the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, provides the Holy Father with a high topic for his Homily.

It is one of the many episodes from the life of the Lord, which prepare us to be fervently united with Him and to celebrate the Divine Mysteries well.

Each page of the Gospel has its own focal, dramatic point, around which the scene of the recalled episode and the faithful account revolve.

For the prodigious and instantaneous healing of the paralytic, the apostle St Matthew is more sober than the other synoptics, St Mark and St Luke. These add more extensive details, including that of the opening of the roof in the room where Jesus was, in order to lower the sick man with his bed, given the enormous crowd that was crowding the entrance.

The hope of the pitiful companions is evident: they almost want to force Jesus to take care of the unexpected guest and begin a dialogue with him.

THE TWOFOLD HEALING OF THE PARALYTIC

Here we immediately find ourselves at a peak of wonder and grace. The Lord, with a very sweet, beautiful, regenerative word, addresses the paralytic, saying: 'Trust, you thread . . .": Have confidence, my son. And then? Behold: "Remittuntur tibi peccata tua": Your sins are forgiven you. Amazement of all present. It was not for this that they had brought the sick man, but that he might be freed from his immobility. They did not expect Jesus to speak of the poor man's sins: were sins, then, an impediment to healing?

Jesus reads the hearts of those around him: his first concern is to remove the moral sickness, and he declares this. Hence, after the first surprise, other comments and criticisms, indeed the bitter and vehement rebuke. Who is it that forgives sins? Only God can forgive them; God alone can settle the accounts between Him and creatures. Why, then, the arbitrary, indeed, the reckless act, even a blasphemy? Then Jesus, seeing their thoughts, adds: "Why do you think evil in your hearts? What is easier to say: your sins are forgiven you, or to say: get up, and walk?". In the same instant he also performs the physical miracle, saying to the paralytic: 'Arise, take up your bed and return to your home'.

The most interesting point, in this episode, is that Jesus, in front of an immobilised and unhappy poor man, discovers an even greater unhappiness, an even more acute misery. He wants, first of all, to take care of his moral health; and, good and omnipotent in the highest degree, He performs the miracle of spiritual healing before the physical one.

He himself makes the comparison: Which of the two healings is the easier? Of the soul or of the body?: and concludes by showing that the well-being of the spirit is far more important than the physical.

This gives rise to some questions about one of the most interesting aspects of the Gospel.

What does Jesus see in men? Jesus entered the world and converses with us, the human race. Well, how does he judge us? What does his eye discern in us? As we examine ourselves, we see that before Jesus there is no secret. For Him everything is transparent. Indeed, if we want to understand something beautiful in the Gospel, we will always have to think that the scenes unfolding around Jesus have a crystal-clear, singular, inimitable clarity for Him, Jesus sees everything. St John, in one of the first chapters of his Gospel, states precisely that the Saviour sciebat quid esset in homine. Jesus knows what is in man. During His earthly life, men stand before Him in transparency. Jesus passes through them with his gaze and fully knows what they are, what they do, what they think: 'Deus intuetur cor': God discerns the heart.

GOD'S GAZE INTO THE HUMAN HEART

The permanent quest, so accentuated in modern man, to intuit the secret of man, to know everything about him, in Jesus is an infallible, divine endowment. He knows human reality in its entirety and in its deepest and most arcane individual notes. He opens wide all the secret doors of our inner hiding places; our thoughts are manifest to Him: nothing, nothing can be concealed from Him. To appear, therefore, before Him and be considered in every detail is an instantaneous fact, for He observes and judges everything in us.

And then we can ask ourselves: But, then, what does He see? The positive values and faults of man. In children Jesus sees an angelic innocence and rejoices in it, because they are the authentic citizens of the heavenly kingdom. In the little ones, the Son of God detects the harmonious nature that his creative hand has imprinted in these innocent creatures. He therefore immensely enjoys their companionship, vivacity and enchantment; in a word, the beauty of God reflected in the human face.

And again: what do you notice, for example, in the Samaritan woman? Even that poor creature is dismayed. Oh yes! - she exclaims - this Prophet has read my spirit: he knows who I am! And here she goes, crying out to her countrymen: a great Prophet has come; he has said everything about my life without knowing me! What, moreover, will the Divine Master see in the imploring Magdalene whom everyone would like to crush with contempt and ruthless public accusation? Poor humanity to be redeemed and saved. Deus dilexit mundum! God observes the depths of the human heart, which, even beneath the surface of sin and disorder, still possesses a wonderful wealth of love; Jesus with his gaze draws it out, makes it overflow from the oppressed soul. To Jesus, therefore, nothing escapes of what is in men, of their total reality, in which good and evil are.

INCONSISTENCIES AND DISTORTIONS IN HUMAN THINKING

The second question is: And what do men, with their modern education, see? They are also inconsistent here. First of all, you will no longer find in the language of decent people today, in books, in the things that speak of men, the dreadful word that, on the other hand, is so frequent in the religious world, in our world, especially in the world close to God: the word sin. Men, in today's judgements, are no longer considered sinners. They are catalogued as healthy, sick, good, strong, weak, rich, poor, wise, ignorant; but the word sin is never encountered. And it does not return because, having detached the human intellect from divine wisdom, the concept of sin has been lost. One of the most penetrating and serious words of the Supreme Pontiff Pius XII of v. m. is this: 'the modern world has lost the sense of sin'; that is, what the rupture of relations with God, caused precisely by sin, is. The world no longer intends to dwell on such relationships. And so contemporary philosophy of man starts from an aprioristic optimism. What, for example, does pedagogy say? Man is good; it is society that will make him bad; but, in itself, let him develop spontaneously and in a favourable environment, he will be, by nature, probable and virtuous. Thus is adopted as the norm, a very liberal, very easy indulgence, which paves the way for all sorts of experiences and caprices, since, admitting all rights in man, he must be allowed to express them in his individual faculties. Evil, therefore, does not exist. This famous original sin - which is the first truth about man - is no longer admitted and described in the diagnosis that the world today wants to draw of itself.

And here is the inconsistency. While the point of departure is so certain, the point of arrival, the terminal judgement that our world makes on man, what is it? We are not engaging in psychoanalysis here, we are merely adhering to literary documentation: and we are not mistaken in asserting that the judgement given, today, by man of himself, with his own richest and most persistent testimony, one might even say, the most monotonous, is that of despair: thus, looked at from within, man is a horrible thing. How often do those who present themselves before us with a sympathetic, good-natured, naive appearance, hide, on the contrary, the most putrid and deformed whitewashed sepulchre!

See if there is an optimistic film in the modern production; see if there is a single presentable book in the literary prizes, precisely in these exceedingly copious times, that declares that man is still good, that virtues still exist. On the contrary, the analysis of the mire, of human perversion, is rampant; and with it, the tacit, but inexorable sentence, given as definitive: man is incurable. Here is the dark consequence. One comes to regard man as an unhappy being. Following the direction of these eyes that become implacable and even discerning, one finds nothing but evil, always and desperately evil!

LET THE DIVINE IMAGE SHINE IN EVERY SOUL

Jesus also sees: and he looks at us, who are of the poor people with so many ills. To the paralytic who comes before him, he explains that there are paralyses even more serious and more severe than the physical one. You have many sins: I forgive you, I forgive you! Jesus is the absolute deliverer. He, having urged in us, with this light of his, an examination of conscience, through which guilt is felt but also redemption, enters the soul like a torrent of joy, goodness and love. If you want it,' he comforts us, 'I will give you back your integrity, your innocence, the grace to truly feel what you must be, restored to your stature, your original beauty, and as the Lord created you in his image and likeness.

Jesus is the divine author of the ineffable redemption: one understands, then, how the Gospel, as long as there is a world of men troubled by their own sins, misery, unhappiness, despair, the very Gospel among men will always stir an echo that can never fade. Why? Because not only is it a word of truth - and here men agree - but it is also a light of hope that men cannot give to themselves.

What shall we do, in order to grasp something useful and salutary from today's Gospel page? We will try to let the Lord look at us; to present ourselves to Him with sincere humility. It is the examination of conscience, let us say more: it is the approaching of that sacrament of penance, which truly scrutinises our innermost being and restores truth and justice to our souls. Everyone may say: with the groaning of pain I would not know how to heal myself; but if Thou wilt, O Lord, Thy word is enough.

"TRUST, THREADS"

That word will never fail us. God's mercy is an inexhaustible source that Christ brought into the world precisely with the desire, the eagerness to seek us out, to chase us and repeat to us: I loved you; I came for you, so that you might understand who you are and how crippled and wretched you are. But trust, O son, these your miseries are forgiven you. Indeed: with the moral miseries to a great extent the physical ones may also be healed. Think what would be the face of the world, if men's sins were removed, if moral faults were removed! It is not that they are two consequent things: on other pages of the Gospel, the Lord will say that physical misfortune is not, in itself, fatally linked to moral misfortune. Just remember the man born blind, just think of the many sufferings of the righteous. The fact remains, however, that if the many moral miseries were healed, our life would be much better, much healthier, and more hygienic even; it would be much happier. The unity of man is a reality: it involves interference between one world and the other: the moral and the material; the inner and the outer.

That is why today we will go to Jesus, offering the Divine Sacrifice: we too will present ourselves before Him like the paralytic. With all humility we will ask Him to renew trust in His omnipotence and goodness in our souls. Each one will plead: Lord, save me: You alone have words of eternal life.

(Pope Paul VI, homily 20 September 1964)