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Summary: Jesus knew that the hypocrites in the crowd would accuse Him of playing God. So Our Lord asks, “what is easier for me to say, ‘your sins are forgiven’ or ‘arise and walk.’”

Friday of the First Week in Course 2025

Psalm 29 is prescribed for all of us clerics as the first prayer of the Divine Office. It’s a very short history of the Israelites. It begins “come ring out our joy to the Lord; hail the Rock who saves us. Let us come before Him giving thanks; with songs let us hail the Lord.” So it’s a very upbeat prayer, yet halfway through it turns around and lets us in a sense feel God’s feelings when His people rebelled in the desert.

The prayer continues: “O that today you would listen to God’s voice. Harden not your hearts as at Meribah, on that day in Massah in the desert, when your fathers put me to the test and tried me, though they saw my work.” The verb is “saw,” like “saw that very morning” not “had seen.” Every morning except the Sabbath, they saw God’s work surrounding their encampment. God’s work was an edible product just lying out ready to take and eat or cook for later eating. It was the manna, but even though it was their very sustenance, they rebelled and demanded culinary variety.

The psalm concludes, making us think what God must have thought, and verbalize it: “Forty years I was wearied with these people, and I said ‘their thoughts stray; they do not know my ways’. Then I took an oath in anger and said ‘never shall they enter my rest.’” The rest being spoken of here is not a future life lived swinging in a hammock with a tall one. No, it’s God’s own rest. Our Lord wants to let us enjoy His very own life, called His “rest,” the Beatific Vision. He wants to scoop us up in our resurrected bodies and souls and let us experience forever His own divine joy, in the love of the Holy Trinity. But the rebels, who would have considered ownership of a plot of land in the Holy Land all the joy they could stand, never crossed the Jordan to take possession of it. They had no faith in the promise of God. And if we rebel and refuse to follow Christ’s law of love, even of our enemies, we will not experience the Divine Rest either. As the author of the letter to the Hebrews tells us: “we who have believed enter that rest,” and we experience it in a small way every time we gather for the Eucharist.

When Jesus sees faith, He rejoices, and He changes lives. These friends with a quadriplegic man knew in their hearts that Christ could heal their friend. But just think of four people carrying someone into this building on a stretcher. And imagine that the building is a lot smaller and there are a thousand people already inside. How can they get their bedridden pal to Jesus? In first-century Israel, all they could do is climb up onto the flat thatched roof and tear away the thatching above Jesus’s head. Jesus obviously would know what was happening, and why. “And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘My son, your sins are forgiven.’” He was playing a game even as He was teaching faith. He knew that the hypocrites in the crowd would accuse Him of playing God. So Our Lord asks, “what is easier for me to say, ‘your sins are forgiven’ or ‘arise and walk.’” The answer is obvious. Of course it’s easy to say “your sins are forgiven,” because nobody can see inside the man’s heart for healing. It’s hard to say “arise and walk,” because a failure would be clear to everybody. So Jesus proves He is able to forgive sins by telling the man to walk and seeing him do so. Jesus can still forgive sins through the ministry of the Church, if we will just have the faith to ask. Do it today, and experience the freedom of the children of God.

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