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Commentary on the Gospel for Friday, January 17, 2025
What’s at stake in this Gospel story isn’t so much whether Jesus can heal or not. The real question is whether He can forgive sins. That’s where those listening to Him find what they consider blasphemy—a radical offense against God. Only God can forgive sins! Only God holds the key to free a person from the weight of their mistakes and allow them to start anew. Anyone who claims that power is, by their standards, blaspheming against God. And here’s the implication: if only God can forgive sins, then I am not obligated to forgive my brother or sister—that’s God’s job.
We might use this story to respond to such claims: it’s clear that Jesus could forgive sins because Jesus is God. The problem was that His listeners hadn’t yet made the leap of faith to recognize His divinity. We believe in that divinity, and that’s why we find in Jesus the forgiveness of our sins and the path to salvation, once we’ve left behind our guilt. This forgiveness is embodied in the celebration of the sacrament of reconciliation—penance, confession—which seems to be the moment when God forgives our sins.
But I think we need to go further. Our God is a Father who loves, forgives, and reconciles, who always offers us new paths and new hopes. What we celebrate in the sacrament of reconciliation isn’t just the forgiveness of specific sins—those we’ve committed since our last confession—but rather the ongoing forgiveness of God that is always with us. Always. Always.
And we can go even further. In Jesus, the ministry of reconciliation has been entrusted to all of us. We are all carriers of God’s forgiveness, both for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters. Paul says it clearly in his second letter to the Corinthians: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). Jesus can forgive sins, and so can we, His disciples. That is precisely the ministry we’ve been given: to free, forgive, reconcile, and open paths to hope. Never to condemn, exclude, or reject, but to welcome and save.