HOMILY for 18th Sunday after Pentecost (EF)
1 Cor 1:4-8; Matthew 9:1-8
Note again the way in which Christ addresses the paralytic in today’s Gospel. “Take heart, my son, your sins have been forgiven.” (Mt 9:2) A couple of Sundays ago, we heard Our Lord call us “friend”, thus calling sinful humanity to turn from sin, to turn from ways of behaving and thinking that are antithetical to genuine friendship with Christ. And so, as I said two Sundays ago, we have been called to befriend God by loving divine things as he loves, and in the manner that he loves.
But today, Christ calls the sick man, “my son”. Hence, Christ reveals that he has come not just to extend the love of divine friendship to sinners, but, even more astonishingly, God shows us that we have been called to share in the divine Sonship of Jesus Christ. So, through the forgiveness of our sins, through the liberation from sin that comes through grace and the sacraments, we have been set free by Christ so that henceforth we no longer belong to sin; we no longer belong to the world and the Devil, but rather now, by the grace of repentance and the gift of divine forgiveness, we have become God’s: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”, says the Lord to the soul in the Song of Songs. (2:16) Indeed, through the grace of Christ the Son, God has claimed us as his own Son, for we have been baptised into Christ. So St Paul says: “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptised into Christ have put on Christ.” (Gal 3:26-27)
Hence the Fathers of the Church have seen in this Gospel a defence of the ancient practice of infant Baptism. For, against the somewhat Pelagian idea that Baptism should be of my choosing, as if grace and salvation is something I can claim for myself as an individual, today’s Gospel presents us with the communal and Ecclesial dimensions of the Faith. For as St Thomas says: “this paralytic symbolises the sinner lying in sin. Just as the paralytic cannot move, so the sinner cannot help himself.” This is especially true of the baby born into a state of original sin. Just as infants cannot help themselves, and they need their parents to feed them, clothe them, and clean them, so all the more does this apply to the spiritual realm. The baby, born with the stain of Adam’s sin on his soul, needs to be forgiven and redeemed and freed from original sin through Baptism. Hence, lying there like a baby, a helpless child, the sinner is brought to God. So we can note that in the Greek text of the Gospel, Jesus calls the paralytic ‘teknon’, which literally means ‘child’.
So, the child, the sinner, the one who is lying helpless and paralysed by sin, is brought to Jesus Christ by his friends and family, by those who love him. And, according to the Gospel, Jesus, seeing their faith, forgives the man’s sins and heals him. Thus the Church readily baptises infants who are brought to the font, and through this action man is forgiven, freed from original sin. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “Baptism is the first and chief sacrament of forgiveness of sins”. (CCC 977) Notice though that this gratuitous act of God’s grace operates not through the explicit choice or faith or will of the baby, nor it would seem, the faith of the paralytic in the Gospel. Rather, seeing the faith of those who love him and have brought him to Jesus; seeing the faith of the child’s parents and godparents, Christ acts: the man is forgiven and healed; the child is baptised and thus forgiven; freed from the bondage of original sin, claimed from Satan and the world as God’s own son.
As the Father’s voice had been heard at Christ’s Baptism, saying “This is my beloved Son”, so at our Baptism, God the Father claims us as his beloved Son, and the Church becomes our Mother. “My beloved is mine, and I am his” says the Lord to the soul at his or her Baptism. In St Jerome’s Latin translation of the Gospel that we hear in this Mass, therefore, the Greek word ‘teknon’ is not translated as ‘puer’, child, but rather ‘fili’, son. This, I believe, is a deliberate choice of the Saint, so that we can hear the resonance of God the Father declaring Christ to be his beloved Son, and so that we should immediately be reminded of the grace of divine filiation, the grace of our adoption as God’s son, through the Sacrament of Baptism.
So, hear again today the words of the Lord to you and me, to the baptised: “Take heart, my son, your sins have been forgiven”. In Greek, the word translated as ‘take heart’ is ‘tharsei’, which the Lord says 10 times in the Gospels. It means, ‘Take courage, do not be afraid, cheer up’! Therefore, the Lord says to us who have been raised from sin through baptism into him, who share his divine Sonship: Take heart, that is to say, he calls us to have courage in the face of all the trials of this life, all the oppositions that would assail us, against sickness and ill health, and even against the struggle with our sins. With these words, we have his assurance that God’s grace is always at hand to help us, to strengthen and encourage us. Thus we hear in today’s epistle: “you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
For we are God’s, his sons, his Saints, his beloved, and he is ours! Therefore, let us be confirmed in our faith in God’s gift of divine Sonship given to us through holy Baptism. Hence St Josemaria Escriva declared that “If we are convinced of this marvellous truth, we will never lose our serenity. We will feel secure. And should we ever go astray, even seriously astray, as a result of one of the skirmishes of our daily struggle (since through frailty we can and in fact do go astray), we will [repent and] return to him.”
