18th Sunday after Pentecost 16 Oct 2011 Sermon

18th Sunday after Pentecost 16.10.11 Forgiveness

Which is easier to say? ‘Your sins are forgiven’ is easier to say insofar as it cannot be verified externally that anything has happened.

So Our Lord gives another command which can be verified – ‘Stand up and walk’ - which indicates His authority to forgive sins. It is not everyone who can cure a sickness with a word! If He can do such things in the physical world it can be presumed He has the same power in the spiritual world.

Our Lord has authority to forgive sins because He has authority over the whole world and everything in it. It is all His – every person, every thing, every nation, organization, the public domain, the private, the individual, the communal. All things are open to His eye and subject to His authority.

Every sin affects Him directly because it involves something that belongs to Him. There is nothing ‘private’ from Him. Sometimes people try to justify behaviour by saying it does not harm anyone else. So if I take drugs for instance, it is my decision and my body, so no one else should get excited. Or an abortion is just a decision for the woman concerned: it is her body after all.

But everything belongs to God. My body is His body. My house is His house. My time is His time. There is no way we can quarantine some part of our existence from His influence.

This is what makes a sin a sin: that we are somehow infringing on His rights. When we sin we are probably offending other people but always offending Our Lord.

Since He is personally involved He has the authority to forgive sin, and He does this with great generosity.

When He forgives He is bringing back to life. He is offering His love to the sinner and this love has the effect of restoring the sinner to union with Himself, which we call sanctifying grace, or life in the soul. Like a branch attached to the tree, we are alive again.

It is like a resurrection of the body, but better still.

He forgives ‘in potential’ every sin. But for the forgiveness to take effect the sinner has to ask for mercy. Not everyone is willing to do that, for all sorts of reasons.

But when they do ask they will receive and they are brought back to life or to a much healthier state.

In the meantime, until they ask for mercy, Our Lord will continue to offer it. He waits for that interior light to switch on, moving first to shame for sin and then to the joy of being forgiven.

This is probably the result of someone else’s prayers. Like a mother for instance. We pray for each other’s children, for all the children of the world that they will understand the dimensions of sin; how ugly and damaging it is; how glorious it is to be forgiven.

We are the man on the stretcher insofar as we all need forgiveness. We are the friends bringing the man insofar as we pray for each other.

The Lord loves us enough to forgive us; now we have to love Him enough to receive that forgiveness, and be changed internally so that we do not want to sin again.

We are His property; we have been bought and paid for. Everything is His. All the better for us.