Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day we heard about the salvation which God had brought upon us all mankind, and how He healed us from our afflictions, the sickness and the shackles of sin, which He cast away from us and brought us to freedom with Him. In the first reading, St. Paul in his epistle and letter to the Church and the faithful in the city of Colossae reminded them about the Lord who revealed the truth about His salvation through Jesus Christ, His Son.

God can just abandon all of us and leave us all to be destroyed by our own foolishness, by our own disobedience and sins. Instead, He chose to reveal to us His infinite and everlasting mercy, through which He had brought is out of our misery and despair, from our fate of annihilation and suffering, into the new assurance and certainty of His love, and the everlasting life He had promised to all those who keep their faith in Him.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, in the Gospel today, this message is reiterated even more strongly, as we can hear how Jesus healed the paralytic man’s hand and made it whole and healthy again. And the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law tried to use that opportunity to find fault with Jesus, to criticise Him, to accuse Him and eventually to bring Him down and remove the One whom they have considered as a rival to their teaching authority.

In this alone, we can see how we behave in our own lives with regards to sin and with regards to God’s loving offer of mercy and forgiveness. Whenever we sin, we often act like the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law, who refused to listen to God, and preferred to listen to their own heart’s desires, and closed themselves up against the Lord.

They acted high and mighty, appearing to be pious and also zealous guardians of the faith and the Law of God, criticising and condemning all those who did not follow the tenets and words of the Law as they prescribed. And they thought of themselves as righteous and just, as arbiters of God’s law among men. But they themselves had not acted and done things in the way the Lord had wanted them.

How many of us when we were accused to be wrong, or found ourselves to be in the wrong, went forth and tried to place the blame on others instead? Instead of trying to look at and contemplate our own faults and mistakes, we tried to come up with reasons to cover up our faults. We do not want to be blamed for something, worst of all is if the mistake is our own mistake.

But that is exactly what the problem is. The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law were too adamant that they were righteous and without fault, and they were unable to comprehend that the problem lies with them, the pride that is in their hearts and minds, the hubris which prevented them from seeing the truth about their own sin. Just as Jesus spoke about this in another parable, when He rebuked the Pharisees also for not being able to see their own faults while pointing out the faults of others, likening it to those who could see a splinter in the eye of another and yet a plank in their own eyes, they could not see it.

If we want to be forgiven, then all of us ought to be sincere and make the effort to seek the Lord and love Him with all of our hearts. God will see our love and devotion, and He who is loving and merciful will show His tender mercy upon us. But we have to really look deep into ourselves and discern what is the problem that we have with us.

Let us all seek to be forgiven for all of our faults, and let us all commit ourselves to changing our lives for the better. Let us all walk in the path of our Lord and be righteous in all things. May Almighty God, our Father, bless us all and keep us all in His grace and love. May He heal us from our afflictions and help us to remain always humble and dedicated to Him, that we may be able to help one another to repent our sins and find our way to the Lord. Amen.