Monday Second Week of Advent, Year II

Readings: Isa 35:1-10; Ps 85:9ab-14; Luke 5:17-26

According to Jesus, it is harder to forgive sins than it is to heal the lame. The main reason Jesus spent a lot of time talking to the Pharisees is because they were the Jews with whom he had the most in common. Here’s something about the Pharisees: they understood the gravity of sin. Too often, we don’t. Hence, we continue to think that it’s a greater miracle to make a paraplegic walk than it is for God to our forgive sins through Christ.

Of course, Jesus can forgive sins because he is “True God from true God.”¹ Just think of how difficult it is sometimes to forgive someone who has wronged you. Usually, we don’t just want to forgive. We long to be reconciled. But being reconciled requires that the wrong-doer acknowledge her/his offense and ask the one s/he has acted badly towards for pardon.

Forgiving means letting it go, not seeking revenge, not trying to get even. It is possible and, in fact, often the case that we forgive and remain hurt, even angry, sometimes justifiably so. Reconciliation requires speaking, hearing, and then reckoning together with the truth. A reckoning is the settling of an account.

We all need not only God’s forgiveness but to be reconciled to God. Why? In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul provides the answer: “all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.”² It is the work of Christ to reconcile us and the whole of creation to God. God deeply desires to share his glory with you.

You don’t go to confession to find our whether or not God will forgive you. As Jesus demonstrates in today’s Gospel, in and through him, you are always already forgiven. Confession is where you go to be reconciled with the Father, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Through the Sacrament of Penance you are also reconciled to your sisters and brothers, that is, the Church. This is why we also call this the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Christ Healing the Paralytic at Capernaum, by Bernhard Rode, 1780

In confession, you face the truth by acknowledging your sins and, in the Act of Contrition, telling God you are sincerely sorry for them. Then, by doing your penance to show the sincerity of your promise to amend, you receive the full grace of the sacrament. It is with the help of God’s grace, his unmerited favor toward you, his love of you, that you can truly repent.

Repentance means changing your heart and your mind. These must change before your behavior changes. As Jesus teaches in the next chapter of Saint Luke’s Gospel:

A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good,
but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil;
for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks³

Later in Luke, a rich man says to Jesus: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” To which Jesus responds: “No one is good but God alone.”⁴ As novelist Philip Roth wrote: “whoever imagines himself pure is wicked.”⁵

The first two weeks of Advent pick-up where Christ the King left-off: looking forward to Jesus’s return in glory. As a result, these weeks really have one theme: our need to repent, to be converted. To convert is to change. By grace, we are to be changed into the very image of Christ. In the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern Church, Gaudium et spes, the Second Vatican Council stated this powerfully: Jesus Christ

Who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), is Himself the perfect man. To the [children] of Adam He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward. Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too. For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every [person]⁶

This is summed up nicely by the whispered prayer said during Mass when the water is added to the wine on the altar: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”⁷ At root, this is what the Incarnation of the Son of God is about.

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1 The Roman Missal The Order the Mass, The Liturgy of the Word, sec. 18.^↩
2 Romans 3:23.^↩
3 Luke 6:45.^↩
4 Luke 18:18-19.^↩
5 Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater.^↩
6 Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World [Gaudium et spes], sec. 22. ^↩
7 The Roman Missal, Order of Mass, The Liturgy of the Eucharist, sec. 24.^↩