Pills of Faith of 18 January "Get up, take your bed and go to your house"

[In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus has just healed two strangers in pagan territory.] In this paralytic it is the totality of the pagans who are presented to Christ to be healed. But the very terms of healing must be studied: what Jesus says to the paralytic is not: "Be healed", nor: "Get up and walk", but: "Courage, son, your sins are forgiven" (Mt 9,2, 9,3). In one man, Adam, sins had been passed on to all nations. That is why he who is called son is presented to be healed ..., because it is the first work of God ...; now he receives the mercy that comes from the forgiveness of the first disobedience. We do not see that this paralytic has committed sins; and elsewhere the Lord said that blindness from birth had not been contracted as a result of a personal or hereditary sin (Jn XNUMX: XNUMX) ...

No one can forgive sins except God alone, therefore who has forgiven them is God ... And so that it can be understood that he had taken our flesh to forgive sins for souls and procure the resurrection to the bodies, he says: "Why do you know that the Son Man has the power on earth to forgive sins: get up, the paralytic then said, take your bed and go to your house. " It would have been enough to say: "Get up", but ... he adds: "take your bed and go to your house". First he granted the remission of sins, then he showed the power of the resurrection, then he taught, by taking the bed, that weakness and pain will no longer affect the body. Finally, returning the healed man to his home, he indicated that believers must find the road that leads to heaven, the road that Adam, father of all men, had abandoned after being ruined by the consequences of sin.