NKCC

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading I – Is 43:18-19, 21-22, 24b-25 | Psalm – Ps 41:2-3, 4-5, 13-14

Reading II – 2 Cor 1:18-22 | Gospel – Mk 2:1-12

Listen to this week's readings courtesy of the USCCB.

Forgiven

The people of Israel, even in New Testament times, thought of God in a very personal, intimate, and relationship-oriented manner. In our modern times, we have inherited categories about God from Greek philosophy: God as all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present. Not that God isn’t these things, but if we think of God primarily that way, when we get to the end of Isaiah today (“your sins I remember no more”), we are a bit confounded. How can an all-knowing God forget anything? Isaiah’s listeners would have been more inclined to rejoice at what a wonderful, loving relationship God had with them. God—who had the power to forgive their sins—forgave sins, and then completely forgot them! Jesus, in today’s Gospel, is also more interested in the paralyzed man knowing that wonderful, loving, healing presence of God than he is in satisfying the scribes’ pre-conceived notions about God. How often it is we, not God, who remain paralyzed by our past sinfulness, even when we have been forgiven by God and reconciled with others. Let us, instead, give God glory by picking ourselves up from our paralyzed past, and journey on as disciples of Jesus.

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