DGEMs

Faith-Healing: In today’s Gospel, the deep faith in Jesus’ healing and Compassionate Love led the paralytic and his friends to beg Him for healing.  In contrast, the scribes and Pharisees denounced Jesus for His healing powers.  Do we have the heart of faith or the prejudice of skeptics towards Jesus?

Jesus was teaching one day, and Pharisees and teachers of the Law, who had come from every village in Galilee, from Judaea and from Jerusalem, were sitting there. And now some men appeared, bringing on a bed a paralysed man whom they were trying to bring in and lay down in front of him. But as they could find no way of getting the man through the crowd, they went up onto the top of the house and lowered him and his stretcher down through the tiles into the middle of the gathering, in front of Jesus. Seeing their faith he said, ‘My friend, your sins are forgiven you.’ 

The scribes and the Pharisees began to think this over. ‘Who is this man, talking blasphemy? Who but God alone can forgive sins?’ ‘To prove to you that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,’ – Jesus said to the paralysed man – ‘I order you: get up, and pick up your stretcher and go home.’ And immediately before their very eyes he got up, picked up what he had been lying on and went home praising God.