We always need God's forgiveness
How many times does God forgive our sins? As many as we live the sacrament of forgiveness.
The paralytic, incurable, was lying on a stretcher. Having exhausted the art of doctors, he arrives, brought by his own, to the one and true doctor, the doctor comes from heaven. But when they put him before the one who could cure him, it was his faith that attracted the Lord's gaze. To clearly show that this faith destroyed sin, Jesus immediately said, "Your sins are forgiven." Perhaps someone will say to me, "This man wanted to be healed of his sickness, why does Christ announce to him the remission of his sins?" It is for you to learn that God sees, in silence and without noise, the heart of man and that he contemplates the ways of all the living. Indeed, scripture says: "The eyes of the Lord observe the ways of men and watch over all their ways" (Pr 5:21).
However, when Christ said, "Your sins are forgiven", he left the field free for disbelief; the forgiveness of sins is not seen with our eyes of flesh. Then, when the paralytic rose, he revealed that Christ possesses the power of God (St. Cyril of Alexandria).
In the Gospels, pearls are hiding that it is difficult to let go without commenting on them. In this case, I bring the comment that St Cyril of Alexandria makes to the gospel.
How many times does God forgive our sins? As many as we live the sacrament of forgiveness. But this forgiveness of sins is, as St Cyril says, a free field to disbelief. How many times have we heard that confessing in front of a man is a humiliation and nonsense? Many.
If we look back to the gospel, we will see that there was something in the paralytic that caused Christ to perform an extraordinary miracle before the unbelievers. The paralytic had immense confidence in Christ and that made him open his heart to the Lord. "The eyes of the Lord observe the ways of men and watch over all their ways" (Pr 5:21) Do we have that faith?
No doubt the paralytic had some advantage over us. He had the Lord before him and heard his words. We don't, but that doesn't stop us from opening our hearts in the same way as the paralyzed one did. In our case, the miracle is not to get our legs to support us, but to transform ourselves internally. The key question is whether we will confess with hope and certainty that the Lord will transform us, lift us from our infidelities and mistakes, so that we may walk from His hand in life. This miracle would also disorient and commit the disbelievers, but do we allow the Lord to transform us? Do we allow the Lord to transform us into signs of his power and mercy?
It is not easy to accept that the Lord transforms us, for that entails so many responsibilities that it frightens us just to think about it. We would become a sign of the Lord, and that is uncomfortable for our present life. Do we want to be cured of our disease? Perhaps it would be interesting to reflect on why we confess and thus begin to open our hearts to Christ.
It’s a reality that we feel less and less guilty and therefore less in need of forgiveness from the Lord. If we do not feel our filth, we will not need to wash, and God will be less and less necessary in our lives. We feel more and more able to fend for ourselves. But what we are not aware of is that this leads us to disengage from our cleansing heart and this causes us to see Godless and more in all and all that surrounds us. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. Don't we see God? This implies that we have to cleanse our hearts.
Evil knows how to act to separate us from God. What better way away than to make us think that we have no-fault in our conscience? We don't even aspire to be healed, because we don't feel we need forgiveness.
St. Augustine tells us this: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and there is no truth in us. To the present, it is well to live without sin and whoever thinks that he lives without sin does not turn away from himself sin, but forgiveness (The City of God 14,9,4).
Whoever thinks that he does not sin, what he does is away from himself forgiveness, for if we think that we live in sin, we are deceived. We need that Grace that transforms us, and this Grace is present in the sacrament of forgiveness.