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JMJ
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Feast of St. Jerome,
"the greatest Doctor of the Church" (Pope Benedict XV) who gave Christendom the Latin Vulgate of the Sacred Scriptures
From the
eighth chapter of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the progress from
the immediate cure of fever to the command over nature and to
the deliverance of souls from demonic possessions brings us today (Mt. 9.1-8) to the climactic exhibition of a power that
truly belongs to God alone: Who can
forgive sins, but God only? (Mk. 2.7).
Our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ, in asserting His divine prerogatives, against which some
of the Jewish scholars on the Law (the Scribes) accused Him of blasphemy – the same
charge for which the Christ was finally condemned by the Sanhedrin to die the
death on the Cross – utters to the man sick of palsy: … Thy sins are forgiven thee (v.2). Thus, the miracle God works is
now more than a mere sensible wonder.
Faith
in Jesus Christ is an implicit confession of sin and of repentance unto penance (Rom. 8.13; Col. 3.5). Therefore, “it elicits,” says a
Jesuit Old Testament professor, “not a divine response to be tested by observation but a declaration
of forgiveness of sins” – the miracle which escapes not only the Jewish scholars
in the Gospel but also their modern-day kindred: the agnostics and materialist-atheists (in
their relative “If there is God…” paradigm). The
afflictions of the fallen human condition are the consequences of sin – a deliberate and
free-willing non serviam (“I will not
serve,”): I will be like the Most High! (Is.
14.14, cf., our post yesterday “Quis ut Deus” on the Feast of St. Michael the
Archangel) – and the forgiveness and remission of sins through the Blood of the divine
Lamb, once
physically shed on Calvary and being truly, really yet mystically poured forth
on the Christian high altar (Heb. 13.10), extirpates the root of evil. Unless sin is cured,
there is no genuine remedy for genuine human ills – his moral and spiritual
disorders that come from man’s independence from God. This, according to the
same Professor, “is the fullness of [Christ’s] saving power – not the mere
power of thaumaturgy – that causes men to glorify God.”
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