Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time [2012]

Which of these is easier: to say to the paralytic, 

"Your sins are forgiven" 

or to say, 

"Get up, pick up your stretcher and walk"?

- Mark 2:9

As Christians we are faced with the challenge of manifesting to the world that God is a true God and that the Lord really saved us from bondage to sin. With so many people denying the reality of sin and the need for spiritual salvation we Christians must continue to manifest steadfast faith, ardent hope and generous love.

Actually, the Lord has told us that it is by loving one another that the world will ever believe that He has sent us the same manner that the Father has sent Him to save us. Many times we spend so much on justifying our faith through arguments and evidences but with so many people having their own intellectual prowess to prove their own stand, we are actually left with the option of manifesting true love as our best argument to manifest our faith and hope. 

Hence it is a lot easier to say and show love - and forgiveness - than to argue about whether someone who has been living on a stretcher for much of his life could be loosened from such bondage and be able to carry his own stretcher and walk home. Many times the solution to one's condition is not to take him away from such condition but to make him accept such condition and then use such condition as the starting point of holiness and salvation.

For example, one of the many problems that the government has been trying to solve is the problem on squatters, which now are called informal settlers. But many times the solutions that have been planned, tried and sometimes forced to be implemented, and maybe not properly monitored and evaluated, do not really respond to the problem. Most of these people return to their original informal settlements because the place they are transferred to to live better lives do not provide the basic necessities of life such as opportunities for livelihood for their daily sustenance. Hence the better alternative would be to solve the sinful social structures that create these informal settlers rather than just whisk them away into some place where they would not find solutions to their problems.

May we accept the fact that even the Lord said that the poor will always be with us. First of all, poverty is not a disease or a thing to be considered evil. It is rather a condition that challenges us to manifest our faith, hope and love.

A blessed Sunday, friends!