"I it is, I it is, who must blot out everything and not remember your sins!" Thus ends today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah. This word upside down the way people think. "Instead you have burdened me with your sins" says God, reproving His people. What else could we wait for? Without any doubt, we all think of punishment, some disaster, death. All the peoples believe that the remedy for grave sins is death. Some States, where the Christian culture has not been assimilated, give the death sentence to those who commit grave crimes. And where the State doesn’t enter, the family of the offended person take revenge and punish the family of the offender. What shall God do?

Here is the novelty announced by Isaiah: No need to recall the past, no need to think about what was done before. See, I am doing a new deed…" The new thing is exactly this: "I it is…who must…not remember your sins!"

God’s mercy doesn’t originate from the fact that we are worthy of it or not, whether we are better persons or not, no! It springs forth from the fact that God remembers His faithfulness! He created man, loved him, promised him life and freedom: hence want to be faithful to His love. He saved His people, delivered him from various dangers, from outside, now He wants to deliver him from within, from his sin.

How can we be sure that God has forgiven us? How can we be sure that sin is not between us and God, that does not obscure the relationship between the Creator and His creature? How can we be sure that God doesn’t take revenge?

These questions are present to the heart of Jesus Christ. He proclaims to us the "Good News", "the Gospel of the love of God". He doesn’t announce it like the prophets, but communicates it to us, puts it into our hands, pass it on to us, so to speak!

As when, while He was talking to a crowd in a house of Capharnaum, from the roof of the room comes down a stretcher on which a paralytic was laying, He sees that others doesn’t see. First and foremost He sees the faith of those four men who made it possible to bring the paralytic infront of Him, and then He sees the sin of this suffering person. Jesus know that man suffers more from the wrong relationship that he can have with God than from a physical illness. And He knows that He was sent from God with all the "power" especially to fill the heart with the joy of being near to the Father. He knows that the one who comes to Him in faith, meets "the one sent by the Father", and therefore there is no more separation between man and God, his "sin" does not exists anymore. These are the words, the most beautiful that one can hear: "My child, your sins are forgiven!"

The sinners’ joy is put to test by the unbelief of men, of the wise, that know it all, but doesn’t know the love of God! They condemn Jesus: "He is blaspheming", they say. "Who can forgive sins but God!" And its true and that why Jesus does it, for He is the Son, He does what He saw His Father doing! Its nice how Jesus answered. Healing the paralytic is not an act of God? Is it not to God to do it?

Jesus commands the paralytic to stand up. The paralytic wakes up and goes home, forgiven. We loose heart and joy in asking forgiveness, for the power of the Son of man is still with us here on earth!

Jesus is truly the "Yes" of God to man, as st. Paul says! He is the guarantee that we are loved and accepted by the Father. This truth does not come to an end with the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus to heaven. This truth is still alive thanks to the presence of the apostles.

"There is no Yes or No about what we say to you", says Paul. God kept giving us signs of His love, the anointment, the seal and the plege of the Spirit. Forgiveness is the first step of this free love that God gives us so that we can receive the rest of His graces and be changed, sanctified and made ready for His Reign!