Homily of His Excellency Selim Sfeir, Maronite Archbishop of Cyprus, March 20, 2025
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
On this Sunday, we meditate upon the paralytic who was cured by our Lord. It is a very important miracle, and the Maronite Church places it close to the Great Holy Week because from this miracle, we can see the events of Good Friday in a gentler light.
In His Sacred Passion, it is our Lord who has become a paralytic, and it is He who descends to us, from the glory of the Trinity in order to restore and redeem mankind. In our wretched sinfulness, our sins are like the thick mob of humanity around the door of the village house where Jesus was speaking: our sins made it impossible for God to come close to us. But the mercy of God was not frustrated by our situation. With a resourcefulness that is the fruit of His mercy, He devised a way to reach us. The poor paralytic, lowered from the roof by four of his friends, symbolically represents the poor crucified Christ, being lowered from the Cross and handed to us by the four evangelists. It is St. Mark, who in his account of the miracle, tells us that it was four friends who brought the paralytic to Jesus. It is the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who bring Christ to us.
At the sight of such mercy, each of us is tempted to question, like the scribes and the Pharisees, if this saving work of Jesus Christ is real. Their questioning appeared on the surface to defend the holiness of God and theological orthodoxy: only God can forgive sins. But that wasn’t the real reason they doubted. They doubted because they didn’t want to submit to God in Christ. Their pride refused to allow them to believe in Christ. We are very susceptible to being Pharisees. We think we know better than God how to deal with our sins. We tell ourselves “I did nothing wrong”.
We must heed the warning in the first letter of St. Paul to Timothy read in the Maronite Liturgy today: “the sins of some people are conspicuous and precede them to judgement”. The more we pretend “I did nothing wrong” the more our sins will become visible. When we look at what is happening in Gaza we see the truth of these words. When someone refuses to turn to Christ, His Mercy and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, their rationalisations will become so toxic that everyone will see them and even worse, everyone will feel them.
Dear friends, in these holy Lenten days, remember to make a good Confession.
† Selim Sfeir
Maronite Archbishop of Cyprus