Go home!

 Today’s gospel (Luke 5: 17-26) contains three very simple commands from Jesus: get up, pick up your stretcher, and go home. Jesus is demonstrating to the Pharisees and scribes that He indeed has the power to forgive sins. He does this by miraculously demonstrating His power over nature. But He is not only demonstrating His power. He is also curing a man who has been so helpless, he needed his friends to carry him about on a stretcher.

As almost always in the gospel, however, the physical ailment is a sign and symbol of something deeper. The man’s paralysis is the immobility that comes upon the soul who is immersed in sin, who has lost the ability to discover and seize its own freedom. The man needs a liberator from his sins, just as he needs a liberator from his physical paralysis. Without grace – God’s free intervention – he and we are lost.

But dwell for a moment on the final command: ‘go home’. It is the simplest of orders, and yet it says so much about the sinful condition. To sin is to go away from home; from home and from family, notably our Beloved Father. To be cured of sin through repentance and in the Sacrament of Confession is to set out on the journey home. Home is not only where the heart is, but it is where we belong by providence. Every going out is undertaken in view of a returning home. The world does not, or at least should not, revolve around the office desk or the factory machine, but around the family dinner table where grace and gladness meet.  We are most ourselves when we are set free in the wild adventure of domesticity, rather than competing for the recognition of employers or the admiration of the world at large.

Go home. This is Christ’s agenda.