Forgiveness, healing

Friday February 24th Mark 2: 5 Impressed by their bold belief, Jesus said to the paraplegic, "Son, I forgive your sins." What makes us less than whole? Is it the sin in our life that holds us back from the promises of God? Is it the physical ailments that somehow we allow to hold back our soaring spirits? At Jesus time illness was often associated with sin. Jesus could have, presumably, just healed him and not forgiven him. That would have made the purists in religion happier. But then purists in religion tend to rarely be happy anyway. They don’t so much want God in their lives as to be god of theirs, and everybody else’s lives. When Jesus said that his sins were forgiven, he was not only healing the paraplegic, he was also opening the door to the religious purists. They just weren’t ready to walk through it yet.