The Lord Jesus Christ says: “your sins are forgiven” to the paralytic brought to Him by four people through the house roof when He cures him. Pharisees and scribes resent on this, because they thought nobody can forgive sins, except God. Reading today the fragment of the Sermon on the Mount, we hear the similar idea from the mouth of Jesus Himself. And He says to the apostle after resurrection: “If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven to them”. It is important to try to look over these evangelical episodes together, in order to understand what the Lord says about Forgiveness.
The Lord does not deny the initial premise of the scribes then in peter’s mother-in-law house, but He emphasizes that unlike people, God-man (God Incarnate) can forgive sins by virtue of His divinity and by the right of victim of the Cross. In the Sermon on the Mount He says that only the one who’s just himself and whose opinion is not injured by sin can judge. Finally, God bestows the decree to forgive sins on the Church, because He Himself is the “head” and the Church is called by Him to transmit His forgivenesses.
But it is important for us in practice that His words “Do not judge so that you will not be judged” are if we can express like this “a technical” principle, which using, we can move over from the world of judgment to the world of forgiveness. But this requires the acknowledgement of our own inability to judge and our own sinfulness, which is repentance. And the most important is that, it requires to desire forgiveness, but not a “fair reward”.
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