When Jesus healed the paralytic, the scribes objected. They believed his paralysis must have been caused by sins of the past. But for Jesus the moment is always now

Everyone on TV is pretty,” a little girl was overheard to say one day. And the same is true in magazine ads, in movies, and on billboards. They are young and healthy and physically attractive.

The man was serious: “I carry the memory of that night in me like a sickness,” he told me, shuddering. He was talking about a terrible choice he’d made long ago: what he’d done, what he’d failed to do—and how it affected people he loved, his career, his sense of himself.

On a long trip with a carload of friends, for no reason a driver in another car pulled out a rifle and pointed it at us at a rest stop. Then he threatened his own girlfriend as he pulled her into his car and drove off.

Those of us of a certain age remember with a twinge of laughter and horror Secretary of State Alexander Haig claiming he was in charge when Ronald Reagan was shot.

I once saw an ad in a magazine with the headline: “Will it take six strong men to carry you back into church?” Beneath the headline was a picture of pallbearers carrying a coffin up the church steps.

Gathered in prayer, we stand in faith before the God who saves us.

See, I am doing something new! The prophet puts a “current” event in the context of a “past” one: The freeing of the Israelites from Babylon and the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.

The scribes asserted that only God could forgive sins, yet Jesus not only forgave sins, but showed he also had another power that belongs to God alone: the power to disclose the secrets of the heart. —Saint John Chrysostom (c. 347-407)