Patching the wall does not fix the broken pipe causing the leak. Keeping up with interest payments alone is not sound financial planning. There is a difference between feeling better and being cured.
This is the point of today’s Gospel as Jesus encounters the paralytic man. Jesus offers the man more than just restoring his physical health. Jesus offers the man his saving love, enabling him to get to the root of what hurts, enabling him to move beyond just getting through the moment.
Courage, your sins are forgiven:
Paul Tournier in A Doctor’s Case Book quotes an actual example of that: “There was, for example, the girl whom one of my friends had been treating for several months for anemia, without much success. As a last resort my colleague decided to send her to the medical officer of the district in which she worked in order to get his permission to send her into a mountain sanatorium. A week later the patient brought word back from the medical officer. He proved to be a good fellow and he had granted the permit, but he added, ‘On analyzing the blood, however, I do not arrive at anything like the figures you quote.’ My friend, somewhat put out, at once took a fresh sample of the blood, and rushed to his laboratory. Sure enough the blood count had suddenly changed. ‘If I had not been the kind of person who keeps carefully to laboratory routine,’ my friend’s story goes on, ‘and if I had not previously checked my figures at each of my patient’s visits, I might have thought I had mad a mistake.’ He returned to the patient and asked her, ‘Has anything out of the ordinary happened in your life since your last visit?’ ‘Yes, something has happened,’ she replied. ‘I have suddenly been able to forgive someone against whom I bore a nasty grudge; and all at once I felt I could at last say, yes, to life!’” Her mental attitude was changed, and the very state of her blood was changed along with it. Her mind was cured, and her body was well on the way to being cured.
It’s amazing what three simple words can do for someone who is hurting. I forgive you.