Daily Gospel Reflection
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January 12, 2024
When Jesus returned to Capernaum after some days,
it became known that he was at home.
Many gathered together so that there was no longer room for them,
not even around the door,
and he preached the word to them.
They came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men.
Unable to get near Jesus because of the crowd,
they opened up the roof above him.
After they had broken through,
they let down the mat on which the paralytic was lying.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to him,
“Child, your sins are forgiven.”
Now some of the scribes were sitting there asking themselves,
“Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming.
Who but God alone can forgive sins?”
Jesus immediately knew in his mind what
they were thinking to themselves,
so he said, “Why are you thinking such things in your hearts?
Which is easier, to say to the paralytic,
‘Your sins are forgiven,’
or to say, ‘Rise, pick up your mat and walk’?
But that you may know
that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on earth”
–he said to the paralytic,
“I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home.”
He rose, picked up his mat at once,
and went away in the sight of everyone.
They were all astounded
and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this.”
While Jesus forgiving and curing the paralytic is certainly the focal point of today’s gospel, what really struck me was the incredible effort of the paralytic’s friends. A jam-packed house with absolutely no room at the door? No problem! We’ll just climb up and break through the roof! Wow! Talk about sheer determination and tenacity!
According to Forbes, tenacity is a blend of determination, persistence, and grit. We all have demonstrated tenacity at some time in our lives. Who can remember buckling down and digging deep within ourselves to do whatever it took to accomplish something?
We all have a well of strength, resolve, and determination, that we call on during specific periods such as dealing with daunting health or financial challenges, losing a loved one, losing a job, or seemingly impossible work deadlines. We all can be laser-focused when we want and channel a seemingly endless amount of energy into overcoming complex life challenges or meeting goals that we have set.
This gospel makes me step back and question whether I am showing this same type of doggedness and tenacity towards arguably the more critical aspects of my life: my faith, my spirituality, and my devotion to God. Being a work in progress, the answer to that question for me is currently “no.”
My hope is that this gospel will spur each of us to tap the deep well of drive and tenacity that I know we have and apply it to our spiritual lives. Imagine if Jesus could see in every one of us the same unrelenting light as the paralytic’s friends!
Prayer
Heavenly Father, those who love you bear witness to this love by sharing it with others. Help us grow in love, and strengthen us to reach out to those in need and lead them to you so that all burdened in this life may experience healing in body and soul. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint of the Day
St. Marguerite Bourgeoys was a French missionary who educated native people and settlers in Montreal and Quebec—she is one of Canada’s first saints.
She was born in 1620 in France to a middle-class family. When she was twenty, Marguerite attended a procession on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. During the procession, she looked at a statue of Mary that seemed to be looking back at her with a living, loving gaze. Marguerite was profoundly touched by this event and dedicated her life to God by trying to emulate Mary in all she did.
A cloistered religious community of sisters, the Congregation of Notre Dame, lived in Marguerite's hometown. They had an educational mission and ran a boarding school to teach girls within the cloister. To reach girls from poor families who could not attend the boarding school, the cloistered nuns sent women associated with their community through a “confraternity” out to village and city schools to teach the poorer families. Marguerite joined this confraternity and, over time, became the leader of the confraternity.
The governor of a colony in New France had family in Marguerite’s hometown and returned for a time to recruit workers and educators. The rough life of a New World colony could not support a cloister, but the women of the confraternity would be able to travel and engage colonists and native peoples. Thus, in 1653, Marguerite decided to travel to New France as a missionary.
Marguerite landed in Quebec and traveled to the countryside around Montreal. She was disappointed to find few children living there, due to high rates of infant mortality, but Marguerite set about working alongside the French settlers. Marguerite arranged for the construction of a new church and was given a stone barn in which she began the first public school in Montreal.
Marguerite slowly began to gather other young women to help with her work, and they assembled into a community. Non-cloistered religious sisters were a rare thing in the seventeenth-century Church, but Marguerite fought for an active status for her community so that they could continue to live among settlers and reach out to people of all walks of life, rather than depend upon people coming to them. Marguerite had to contend with a bishop intent on regularizing her community into a cloister, and even went back to France to get a letter from the king in her defense. Marguerite's determination paid off and her Sisters of Notre Dame became known as “secular sisters."
As the colony of New France grew, so did the educational needs of its people, and Marguerite and her community responded by building schools for both settlers and native people. They struggled with many obstacles—poverty, tensions with the native Iroquois, and a fire that burned their convent and killed two sisters—but Marguerite led her community with courage and faith in God's providence.
In her old age, Marguerite turned to attention to a more contemplative life of prayer and writing of her autobiography. When a young sister in the community fell gravely ill, Marguerite prayed for God to exchange her own life for the sick sister’s. Within a few days, the young sister recovered, and Marguerite fell sick—she died soon afterward on January 12, 1700. The people of Montreal and New France had long recognized her holiness, but Marguerite was not formally canonized until 1982.
St. Marguerite Bourgeoys is represented in this stained glass window to the left that was installed in the chapel of the Stayer Center for Executive Education on Notre Dame's campus; some of Marguerite's relics are housed in the reliquary chapel in the Basilica.
St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, who brought education to the poor of New France—pray for us!