Thursday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading: Amos 7:10-17
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11
Gospel: Matthew 9:1-8
Daily readings: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070226.cfm

Amos is not a professional prophet. He tells us that himself. "I was no prophet, nor did I belong to a company of prophets. I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees." He is an ordinary man from an ordinary trade, and God pulled him out of it and sent him to speak. Amaziah the priest wants him silenced — tells him to go back to Judah and earn his bread prophesying there, not here. And Amos's response is simple: I did not choose this. God took me and said, go, prophesy. This is not my idea. When an ordinary person is willing to be used, God tends to take them at their word.

Then Jesus comes back to his own town. A paralyzed man is brought to him on a stretcher. And before he does anything else, Jesus says something that causes a small scandal in the room: "Courage, child, your sins are forgiven." Not — you are healed. First: your sins are forgiven. The scribes immediately recognize what this implies. Only God forgives sins. So either Jesus is blaspheming, or he is who he says he is. Jesus reads the room, addresses their thoughts directly, and then heals the man to demonstrate that the authority is real. "But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins..." He gets up and walks home.

The crowd's response is worth sitting with: "They were struck with awe and glorified God who had given such authority to human beings." Not just to this one man — to human beings. The Incarnation means that God, in becoming one of us, has authorized something new. Forgiveness walking the earth in a human body. Healing happening through human hands. Ordinary people like Amos — like us — being taken from their fig trees and sent somewhere. The same authority that raised the paralyzed man is offered to the Church, and through the Church, to each of us in confession, in prayer, in the ordinary moments of a Thursday.


A few questions to sit with tonight:

1. Is there something I am carrying — a guilt, an old wound, a sin I keep circling back to — that I have not yet fully received forgiveness for? What is keeping me from letting it go?

2. Like Amos, has God ever pulled me out of something ordinary and asked me to do something I did not choose? How did I respond?

3. When I encounter Jesus in prayer or at Mass, do I come as someone who needs forgiveness first — or do I mostly come with requests? What would it change to start there?

4. Was there a moment today when I was struck with awe — when something reminded me that God is real and near? Did I stop long enough to notice it?


One small thing for tomorrow:

If you have been away from Confession for a while, let tomorrow be the day you look up your parish's confession times and write them down. You do not have to go tomorrow — just find the time and put it somewhere visible. That small act of intention is already a turning.


Lord Jesus, you said to the paralyzed man what you say to me: courage, your sins are forgiven. I do not always feel the courage or the forgiveness. But I want to receive both. Thank you for crossing into my ordinary life — my ordinary Thursday — with the same authority you brought to that room in Capernaum. Forgive me for the things I carry that I have not laid down. Heal what is paralyzed in me, the places where I have stopped moving because I stopped believing you could reach there. Like Amos, I am nothing special — just someone you took from their ordinary work. Use me anyway. May Mary, who said yes before she understood, help me to say the same. Amen.


If you'd like to share: is there something you have been carrying that you have not yet fully received forgiveness for — and can we pray together that you find the courage to lay it down?