HOMILY PRONOUNCED BY MONS. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY.
ORDINARY XI SUNDAY

Sunday, June 17th of 2007.
Celebration of Our Lady of the Mount Carmel
Father’s day, in Mexico

ONLY GOD CAN FORGIVE THE SINS

My dear brothers and sisters:
Let us praise, brothers, and we thank to God, our Father, the Lord of life, the unique one that can forgive the sins of the men.

We already have said it, but we do not get tired to repeat it: the true greatness of our God is in his mercy for the sinner. The sin does not touch the Lord. He is bigger than our sin, because He is the Lord of life. If the sin is solitude and rejection of life, only God, who is over sin, can return to the joy and to the fullness of life in this present situation of the man in the history.

My brothers, we have to understand that the sin is rejection to the friendship with the God of life in love. For that reason the sin is the death of the man. It is isolation and solitude that frustrates the vocation and the destiny that God has indicated to the man from the creation. This vocation and this destiny are in God, that’s way He made us an image, in the likeness of him, we can say, with Saint Augustine, that He made us for Him. Then, brothers, we can understand the sin as the rejection of life, of total life, that is God.

Our life in God is an opening to his call; it is a permanent communion with the God of love and source of life, because the man is an opening to the other, especially to the other who is God. It means that when the man closes himself to God, this situation does not finish here, because the man because of he is a being for the other, that´s why another being will be able to take the place of God. That other being can be the same man who just is closed in himself, in his egoism, or in the money which corrupts everything, in the power as authoritarianism or great power, or, the pleasure as a good in itself that demands everything and makes slaves. But all this, my brothers, it is not life, it is death.

This is so serious for the human being that God shows all his power in his capacity to forgive, it means, to liberate us from these slaveries and from the same death. That’s why the best description or picture of God is Jesus Christ forgiving the sins of the men. There is where he shows all the sweetness that God is able to, to such a degree that it seems his weakness, but that, in fact, it is his greater force.

Today The Holy Scripture shows us, in the first reading, David who had repented of his sins before the word that the prophet Nathan had given him in the name of God, and for that reason he was pardoned.

In the second reading which was taken from the letters to the Galatians, the apostle makes us to understand that what saves us is faith that is professed in the mercy of God that is given us in Jesus Christ. It means, it is the faith in Jesus Christ what saves us, what reconciles us with God in his love. They are not our good acts by themselves the ones that save us, but it is the faith in Christ who died for us.

The Gospel presents to us, in a typical scenes of Him, the alive image of the mercy of God that liberates from the sin to whom shows the desire to be pardoned. It is the case of the woman to whom Simon, the Pharisee, judges and believes that he is a just man and also he believes that also God must to him because he thinks that he is good. On the other hand, the woman feels like poor and unworthy before Jesus. And she is pardoned, the Lord says, because she has loved very much. In fact, brothers, love heals everything, but specially the love of God to us, because He loves us first.

To save ourselves, we just need to let ourselves love and we also need to correspond to the love with the sorrow because of our sins. This sorrow, brothers, by the sin is already love, because it shows the experience of knowing that we are loved by God and that we correspond very little or nothing. It is already a desire to value love and it is the beginning of our love.

When God forgives us, he returns us to life, because we had died by the sin. And only God can forgive because only He can give back life. The companions were right when they said (scandalized) that only God can forgive the sins!, but it was a pity that they could not see beyond to recognize in Jesus the merciful face of the Father.

Let us see, brothers, what important it is to believe in the love of God which is manifested in Christ. When we continue sinning, we are showing our little faith. Maybe we do not take in a serious way that Jesus has came to give us the forgiveness of God because he loves us a lot, and He wants the freedom for us, being free from all that can fasten us; free men the whole life and for the eternal life.

The sacrament of the Penitence is the court where we always won. In order to that we believe in love. We have to approach him with humility and total confidence in the certainty that God loves us. But the Eucharist renews permanently this love, the one which Christ showed us with his death and resurrection.