Pope Leo XIV: Jesus can heal the past and change your story

After greeting from the papamobile to the thousands of faithful gathered in the Plaza de San Pedro del Vaticano to participate in the General Audience, Pope Leo XIV continued with his catechesis on “Jesus Christ, our hope.”

This Wednesday, June 18, the Pontiff recalled that Jesus is able to heal and “unlock” the past that sometimes paralyzes us, inviting us to walk and decide what to do with our history.

At the beginning of his catechesis, the Holy Father invited the faithful to think about the situations in which “we feel ‘blocked’ and locked in a road without exit”, where it seems “useless to continue waiting, we resign ourselves and we do not want to fight.”

The Church, House of Mercy

When referring to the reading of the Gospel of John (5,1-9), which narrates the healing of a paralytic, the Pontiff said that it is Jesus who “reaches in his pain” the sick and those who were expelled from the temple for being considered “impure.”

These people, the Holy Father recalled, hoped to be healed in a pool whose waters were believed to be able to cure diseases. According to the belief of time, who first divered when the water stirred, cured.

“That pool was called Betzatá, which means ‘House of Mercy’: it could be an image of the Church, where the sick and the poor get together and to where the Lord arrives to heal and donate hope,” he added.

The disappointment that paralyzes

It is then that Jesus addresses a man who has been paralyzed for 38 years and who could not immerse himself in the pool. Given this, the Pope said that what “many times paralyzes us is precisely disappointment. We feel discouraged and we run the risk of falling into the neglect.” When heading to the paralytic, ”he said,” Jesus asks her a “necessary” question: ‘Do you want to cure?’

“Sometimes we prefer to remain in the condition of sick, forcing others to take care of us. It is sometimes also a pretext not to decide what to do with our life. Jesus instead redirects this man to his truthful and deep desire,” said Leo XIV next.

The paralytic, dejected, replies that he has no one to immerse him in the pool, an attitude that, according to the pontiff, “becomes the pretext to avoid assuming one’s responsibilities.”

Before the “fatalistic vision” of the life of the sick man, the Pope pointed out that sometimes “we think things happen to us because we are not lucky, because fate is adverse to us. This man is discouraged. He feels defeated in the struggle of life.”

With Jesus we discover that life is in our hands

However, Jesus “helps him to discover that his life is also in his hands. He invites him to get up, to win his chronic situation, and to collect his stretcher. That bed is not left or thrown out: it represents his past of illness, it is his story,” he added.

In this regard, he said that the past had the “blocked” man, forcing him to “lie as a dead man.” However, thanks Jesus, he is able to “load that stretcher and take it wherever he wants: he can decide what to do with his story! It is about walking, assuming the responsibility of choosing which way to go”.

Finally, he invited the faithful to ask the Lord “the gift of understanding where our life has been blocked. Let’s try to give voice to our desire to heal. And let’s pray for all those who feel paralyzed, who do not see an exit,” he concluded.