Mat 9:2 Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.

This is the first mention of sin by Christ in the Gospels. I mention this because I have been waiting and waiting. Churches throughout history have made the focus of Christianity sin and redemption from sin, but Christ has laid out all his major themes by this point, and sin is not among them.

The word translated as "sin" is the Greek hamartia, which is a form of hamartano, which means "to fail in one's purpose," "to neglect," and "to be deprived of." It has no sense of
doing malicious evil in Greek. Best English translation? I would say, "failures" rather than what we commonly think of as the evils of "sin."

The word translated as "forgive" is aphiemi, which we have seen several times before. It means to "let go," "to leave," "to depart," "to give up a debt," "to leave on dying", "to pass by," and "to get rid of."

So the phrase works out to, "Child, take courage, your failures have left you."