In one of the hymns at Great Vespers on this post-Pascha Sunday we read: “The paralytic… was like a dead man unburied.” Paralysis of his body was the least of his problems, despite the fact that he sat as if lifeless for 38 years. He was also paralyzed in mind and heart. The neurological reasons for his physical paralysis are unknown. Yet it is easy to assess the reason for his emotional paralysis: loneliness. For more than three decades not a single relative, friend, or passing acquaintance stopped to lift him into the healing pool of water at Bethesaida (Bethesda). Imagine….38 years – nobody!
In his book, Living Life-–To Serve Christ Means Suffering, the Romanian Confessor and concentration camp survivor, Fr. +George Calciu, of Blessed Memory, wrote: “What is more striking in today’s Gospel than the loneliness of the paralytic. Being alone means to fall, to be lost, to be so isolated that the pain becomes unbearable. You are overpowered by the futility of life and you feel and you sense yourself living a life whose meaning has vanished.”
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Sitting by the Sheep’s Pool for as long as he had, hardened him into stone. You can hear how destitute and isolated he must have felt when he spoke to Jesus, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool…” But you can still sense that inside this man paralyzed in body and mind there was a “soft center.” Depression, anxiety, fear and aggression are often defense mechanisms. What do they protect? Usually that little thing we work so hard to develop and strive so ardently to preserve at all costs, the thing we like to call the “self” (ego). We cobble this construct out of the debris of life, our desires, our talents, our fears, our guilt, even out mistakes and we call it “me” and then set out to make sure that it uses every possible means to assert itself and ascend the great heap of other “me’s” at any cost. That means it takes no prisoners and ends up becoming one. The paralytic was imprisoned not by his disease, but by his mind. A number of Church Fathers taught that the physical paralysis was but a metaphor for the man’s internal, essentially spiritual struggle to “move.”.
Viktor Frankl, the noted psychologist, was the only survivor among his family of the Nazi death camps. There he noticed that a few, rare persons were able to rise above their suffering and care for the prisoners around them. “We who lived on concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man, but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s one way.”
This is why Jesus asked that all-important question, “Do you want to be healed?” The Lord went to the heart of the problem, cutting through the defenses and past the little “me” in the paralytic to the truth of his being. The “little me” did not want to be healed. It had grown comfortable in its misery and had developed an amazing little fortress to defend itself, to hide from the indifference of others who simply passed him by day after day. But the image of God in him, the truth of his identity, the part of him most deeply imprisoned and forgotten, heard the Lord’s voice. In all likelihood, there was much more to the dialogue between them, but the result was this: “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And then later when Jesus and the man met again in the Temple, Jesus said to him these wise words, “See you are well. Go and sin no more that nothing worse befall you.”
Our Holy Father St. John Chrysostom, in his sermon on this passage of Scripture, writes: “For his healing brought glorification to the Master, and raised up the souls of those who heard it. But his illness and sickness compels us towards patience, and calls us towards zeal. And it more so showed the philanthropy of God. And therefore this illness which he suffered, and the long time that he remained in sickness, was a great trust. For as gold in the furnace is revealed as gold after being tried and purified by fire, and it becomes even purer. Thus, the souls of men to be tried by dangers and difficulties, until they become pure and transparent, and many from this trial are benefited by bearing fruit. This is a special and great blessing of God.”
The point of this purification is choosing an authentic spiritual practice – liberation. Do we really want to be healed? The Church holds the means of salvation for us and offers them freely as did the Lord to the paralytic at the Sheep’s Pool. The Church awakens in us the gifts of God given to all made in His image through Her sacraments, prayers and liturgies. The Lord Jesus came to set us free and there is much we can do to become “co-workers” in our own freedom. So often we allow our souls to give up freedom, to surrender it to the negative, the painful, and the confusing. We choose, instead, to be bound up by our own fatalism, our own discouragements, our own sense that all is futile. This struggling is, as St. John Chrysostom tells us, a blessing. It is the grain of sand within the oyster that through constant irritation and rubbing, becomes a brilliant pearl.
The instantaneous liberation from physical paralysis in the story was only one aspect of the miracle. The other was to awaken the man to the truth of his nature. The Lord advised him to be careful that he not fall again into the mire of the mental state that held him prisoner for thirty-eight years. The antidote to that poisonous mental state, the very one we are all imprisoned by, is an authentic spiritual practice of meditation, prayer and the conscious nurturing of virtuous thoughts and actions. You and I have a direct role in getting rid of our personal “paralysis.” No matter what it is, great or small, how long we have endured it, or the feeling of “aloneness” it generates in our heart and soul – it is ours to reject and to shed. It is ours to transform from an arid desert to a lush and fertile ground in which to plant a new person. – one reborn in and through the power and grace of God, who touched our nature with His in the Crucified and Risen Lord of our human history!
Dr. William Lewis, President of George Washington University from 1923-1927, summed it up this way: “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.” For the paralytic in today’s Gospel, his life began 38 years after the onset of his enduring immobility. It was then that he heard that one single voice and the question it asked him. It was then he conquered his loneliness, he saw new possibilities for his life. It was then that he was. In effect, BORN!
Each of us has to determine when OUR life will actually begin. Each of us has to answer Jesus’ question: “Do you want to be healed?” — in other words are you ready to let Him take Lordship over your life, to call the shots, to be in charge, to determine the course and to make you someone entirely new? Or will you continue to make excuses for why you think it’s better that YOU chart the course of your own life?
And as with the paralytic, there is one catch – you and I must do our best to avoid sin – in other words, to avoid trying to get ourselves back on the throne at the center of our heart, where Jesus alone is destined to sit – to give up our ego, to re-place Him at the center of our lives, our families, our jobs, our relationships? Are we ready to to live in prayer, in the Holy Mysteries, and in on-going love for others. Wellness is not simply a temporary remedy. For the Christian, wellness is a way of living each and every day. — surrendering to Christ, taking on His mind, following His will, knowing His Word, and not “belonging to a church” but BEING the Church, living the Church. It is not about having a religion, it is about living the Orthodox Christiana faith!
As our nation and world pray for an end to the COVID-19 pandemic that feels more and more like it is taking control of our lives, let us fervently pray for deliverance, for liberation, for healing and wholeness to return. And as with the paralytic in today’s Gospel, there is a throne at the center of the world’s heart. The question for all of us is – Who will sit upon that throne? I ask God to loosen whatever holds you back and to free you to become that new person in Christ Jesus, our Risen Sovereign and Lord!
Faithfully in the Risen Jesus,
Fr. Dimitrios
(Please find attached below a copy ot this Sunday’s Bulletin for your prayerful preparation and reflection.) |
