Homily
The Healing of the Paralytic
Health at any
cost! And “True Friendship”
Second
Sunday of Great Lent / March 7, 1999
Introduction: In the Name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen. Our Gospel text this morning plants us in the
middle of a large and pressing crowd, which had surrounded our Savior. They had drawn near to Christ for the same
reason that untold numbers of human beings have ever since, and for the same
reason that we this morning have gathered before Him in His holy house: To hear His word. As was His custom He
began to “speak the word to them”. As He
was teaching a group of five men approached, and tried to push their way through
the crowd. This was impossible due to
the fact that only four of the men could walk.
The fifth was paralyzed, lying on a cot, and being carried by the four
other men. Refusing to be deterred, the
four men carried the paralytic up onto to the roof, and right in the middle of
our Savior’s preaching began to tear off the roof above the crowd in order to
lower down the paralytic from above.
Compared to preaching while the roof above you is being torn up, the job
of preaching while babies are crying and trains are passing appears the easier
of the two.
Our Savior
was moved. He looked not only at the men
and the paralytic, but right into the hearts of each, perceived that the man
suffered physically because of his sins, appraised that their hearts were full
of faith, and pronounced an immediate absolution: “My son, your sins are
forgiven” (St. Mk. 2:5). This bold
statement, necessarily blasphemous if not pronounced by the only One able to
forgive men of their sins, shook the unbelieving scribes in the crowed to the
core of their beings. They were
reasoning in their hearts, “He is blaspheming…Who can forgive sins but God
alone?” Again our Savior read their
hearts (He can just as easily read the heart of the sinner as of the believer),
and, in order to confound them and show forth His divine authority to forgive
sins, He commanded the paralytic, “Rise, take up your pallet, and go home” (
Healing at any cost!
From this Gospel account we can pan for much gold. Blessed Nicolai Velimorovic, in his homily on
this incident, notes that there are three ways that we encounter the presence
of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
First, sometimes, Christ comes directly to us as He did with the Apostle
Paul on the road to
How many of
us would have acted in this way? How many
of us would have never even begun the journey to Christ, making this excuse and
that, and saying that we were sure He would sometime in the future pass our way
at which time we would be able to relate to Him! How many of us, having started out to obtain
His presence and that complete health of body and soul which only He can
effect, would have encountered the large and pressing crowds and have simply
given up and gone back to our “business”!
I mean come on! There are already
so many people! And besides we are
carrying this heavy load! And even if we
did make the extra effort to push through the crowds and up the stairs, what
would we have done once we literally, not just proverbially, encountered the
“brick wall”! How many of us would have
set down the paralytic and begun to rip the wall apart with our bare hands? Oh
what an example these men are to us!
This is what our Lord means when He says, “the kingdom of heaven suffers
violence, and violent men take it by force” (
If we are
to heal ourselves, soul and body, from the paralysis of sin and
ever-encroaching death, we must by all means, at whatever cost find ourselves
in the presence of Christ. He is our
health and salvation. His divine word
will release us from our bondage. And in
order to find ourselves in Christ’s presence we must exert ourselves. We must seek Him fervently. We must throw off the inertia of spiritual
sickness, not learning to “accept” it and “live with it” but learning to cure
it. We
must not allow ourselves to be such slaves to our current ways of living, to
routine, and to busyness that we never even mount up onto the cot and start
moving! Get moving. Some of you have yet to translate the reality
that we are in Great Lent into your practical schedules. It is time to make haste and make up for lost
time. You need to get up on the cot and
out of the house, and start moving toward Christ. Next,
we must not be discouraged at the crowd of people that appear to be blocking
our access to the Savior. So, in our
Lenten journey, which is our movement toward Christ for healing, we must not be
discouraged at the presence at manifold temptations and passions which appear
to block our approach to Christ.
Whenever anyone is serious about healing themselves from their passions
at once they are assaulted by demons, who fear nothing more than a person who
is serious about spiritual health. As
the paralytic and his four friends pushed through the crowd so too we must push
through these temptations and passions.
We must prevail over them by honest evaluation and confession, and we
must make it then to the stairway that leads to the roof. We must
climb these stairs and then set our hands to breaking through the roof. These stairs are the spiritual disciplines,
and the hard roof, which must be broken through and penetrated, is the human
heart. Who will be successful at
breaking through? Who will actually find Himself in Christ’s presence? Who will obtain healing? Only he who is willing to move. Only he who
is willing to endure and overcome the obstacles. Only he who is willing to
climb, and to do forceful spiritual work.
There is no Pascha without Great Lent.
There is no salvation without labor.
True Friendship- Before we leave this beautiful scene I would like to draw your attention to one more aspect of the account. Notice that the paralytic found his health and salvation through the help of his four friends. He could simply not be saved without them, and they were devoted to his spiritual health. What we have before us is a most beautiful picture of true Christian friendship. True Christian friendship is a friendship of mutual encouragement. It is a relationship in which each party works for the good of the other, where each concerns himself with the salvation of the other. True friends push each other on into the presence of the Lord. They are agents of salvation, not corrupters. Look at how much a friend can assist another! Have you ever thought that your loving efforts in a friendship may be the very thing, which, in the providence and grace of Almighty God, enables your friend to obtain salvation! Let us not underestimate the power of mutual encouragement and help. Let us not think in individualistic terms, but instead recognize that the Lord is saving us together. We are repenting together. We are praying together. We are about the business of good deeds together, and we are making up for each other’s weaknesses. In many ways we are being borne on the shoulders of our fellow parishioners and friends into Christ’s presence. “Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near” (Heb. 10:24-25). Think of Great Lent in this way. How greatly are we helped when we are making our prostrations during Great Compline and are buoyed by the other strugglers on their faces next to us. How much our spirits are lifted to hymn together our most pure Mother in the Akathist Hymn. And if we are neglecting our Lenten duties how are we, in truth, abandoning our friends. One person's fervent participation in Lent increases the fire of many, and one person’s non-participation in Lent squelches the zeal of many. I leave you with a word from that pious author of the Diary of a Russian Priest, Fr. Alexander Elchaninov, “Individual effort is fruitless in so many cases. See friendship. This is a case when 1 + 1 are not 2, but at least 3: the two of you, plus the great power- mutual love- which will sustain and fortify you” (p. 208). May it be that, helped by each other’s love and borne on each other’s shoulders, we may find ourselves in the presence of Christ and hear from Him, “My son your sins are forgiven…pick up your pallet and walk!” Doxa To Qeo!