Hebrews 1:10-2:3; Mark 2:1-12
We will misunderstand these blessed weeks of Lent if we assume that they are intended to help us have clearer ideas or deeper feelings about our Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection. We will be even more confused if we think that our intensified prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and repentance somehow earn God’s forgiveness or make us better than other people. Quite the contrary, Lenten disciples are simply opportunities to open ourselves as embodied persons to the gracious healing of the Lord so that we may share more fully in His life. That is another way of saying that the point of Lent is to grow in our personal knowledge of God through true spiritual experience, encounter, and transformation.
On this second Sunday of the Great
Fast, we commemorate St. Gregory Palamas, who defended the experience of monks
who, in the stillness of prayer from their hearts, saw the Uncreated Light of
God. The eyes of their souls were
cleansed and illumined such that they beheld
the divine glory as the Apostles did at the Transfiguration of the Lord on
Mount Tabor. St. Gregory taught that to
know God is to participate in His gracious divine energies as we are
transformed in holiness in every aspect of our existence. He proclaimed that our calling is to know and
experience God through true spiritual union with Him that sanctifies every
dimension of the human person. To do so
is to encounter the great “I AM” of the Burning Bush from the depths of our
souls in a way that illumines us entirely. (Ex. 3:14) It is to shine
brilliantly in holiness like an iron left in the fire of the divine glory.
In today’s gospel reading, Christ
healed a paralyzed man, enabling him to stand up, carry his bed, and walk home
as a sign of the Savior’s divine authority to forgive sins. In doing so, He restored
not only a body to health but a whole person who faced all the practical
challenges of daily life in the world as we know it. Though Palamas focused primarily on the
hesychasm of monks, he also taught that “those who live in the world…must force
themselves to use the things of this world in conformity with the commandments
of God.”[1] When we mindfully embrace the struggle to purify
our hearts so that we may live according to love of God and neighbor, which are
the greatest of the commandments, and not according to our self-centered desires,
we know and experience Christ from the depths of our souls more fully. We pray, fast, give, forgive, and confess
and repent of our sins during Lent so that we may open our hearts, and every
aspect of our lives, as fully as possible to the purifying healing of our
Lord’s gracious divine energies.
His healing is open to all in every time,
place, and circumstance of the world as we know it. Christ sent the formerly paralyzed man home
to resume a conventional life in a land occupied by a foreign military power
and ruled by tyrants in which the weak were routinely crushed by the powerful. That
is precisely the setting in which the God-Man lived, died, and rose from the
dead in order to make us participants in His divine glory. In order to embrace our true identity today in
the same world of corruption, we must offer ourselves for healing as we
mindfully refuse to worship at the perennial pagan altars of pride, power, and
pleasure. Doing so requires constant
vigilance and struggle against falling back into the spiritual blindness and
weakness that our passions so easily bring upon us. Even small steps to embrace the disciplines
of Lent will help us to open the eyes of our souls to behold the glory of the
Lord.
Even the tiniest advance in spiritual
clarity should inspire us to call mindfully for the Lord’s healing mercy each
day in order to grow in our liberation from slavery to the paralysis of sin. Prayer is not about pondering ideas,
cultivating emotions, or merely mouthing words, but requires being fully
present to God from the depths of our souls. We must intentionally devote time and energy to
doing so, if we want to gain His healing and strength so that we may rise up
from our beds of spiritual paralysis and move forward on the journey to the heavenly
kingdom amidst the challenges that we face.
Contrary to what we may like to
think, this is not a calling only for those who we imagine have no great
struggles. Remember that Christ came to
call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. He was a physician to the sick and blessed the
poor and needy. He cast demons out of the
possessed, raised the dead, and showed mercy to those considered notorious
sinners and hated foreigners. It was not those who were perfectly at ease
according to the standards of the fallen world who received Him with joy, but those
with broken hearts who knew their own weakness.
We must never accept the lie that any difficult circumstance of our
lives somehow excuses us from answering the calling to mindfully unite
ourselves to Christ from the depths of our hearts. Indeed, it is precisely such struggles which should
inspire us all the more to call out in humility for His mercy.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
records that God revealed to Saint Antony the Great of Egypt that “there was
one who was his equal in the city. He was a doctor by profession and whatever
he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor, and every day he sang the Sanctus
with the angels.” This example of someone living and working in
the world should remind us that the only limits to our participation in the
life of Christ are those that we choose to impose on ourselves. As we continue our Lenten journey, let us make
the circumstances of our lives, whatever they may be, points of entrance into the
blessed life of our Lord. Let us know
Him as God from the depths of our hearts as we come to shine brightly with the divine
glory by grace. That is not a matter of
rational speculation, historical remembrance, or cultivation of emotions about the
Savior’s Cross and empty tomb, but of lifting up our hearts in prayer and living
faithfully so that we may enter into the joy of the One Who destroyed the power
of sin and death by His glorious resurrection on the third day. That is how we too may gain the strength to
take up our beds and walk home.
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