Acts 9:32-42; John
5:1-15
Christ is Risen!
During
the season of Pascha, the Church calls our attention to how particular people
responded to our Lord, Who rose from the dead as a whole embodied person on the
third day. Thomas did not believe until he saw and touched the wounds of the
Risen Savior. Joseph of Arimathea took
Christ’s body down from the Cross and, with the help of Nicodemus, buried Him. The Myrrh-Bearing women became the first
witnesses of His resurrection when they went to the tomb very early in the
morning to anoint the Lord’s body as a final sign of love.
The gospel
reading on this Sunday of the Paralytic is different, for it focuses on the
Savior’s healing of a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. The man, whose name we do not know, was in
the tragic situation of being right by a pool of water where he could be
healed, but due to his paralysis he was unable to enter it before someone else received
the miracle. At first glance, we may
wonder what these events, which happened before the Lord’s Passion, have to do
with celebrating Pascha. Those who view the Cross in legalistic terms about
satisfying justice or paying a debt will be especially confused about why we
are commemorating today the healing of the paralyzed man. But when we focus on
how our Risen Lord heals and delivers us from the corruption, weakness, and
despair of slavery to the fear of death, which is the wages of sin, we will see
the connection clearly. Before His resurrection, we lacked the strength to embrace
our restoration as beautiful living icons of God’s holiness and certainly could
not overcome the ultimate paralysis of the grave. During Pascha, we enter into the joyful
blessedness of the One Who makes us participants in His victory over death and
liberates us from the paralysis of sin in all its degrading forms.
The paralyzed
man was near the Temple in Jerusalem, right by the pool that provided water for
washing lambs before they were slaughtered. The scene occurs at the Jewish
feast of Pentecost, which commemorated Moses receiving the Law, which had been
given by angels. The Old Testament Law and the sacrificial worship of the Temple
foreshadowed the coming of Christ, but they could not provide healing from the ravages
of sin, including bondage to the grave. The Savior fulfilled both as the Lamb of God
Who takes away the sins of the world. Our
Great High Priest offered Himself on the Cross as He entered fully into death
itself, from which He liberated us by His resurrection to become “partakers of
the divine nature” by grace. He did so
in order to restore and fulfill us in God’s image and likeness as He set us
free from the paralysis of sin and death in all their manifestations. We were powerless before them and in need of the
merciful care of the Great Physician.
The plight of
the paralyzed man shows us the common condition of fallen humanity. None of us took the initiative in bringing
salvation to the world and this fellow did not ask Christ to help him or even
know His name. The Lord graciously
reached out to him, nonetheless, asking the seemingly obvious question, “Do you
want to be healed?” The Savior’s words should
challenge each of us because we often become so comfortable with our weaknesses,
desires, and habits that we do not think that we need healing. If we do not even want to be healed, we will
never open ourselves to receive the Lord’s gracious therapy. We so
easily accept the lie that being “true to ourselves” means claiming an identity
shaped by our passions. To do so,
however, is to deny the truth of our Lord’s resurrection, for He has destroyed
the enslaving power of sin and death, making us participants in His healing,
restoration, and fulfillment of the human person. As “the resurrection and the life,” He is the
New Adam. We can only become our true
selves in Him. Instead of embracing
personally His great liberation, we too often make the tragic choice of living
as though He were still in the tomb and we had no higher calling than to
indulge our distorted desires as those still enslaved to the fear of death.
Apart from
uniting ourselves to Christ, we all lack the ability to find healing for our
souls every bit as much as the paralyzed man who found himself in the tragic
position of never being able to move himself into the nearby pool of
water. In order to accept the Lord’s merciful
healing and strength, we must confess the painful truth about ourselves as we
take intentional, albeit faltering and imperfect, steps to obey His command:
“Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” No
matter how great the struggle, how weak we feel, or how scared we are of an
uncertain future, we must persistently rise up in obedience as best we can in
order to participate personally in His victory over the paralysis of sin and
death.
Embracing His
healing will never be as easy in the moment as resting content with whatever
forms of corruption we have allowed to dominate our hearts and become second
nature. After a lifetime of not moving,
the paralyzed man could not have found it easy to obey Christ’s command to
stand, pick up his bed, and walk. He had
learned how to survive for decades as an invalid, but the Savior called him to
a very different life, the challenges of which he could not have known or
predicted. He must have been at least a
bit afraid about what would lie ahead. We can become paralyzed with fear when
we come to see our spiritual infirmities, and the grip that they have upon us,
more clearly. It may then seem
unimaginable that we could ever truly find healing and be set free from their
grasp.
When we are
tempted to such fearful despair, we must remember that the man in today’s
gospel reading would never have been able to walk had he insisted on remaining
as he had been for thirty-eight years out fear, habit, or any other motivation.
Lying still for a long time inevitably makes us weak and unable to move. The same will remain true of us spiritually
if we do not undertake the struggle to receive the healing of the Lord by
serving Him as faithfully as we presently have the strength to do. The more
accustomed we become to any sin, and especially the more we accept the lie that
embracing that sin is somehow part of becoming our true selves, the weaker we
will become before it. The longer we
insist on remaining enslaved to our passions, the less inclination we will have
to offer the deepest desires of our hearts for purification through the Savior Who
died and rose again. As the God-Man,
Christ Himself is the healing, restoration, and fulfillment of every dimension
of the human person. Entrusting ourselves to Him requires that we refuse to
remain paralyzed before our sins and instead take the tiny steps that we can today
to open ourselves to the divine strength that has overcome even death itself.
Instead of obsessing
about fear of the unknown, bemoaning our weakness, or attempting to justify
ourselves, we must mindfully entrust ourselves to the mercy of the One Who heals
and strengthens us in ways we do not fully know whenever we take up the struggle
to reorient our lives to Him, even in very small ways. We must also take to heart the Lord’s words
to the man after his healing: “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing
worse befalls you.” He calls us not simply to stop doing this or that, but to enter
into the holy joy of Pascha as a truly eternal journey, sharing ever more fully
in His healing mercy as we become more like Him in holiness. The only way to do that is to rise, take up
our beds, and walk each day of our lives in obedience as best we can. That is the only way to participate personally
in the liberation from the paralysis of sin and death that He has brought to
world. He calls and enables us to become
nothing less than truly human as beautiful living icons of God’s holiness. That is what we must do in order to celebrate
this glorious season of Pascha with integrity, for “Christ is risen!”
