Homily for the Sunday of the Paralytic #
Metropolitan Korniliy (Titov)
In today’s Gospel, we hear the account of how Jesus Christ healed the paralytic at the Sheep’s Pool. This miracle took place during the feast of Pascha in Jerusalem, when many people from all Judea had gathered in the city. In Jerusalem there was a pool called the Sheep Pool, located near the temple and so named because sheep brought for sacrifice were washed there. The pool bore the name Bethesda, which means “house of mercy.” Near the pool were five galleries—porches—where, as the Gospel tells us, a great multitude of the sick, blind, lame, and withered lay. The water of the Sheep Pool had miraculous power: once a year an Angel of the Lord would descend into the pool and stir the water, and the first person to step into it afterward would be healed of whatever disease he had.
Among those lying there was a paralytic, unable to move due to an illness that had afflicted him for thirty-eight years. This man could not approach the pool on his own, but for many years he hoped that the power of God would help him, that God would not forsake him.
The merciful Lord, seeing him lying there and “knowing that he had been now a long time in that case,” said unto him, “Wilt thou be made whole?” The Lord’s question, “Do you wish to be healed?”, was a final test, by which He would reveal the paralytic’s long-suffering and meekness. In the man’s reply—“Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool”—we hear no complaints or murmuring, no reproaches or resentment, though such things are natural in the sick. His answer is full of patience and meekness; there is not a trace of grumbling against the cruelty or hard-heartedness of those around him.
Yes, through all those years there was not a single person who would help him down into the healing waters of the pool. But Christ, seeing the measure of this man’s endurance, healed him with a single word, in the majesty of His omnipotence. The words of Christ—“Rise, take up thy bed and walk”—carried healing power. At once, by the Almighty Word, the paralytic felt himself strong and well; he took up his bed and walked.
Christ, the Healer of souls, later said to the man when He found him in the temple: “Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.” Thus, the cause of his illness and paralysis lay in the sin he had committed.
In terms of our inner spiritual condition, the paralytic is an image of nearly every one of us. Our will is weakened by sin. Our souls are paralyzed by the sickness of sin, and thus, like this man, we too are in need of healing and the gracious help of God.
Like the paralytic in the Gospel, we are at times powerless in our will to struggle against sin, numb in heart, unable to gather the strength to turn to God in prayer. We know that the Lord has prepared for us the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal blessedness, but in striving toward it we are often overcome by a certain spiritual paralysis. Sins conquer us; we fall in the fight against them, and no sooner do we rise than we fall again. This can lead to despair, to the thought that sin cannot be conquered. But the Lord, in healing the paralytic, assures us that if we feel sin within us, if we are struggling against it, then we are still spiritually alive! The Lord sees our efforts to overcome sin, even when we achieve no quick results. He sees our weak attempts to battle sin, sees that we at times lack even a single person who might help us with a good example or wise counsel. The Lord, seeing our desire to be healed, comes and says: “Rise and walk!”
The sinful corruption of our soul is more dangerous than any bodily disease. The Lord constantly links sickness and sin in close connection. Sin is the cause of the soul’s affliction. And when healing a sickness, the Lord first removes the sin from the soul of the afflicted. “Thy sins be forgiven thee,” He says to the paralytic in Capernaum. “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee,” He says to the paralytic at the Sheep Pool.
The Apostle Paul declares plainly: “The wages of sin is death.” And in another place he explains that people have corrupted their souls, defiled them as garments, and unworthily, “not discerning” themselves, approach the Cup of Holy Communion. Because of this, “many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep,” that is, many die (1 Cor. 11:30).
The teaching on the link between sin and sickness is revealed from the very first pages of the Bible. Sickness and death came as the consequence of Adam’s sin. To Eve was appointed by God, as punishment for transgressing His commandment, the pain of childbirth.
Sin is a poison that painfully affects our body—sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, but always destructively. The Word of God testifies to this: “Many sorrows shall be to the wicked” (Ps. 30), “There is no peace in my bones by reason of my sins” (Ps. 37), “Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days” (Ps. 54). Because of the consequences of sin, even children are sometimes born with a tendency toward their parents’ sins, or even with the very diseases of their parents. “Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children” (Hos. 4:6), proclaims the prophet. And the Lord speaks fearful words to sinful parents: “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (Deut. 5:9). But let us remember that the Lord is longsuffering and abundant in mercy, and according to His word, “The generation of the upright shall be blessed,” and “their seed shall inherit the earth” (Isa. 3:2).
Bishop Mikhail Semyonov, in his homily “Sickness and Sin”, writes:
“The source of our body is spiritual. All physical illnesses stem from the corruption of this creative principle. As long as it is healthy, all physical damages are instantly repaired, all infections are paralyzed. A healthy soul protects and defends its body. But once it wavers in its connection with God, becomes weary, darkened, or weakened—then at once, like into a poorly guarded fortress, destructive forces burst in. We can see that a conscious change in one’s inner state could save many from such illnesses before which worldly doctors are powerless.”
The Lord affirms in the Gospel that where He is, where there is a living contact with Him through prayer and faith, there is no sickness—there, the lame walk, the blind see, the lepers are cleansed. “Thy sins are forgiven thee,” the Lord says to the paralytic. By these words, He shows that the essential condition for the healing of the body is a return to its source—life with God.
But it is not enough merely to cast out the demons of sin from the soul, that is, to expose sin through repentance. The demons will return, says the Lord, if the house of the soul in which they dwelled is only swept clean, but remains unoccupied. That is, it is not enough to simply break with sin; one must also labor constantly to fill the soul with good feelings and good deeds, to give it a desire to live according to the commandments of God, to grow in spirit, to perform deeds of goodness and love for God and neighbor—deeds which will drive out selfishness and attachment to sin, leaving no room for the return of the demons, that is, sinful inclinations.
The Lord healed the paralytic because he had condemned and conquered the sin that had lived in him. And now that bed—the healed body—the paralytic carries into the temple, where he meets the Lord. Let us remember how the mother-in-law of the Apostle Peter, healed from her fever, rose and began to serve the Lord. So too did the healed Aeneas in the city of Lydda, and the virtuous woman named Tabitha from Joppa, who began to serve the Lord and others through her needlework and abundant charity after her resurrection, as recounted in the Acts of the Apostles read today at the Divine Liturgy.
The Lord sometimes sends us illness as a means by which the soul is purified and made ready to see Christ as Savior and God. When the apostles asked the Master why the man born blind was suffering—whether for his own sin or his parents’—He replied, “That the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3), that the one healed might glorify Christ who healed him.
Bishop Mikhail Semyonov writes:
“In suffering, the shell brings forth the pearl. Illness, like a thunderstorm for the soul, clears the air, creates a certain tenderness and sensitivity of spirit, and helps one to behold the Kingdom of God. Thus we must fight the sickness whose source is sin, which causes many to ‘sleep’ [i.e., die], and fight it through healing from sin. Then the very sickness of the body becomes a call to the healing of the spirit and a cleansing bath for the soul.”
Christ grants us the opportunity for healing. Bethesda is ever alive in the Church. But unlike the Sheep Pool, where once a year an angel would bring healing to only the first person who entered the water, in the Church we may enter the healing waters every day—and the power of the Life-giving Source suffices for all. And yet we see that many are still afflicted, and “many sleep.” Why, then, are few healed today? There are the blind, the lame, the leprous of soul—yet they are not cleansed. The reason is that we often fail to recognize our sickness, and therefore do not seek healing, though our conscience reveals the illnesses of our sin and calls us to be healed. But at times we close our ears, that we might not hear the voice of God; we make no effort to be healed.
The Lord says: “For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them” (Matt. 13:15). Sinners who do not wish to repent seem to say: “Depart from us, Lord; wait, do not heal us. Let us live a little longer in the sickness of our sin, for it is sweet to us.” Sweet, like filth is sweet to a swine. They reject the help of the Savior because His healing would require them to change their lives, to break the sinful habits to which they are accustomed and attached—just as the swine were dear to the Gergesenes. We often turn away from the Healer, not recognizing our sickness, saying: “We are no worse than others,” or “Everyone lives this way.” And so—there is no healing. The hand of the Lord does not touch the afflicted, and for this cause, “many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep” (1 Cor. 11:30).
Moreover, mutual assistance among people has withered away. Many who are paralyzed by sin can now say, “I have no man,” because they find no one to help them heal, to speak a life-giving word, to support them in weakness, to call them to repentance. How many people are near to us—aware that they are sick in spirit with unbelief and despair, desiring to be healed—yet there is no one beside them who would extend a helping hand, who would lead them to the life-giving waters of repentance and healing? Where are the friends of the paralytic, who were ready to “break through the roof” for the sake of their friend’s healing, that they might bring him—sick in both body and soul—to the feet of the Lord? How many people around us are paralyzed in their will, in heart, in soul, whom we could help to come alive, to rise, to walk—and yet we are too lazy, too forgetful, too sluggish, too absorbed in ourselves to care for anyone else.
How many today are weary in soul, spiritually paralyzed, having lost the saving path and the love that leads to it? And yet Bethesda is near—that is, the Church, where the living water of prayer flows, where the Word of God is proclaimed, and where repentance is always possible.
St. John Chrysostom advised Christians, especially on feast days, to wait at the doors of their neighbors’ homes before the Divine Liturgy to rouse in them “hunger and thirst” for hearing the Word of God, and to hinder them from going to entertainments instead of to the temple. This is true care for the soul of one’s neighbor: to quicken dead souls with the living water of the Word of God. But today, compassion, pity, and mercy have grown scarce. In a single apartment building, hundreds may live under one roof, yet the neighbors are indifferent to one another, unwilling even to know what is happening just beyond the wall. And yet there, perhaps, a person suffers in anguish, despondency, and loneliness. The first communities of Christians lived by Christian love, with one heart and one soul; they “bore one another’s burdens,” and by this they drew others to the faith.
Let us set these questions before ourselves: what must we do so that those around us might be healed, so that their souls may be set aflame with love for the Lord, so that those near us may hear the glad tidings of the risen and life-giving Savior? Where lies our weakness? What has paralyzed our soul? How shall we shake off this paralysis, this sinful stupor?
Brothers and sisters! Let us gather all our spiritual strength so that, with Christ’s help, in the pool of His covenants, through repentance, and with the help of pious people who love us, we may come alive again—being strengthened in faith, learning daily from the Word of God, striving to fulfill His commandments: praying more often, attending church regularly, drawing near to Christ the Savior with fervent zeal and pleas for help, confessing to Him our infirmity and at the same time our burning desire for spiritual healing. And the merciful Lord will surely extend His hand to help us and, by His divine power, raise us up—just as He once raised the paralytic—from the depths of sinful infirmity, healing us and saving our souls.