2nd Sunday in Great Lent
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
The importance of this Gospel passage is that it is a demonstration of God’s love and forgiveness for us. The two go together. The Lord wants to draw us back to Himself, and He wants to forgive us. The Pharisees and the ordinary people around Jesus Christ today cannot comprehend how it is that a human being can forgive sins, because they do not know Who Jesus truly is. They think that He is perhaps a prophet, perhaps a gifted man, but they do not understand, as we do, that He is the Son of God. To demonstrate that He has the authority to forgive sins, to make it clear, He says to the man : “‘I say to you, arise, take up your bed, and go to your house’”. And he does.
Human beings always seem to have difficulty accepting the love of God for what it is. That has been our problem and our weakness from the time of Adam and Eve, in fact. Ever since this beginning, we have had difficulty accepting the depth of the love of God, and living in accordance with His love. We always try to limit the One who is unlimitable. He, Himself, it is true, limited Himself when He became Man, but that was His own self-limitation, His own self-emptying. We cannot do the same for Him. We cannot close Him in and measure Him somehow, and make Him more acceptable to our limitations. It is not we who pull Him down from Heaven, and reduce Him to our level. Rather, it is we who have to come up to Him. It is we who have to grow up into Him. The way human beings have been behaving is still contrary to Him who is the Truth, the Absolute Truth.
We must have a correct understanding of our relationship with Christ. Two things stand in the way of our relationship with Him. It seems that we human beings are always afraid. Fear is therefore often our first response to everything. We often see it in the reflex answer “No”. Next, we have our pride and our self-confidence in our so-called intelligence. In the time of Saint Gregory Palamas, there was a big controversy between the East and the West. This was at the time when philosophical Scholasticism had grown up and taken precedence in Christian life in the West. This means that in the West all theology was subjected to philosophical and logical systems. On the other hand, Saint Gregory Palamas was telling, and is telling us that the most important thing for Christians is to know the love of God, and to live in the love of God. The intelligence, the logic, the reasoning – everything has to be subjected to that relationship of love. Saint Gregory Palamas tells us that we can know God, not in the essence of Who He is, but in His energies. We can know the Lord as He reveals Himself to us. However, we cannot know the Lord so as to control Him.
That is one reason, by the way, why we never speak the Name given by God to Moses as to Who He is. This Name of God, a four letter Hebrew word (the Tetragrammaton), is so holy that traditionally the Jews do not pronounce it. Rather, a substitute word is provided. This word is translated “the Lord”, and we Orthodox Christians also have always used this substitute word. For the past few hundred years, Western people have been trying to pronounce this word under the influence of so-called enlightened logic. “Jehovah”, or “Yahweh”, or something like that, is not even close to the correct pronunciation. On the other hand, even if it were close, it is completely inappropriate for human beings ever to try to pronounce the Name of God. For human beings, to name something is to control it. We put names on things so as to have control over them. There is a famous Protestant saying : “Name it and claim it” which is related to this. This “Name it and claim it” (which really means “Name it and control it”), when it comes to a relationship with God, is crazy. God is not some sort of cosmic cow that anyone can milk if just the right technique is learnt. God gives His gifts and everything to us freely. We cannot extract anything from Him according to some technique.
Who do we think we are, anyhow, to approach God with such insolence and such pride – to think that we can milk God like a cow ! God gives His gifts to us, and we live these gifts in accordance with what the gifts are, and in accordance with the nature of our love which gives life to those gifts. We are not all the same. As the Apostle Paul said, we do not all have the same gifts (see 1 Corinthians 12:4-6). Each of us has unique gifts because God creates each of us uniquely once, and only once. God is not in the recycling business. We do not go and come back. This is our one time. God is not limited in how many people He creates, because His love is unending. It is His love that creates us all.
There is a relationship of love between us and God. This love is the raison d’être of our life. We must live in the love of Jesus Christ. We have to do all things, pronounce all words, pray all prayers, in this relationship of love with Jesus Christ. God created us for this reason : to live in a relationship of love with Him. Saint Seraphim of Sarov tells us that the goal of the Christian life is to acquire the Holy Spirit. He meant that we should live the whole of our life in the love of Jesus Christ. That is the aim of our whole life. Let us enter into the love of Jesus Christ, continue in the love of Jesus Christ, grow in the love of Christ, do all things, think, and pray in the love of Jesus Christ. Let us at all times and every where glorify the same Jesus Christ, together with the Father, and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.