In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Very often we are carried away by rules and regulations, and that is very much the case in today’s Gospel reading, because this woman is healed of her illness on the Sabbath Day. (In this particular case it was not simply an illness, but it also had to do with a demonic oppression.) A very important thing to remember is that underlying everything in the relationship with the Lord is this saying : “‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’” (Mark 2:27). The Sabbath Day, the day of rest, was given to us as a blessing, a day on which we could rest from doing all sorts of work and instead, devote ourselves to worshipping God. That should take precedence over everything.
However, the worship of God should not be unreasonable. Human beings like to take liberties, of course. That old saying : “Give them an inch, and they will take a yard or even a mile” applies to all human beings. When it is understood by human beings very often that there is freedom to do whatever their heart moves them to do on the Sabbath Day, the tendency is to do whatever one feels like on the Sabbath Day. People would naturally begin to do all sorts of things that are not particularly restful and make excuses for not attending worship services. Those who were in charge of the congregations in those pre-Christian days, as people still do today, said, in effect : “Well, since people are getting all unruly, we have to regulate life and put things in order. Therefore, we are going to have to make extra rules to make sure that people do not do any work at any time on the Sabbath Day”.
The rules that they came up with became almost ridiculous. If anyone had been doing some sewing some other day, and accidentally on the Sabbath had put on a coat or a cloak that had a needle in it, and got caught by someone, this person would be accused of working on the Sabbath Day ; such a person would be given penalties because a needle was being carried in a cloak. This does not work, of course, because we get ridiculous in our attempt to protect something that is holy. The Sabbath Day is holy.
Society used to keep the Lord’s Day, the Christian day of rest. We did not lose Saturday as the Sabbath and the seventh day of the week. Rather, we Christians added the factor of resting on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the day of the Lord’s Resurrection. Sunday, the first day of the week, is also the Eighth Day. The Eighth Day is the day of the Kingdom of Heaven. This fact adds to the solemnity of the Lord’s Resurrection. This is why on this day, we worship the Lord, attend church, pay attention to the Lord, and put the Lord first. When I was a child, of course, nothing was open on Sunday anywhere in Canada. All shops were closed. Restaurants were maybe open a little bit, but not much at all happened on Sunday. I was quite surprised when I was in Thessalonica a couple of weeks ago to see that this is still the case there. I could not believe it. On Sunday, after church, nothing is open at all, and such restaurants that are open are already closing at 6 o’clock. Everyone is taking a rest on Sunday in Thessalonica, and I am told that it is the case in all of Greece.
Here in Canada, this sort of liberty that we began to take has gone to extremes. In Canada, it seems that more and more, all that people do now is work, work, work every single, solitary day. No day is any different ; money is money ; business is business – work, work, work. There is no day off. We have no day off at all in Canada. This is where we are getting ridiculous in the opposite direction. However, making federal laws to stop us working on Sunday is not going to get us anywhere because we always rebel and try to get around those laws one way or another. We do not like being regulated.
If things are going to change, we ourselves have to do something in our hearts in the first place. We have to let the Lord guide and govern our hearts, and direct us correctly. Worshipping the Lord, being in His presence, being together in the House of the Lord, at the Table of the Lord on the Day of the Lord is the most important thing for us no matter what else seems to be important. It is difficult to survive, to endure to the end of any week unless we first come here on Sunday to worship the Lord together. When we are here at the Table of the Lord amongst the people of the Lord, He feeds us with Himself, with His life, so that we have strength to continue to follow the right way, with hearts that are open to the Lord, and able to hear everything by the Grace of the Holy Spirit.
This woman today is bent over. Nowadays, because of Canadian medicine, we seldom see a man or a woman all bent over. This, of course, is a symptom of osteoporosis. However, in this particular woman’s case, her condition seems not to have been as simple as osteoporosis. Something else was burdening her, since the Evangelist Luke says that she had a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years. In her case it was not osteoporosis. Something had happened to her spiritually that affected her physically, and bent her all over. The Lord, who everywhere and at all times, is setting people free, approaches her, and sets her free just like that. She immediately stands up straight.
It is necessary that we remember this, because we, ourselves, are often burdened by sin, by guilt, by too much paying attention to evil thoughts, by all sorts of other things. Perhaps our bodies are not all bent over, but our hearts can be all bent over and darkened. It is important for us to remember that the Lord is the same Lord always. He is the same to us as He is to this woman. He cares about this woman that we just heard about ; He cares about us in the same way. As He sets this woman free from her oppression by the devil, He does set you and me free also from oppression by the devil, and from enslavement to our sins of one sort or another. He sets us free by His love. He is the One who gives us life. He is the One who turns us about, cleans us up, washes us, straightens us up, gives us the strength to do what we have to do as healthy persons, as healthy Christians.
When we are hearing about spiritual struggle (which is sometimes called “warfare” in one or another form), we are often speaking about ourselves as some sort of Star Wars warrior or the like. Very often such images pass through the mind (especially today when the Apostle is talking about putting on the whole armour). Spiritual struggle is not as simple as this. The spiritual Fathers and Mothers, who have experience, understand this. They repeat frequently that accepting and cultivating images in the mind is not the way. It is never a safe way to start trying to battle with devils and evil face to face and directly, ourselves. It is not as though we can put on some sort of impenetrable armour and be like Frodo, or some elf in a Tolkien story. Those sorts of weapons and protections are merely imaginary and illusory when it comes to dealing with good and evil. In the struggle between good and evil in our hearts and in our lives, there is no bullet-proof vest that we can put on. The only protection you or I can have is the protection of the Saviour, Himself. The armour that we put on is Christ. If there is going to be the overcoming of evil in our lives, it is going to be done by Christ. Indeed, in Christ we have also the wonderful protection of the Mother of God who ably wields His protection.
I will give you an example. This is an account that I read a long time ago about a man, who around 1907 had lived a very bad life in Russia, and never went to church (although he had gone when he was a child). In those days, there were many people who did not go to church. He had lived some sort of evil and dissolute life (as Canadians live now, by and large). This man contracted pneumonia. A hundred years ago, pneumonia was very, very serious, and it was easy to die from it, even if the person were young. He was in the hospital with a terrible fever, and so forth.
The doctors and nurses were coming and going, attending to him, and at one stage it was so bad that he came out of himself, and was looking down upon himself. He was seeing the doctors and the nurses standing there, and they said : “There is no hope for him. There is nothing we can do”. When he heard that, he felt himself being taken away by someone nearby. He went into a darkness, and then began to go towards some sort of light. We all have heard or read perhaps of these near-death experiences. This man did not have a near-death experience ; he had a complete death experience. He was being taken by an angel towards the light that he began to see. As he was going in this direction towards the light, there began to be dark creatures approaching him. These nasty, distorted creatures began to accuse the Guardian Angel (as he soon understood this person to be), saying : “This man belongs to us because everything about his life has been belonging to us. You have no right to take him”. They argued like this, and the man was absolutely terrified (or horrified, to put it in other terms). The angel carried him on farther, and the attacks became more and more intense and severe, and all true (they were not lying about what he had done in his life).
Indeed, he was so scared that he did not know what to do. Yet the angel was still there. Suddenly he remembered having been in church with his grandmother when he was a child, and only one prayer that she said in church, or with him at home, came back to his memory, and that was : “Most holy Theotokos, save us”. Therefore, he said it. Immediately some sort of fog surrounded him, and he could not see those dark creatures or hear their accusations anymore. He was surprised, so he repeated the prayer. The more he repeated this prayer, the more the fog became thick, and he could hear less and less the accusations. His fear became less, and he became more calm. He continued to repeat this prayer.
Eventually they came out of the fog, and there were no demons around, no ugly things. There was only the light, to which he approached, and in the presence of which he felt extremely warm, at peace, and full of joy. As he approached very close to this light, there was a voice that said : “Not ready !” Immediately he went into reverse and he was returned to the hospital where his body was. However, by this time, his body was already in the morgue of the hospital. A hundred years ago, in an Orthodox country, the morgue was not like those of modern Canadian hospitals where they put the body in some sort of drawer in a cooler. His body was on a table (and there were probably other bodies on tables as well), and the psalm-reader was reading the Psalms, which was his job in an Orthodox hospital in an Orthodox country. This is the Orthodox way when someone dies. Someone stays in the presence of the body until the family comes to collect it. In traditional culture, if the body is at home, immediately after the repose, someone begins to read the Psalms over the body, and stays in the presence of the body until the time comes for washing the body, dressing, preparing for burial, and taking the body to the church. The man came back to himself. Apparently the return to his body was with a certain amount of power and demonstrativeness as he began to breathe and flail about, and come to consciousness. The psalm-reader fainted. (Wouldn’t you have fainted, in such circumstances ?)
This man wrote a pamphlet describing his experiences, because he wanted other people to know what his life had been like, and how the Lord had touched him. He wanted other people to know that the Lord truly does love them, and that they can turn from their darkness and come to their senses, like the prodigal son. They can come to life. This man did apparently live a truly Christian life afterwards. This is the armour of Christ – turning to the Lord.
In this case, the man asked for the help of the Mother of God. It is the same thing as asking for the Lord’s help, because she immediately prays to her Son for whoever turns to her, just as can be seen in this icon. The Mother of God is always referring us to her Son. Her Son is blessing. She is always in perfect communion of love with her Son. She knows His will. He tells her what to do. She prays to Him, asking on our behalf. He blesses. This is what happened in this man’s case, and that is what happens in our case, too. We can turn to her. We can ask her as a friend, as a mother, to pray for us and to help us. What happened to this man can happen to us, too. The love of the Lord comes to us through her, and through her prayers. He, Himself, is the Actor in this case, but she is the extra agent of love, as we sometimes are, too. The Lord does hear your and my intercessions, similarly, as agents of His love.
When we are in the middle of temptation and we are being attacked by evil, whether it is one sort of a struggle or another in our lives, it is important for us to turn to the Lord and say : “Help !” This is precisely what “putting on the armour” means. It is not that we are going to start sword-fighting. Rather, we employ something like oriental-style martial arts technique : when an attack comes, we sidestep, allow it to pass by, and say : “Help” to the Lord.
It is the Lord who puts on the protection and stops the attack, Himself. It is not we who do anything. If we think it is our doing, then immediately for us it becomes “me, me, me”. As soon as we say “me, me, me”, it is all finished, and Big Red has won. It always has to be Jesus Christ, who is our Saviour. He is the only Saviour. I cannot save me. I cannot save anyone. The Saviour does all the saving. He is the Protector. Let us glorify our Saviour, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.