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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Today, our Lord is doing what He always does amongst us. He is liberating us. He is freeing us. He is healing us. We see that when the paralysed man is brought to Him on a pallet, our Saviour not only raises him from his physical paralysis, but He demonstrates to everyone around that He has authority over sins as well. This is made clear when He says to the man : “‘Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house’”. He does get up, and he does go to his home. Of course, “go” means that he walked. The Lord is demonstrating His authority over everything about our lives, everything in heaven and on earth, including the forgiveness of sins (to underline it to the doubters).
Just as there are in today’s Gospel reading, there always have been people saying to Him : “This is not only strange, but it is also wrong that You are saying that You can forgive sins. Only God can forgive sins”. They are saying this to Him (or thinking these things, for He knows their hearts) because they do not know Who He is. They think that He is just an ordinary person or a prophet. Even prophets do not have the authority to forgive sins. Only God can forgive sins. That is true. Our Saviour shows to them and to us that He is Who He says that He is. He is the Son of the living God. He is “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). As the Son of God, He does have the authority to forgive sins.
I think that we cannot have a much more visible and concrete sign of the Saviour’s ability to forgive sins than this particular moment of forgiveness for this man. While all this healing is happening and all this forgiving is occurring, our Lord is showing us that when we are bound by the chains of sin, we are also paralysed spiritually. If we look at our lives and examine how we behave in our lives, then we see that when we are burdened with sin (which is always connected with fear of some sort), we cannot do what is right no matter how much we want to do what is right. We keep doing what is not right. It is only when the Lord is freeing us from our slavery to sins and passions that we are able finally to understand what is the right way. In fact, it is then that we can understand what His will is and do His will. When we are understanding clearly what His will is, we understand then what the Apostle is saying to us, today. Just before the beginning of today’s reading, the Apostle reminds us that we are members of the Body of Christ, members of each other. Being in Christ gives us the responsibility to use the gifts that God has given to each of us.
When God creates you and me, He does not merely create some sort of a creature by itself, which lacks any support, lacks any sense of direction, lacks any purpose. He has a purpose for each human being that He creates : doing and being good in this life. Doing and being good in this life is never centred on the self. It is always focussed on the other. The Christian way is always focussed on the needs of the other, not on the self. The Christian way, following the Saviour, is the way of service. The Saviour Himself, risen from the dead, ascended into Heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, to this day is pouring Himself out for us in selfless love. He is still serving you and me because we keep crying to Him : “Please, help me”. “Help me with this”. “Help me with that”. “Give me this”. “Give me that”. He is meeting our real needs. He is still the Servant of you and me because He loves you and me. We Christians serve each other (and even other people who are not Christians), because God loves us, and He gives us the ability to love other human beings. Each particular one of us has particular gifts that He gives to us in order to accomplish this work of service in the course of our lives. This work of service, caring for the needs of other people, is the way of life.
It is always difficult for me to comprehend, especially in this province, how it is that a society, disappointed by the sins and shortcomings of human beings, can pretend to throw away God, and at the same time have characteristics which completely declare the Christian foundation and the Christian mentality that undergird the whole social structure of this province. People, in their disappointment and rebellion, have become very self-indulgent and very rejecting of God. At the same time, this is a province where, everywhere you turn, there are people who are volunteering to help others : to pick them up and take them to get groceries and to drive them here and there because they are housebound. This is really characteristic of this city. People volunteer to look after each other. They take each other around because there is no bus system and only one taxi. Since there is not enough transportation for all those in need, there are all these wonderful volunteers.
Why do people volunteer ? Where does it come from ? Volunteering comes from the Christian foundation of this province and the Christian people who were the founders of this city. It is not just plain human kindness. Human kindness (that comes with being a human being who might listen to God sometimes) is not organised like this and not determined like this. I am convinced that even though people (like children and even like abused children) say : “I do not want to hear anything about God”, nevertheless, at the same time, in their hearts they respond positively to God’s love. Even though it is a contradictory way of living in this province, it is a virtue that this phenomenon still exists. There is yet great hope in the future for this province. All Christianity has not disappeared.
We who are Orthodox Christian believers have a great responsibility, because we still know how to live the Christian way. We still know how to love Christ, and how to respond to His love. We know how to live in the environment of His love. Therefore, we have the responsibility of showing the hungry and thirsty people around us Who it is that is the Lover of human beings ; we have the responsibility of showing how He can meet their needs, and how He can heal their broken hearts as He healed our brokennesses. The hardest way of all for us, it seems, is to do precisely those words that the Apostle Paul says to us today : “‘Bless those who persecute you’”. His words are very close to those of our Saviour in Matthew 5:44. In other words, he says to us, in effect, “Do not condemn anyone”. “Bless those who hurt you”. Therefore, we are called to bless all and to forgive all in the love of Christ. If we do not bless those who hurt us, and if we hold grudges, it only poisons our own hearts and does nothing to anyone else. Those words are a 100 per-cent application of the Saviour’s love. They are also a 100 per-cent application of the “Beatitudes” (which we sang earlier), which point to our Saviour Himself, and which are characteristic of all those who follow in His way.
For us to be alive, truly human and constructive, we must be able with Christ’s help to live His love radically. The radical application of His love is precisely this blessing those who persecute us. I very much recommend that we all read the lives of the saints much more (especially the martyrs), because there, we see very concrete examples of people who are being tortured in very horrible ways. (It is really ugly the things that were done, and are still being done to the martyrs.) These martyrs are blessing and forgiving the persons who are killing them in the same way that our Saviour did from the Cross. With His arms voluntarily outstretched, He forgave those who killed him. We forgive those who injure us. We forgive those who persecute us. We forgive those who hound us because we want the Lord’s healing and life in our hearts. We want the Lord’s healing and life in the hearts of those who are near us whether they wish us good or ill. This is the radical way. It is the way of life, and it is the fruitful way.
To illustrate this, I will repeat the story about the death of Saint Juvenaly, the first priest-martyr of North America, who was a missionary priest-monk from Valaam Monastery in Russia. On the west coast of Alaska, he was coming with his reader by boat to bring the Gospel to the Yupik people. The Yupik people did not understand who he was or what were his intentions. They thought that he was a threat, and they began to shoot at him with arrows. It was reported in the families of those Yupiks that the people who were shooting him thought at the time that he must be crazy. It looked to them as though he were moving his arms, trying to brush the arrows away like mosquitoes. What they did not understand at the time (but they understood later) was that he was making the sign of the Cross on those who were shooting arrows at him. He was blessing the people who were killing him, just as the Apostle Paul exhorts us today. He was blessing those who were killing him. They also killed his reader (whose name we do not even know).
As a result of this blessing, other missionaries followed later, and they established the Orthodox Faith in this area of western Alaska that I call “Yupikia”. As a result of the spilling of the blood of the Hieromartyr Juvenaly, the Orthodox Faith planted then has lasted until now. The memory of the event has lasted until now. The people who killed him became Christians. The people who produced families of Orthodox Christians in Alaska remembered the story. Their families remembered the event, and their descendants have remembered and known Jesus Christ whom they serve with love until this day. The death of this missionary priest produced fruit more than a hundredfold. For the Orthodox Christian, to die is not the worst possible thing to happen. For the Orthodox Christian, to die out of communion with Christ is the worst thing. To die in the love of Jesus Christ is, in fact, life eternal. Saint Juvenaly, who was blessing the people who killed him, was taken by our Saviour into Heaven, where he continues to pray. His prayers bear fruit more than a hundredfold.
The radical way of the Christian, the radical way of love, is the way that gives life and bears fruit. Let us ask the Lord to renew the Grace of the Holy Spirit in our hearts today so that we, with Saint Juvenaly, the martyrs, and all other faithful Orthodox Christians may glorify our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.