Augustine Sokolovski
The fourth Sunday after Easter in the Orthodox Church is called the Sunday of the Paralytic. During the Divine Liturgy, the account from the Gospel of John, chapter 5, verses 1 to 15, is read. The text speaks of the healing of a paralytic man, who was cured by the Lord Jesus.
According to the Gospel of John, the Lord came to Jerusalem. "There was a Jewish feast, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem" (John 5:1). We cannot say which religious feast this was. Apparently, it was one of the three main feasts for which Jewish tradition of the time required a pilgrimage to the Holy City. These "pilgrimage feasts" were Passover, or Pesach, in memory of the Exodus; Pentecost, or Shavuot, in honor of the giving of the Torah; and, finally, Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, in memory of the biblical people's wandering in the desert.
It is important to remember that the Lord Jesus, like us today, was himself a pilgrim in his earthly life. We make our pilgrimages in his footsteps. This means that the pilgrimages we, Christians, experience are not only a phenomenon that exists in all the world's religions, but we make pilgrimages by following the example of the Lord Jesus himself, to encounter him along the way in the sacraments, in prayer, and by touching places and shrines.
"Now in Jerusalem, near the Sheep Gate, there was a pool called the House of Mercy. It had five colonnades, under which lay many sick people, blind, lame, and weak, waiting for the moving of the water," continues the Gospel of John (5:2-3). The Hebrew name for the pool, "Bethesda," generally translated as "House of Grace" or "House of Mercy," is rich in biblical symbolism.
When interpreting the texts of Scripture, the Fathers of the Church paid attention to the smallest details. They saw something mysterious in them, "a wink from God," a sacramental melody of words, the mysticism of light and fire in the symbolism. Thus, the "five covered colonnades" of the Sheep Gate, according to Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), referred to the first five books of the Bible, the Law of Moses, the Pentateuch.
The presence of the sick and the infirm symbolized the power of the Law to detect illnesses and prohibit crimes, the power to punish and, at the same time, the total inability to forgive and heal. The Father of the Church had in mind both human laws and divine law. In the last century, the writer Franz Kafka (1881-1924), endowed with incredible theological genius, wrote about this impotence of the law in his novels The Castle and The Trial.
“Hell is other people," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1880). In his philosophy, he speaks of human and freedom. According to Sartre, every human being is freedom constantly realizing itself. The hell is that there are an infinite number of such freedoms. But God is freedom too. God is infinite, and therefore His freedom knows no bounds. If this is the case, then God's freedom abolishes all human freedom that is limited. God abolishes human beings. God and human beings are mutually exclusive. We must therefore deny God, even if he exists, Sartre argued.
For us Orthodox Christians, the Church is the House of Mercy. Grace is communication and grace is freedom. At the entrance to the Church of Christ stands a great multitude of sick people of all kinds. But they cannot, or simply will not, enter. This is the great tragedy and the great challenge.
The Church is a community of believers, humanity is a gathering of those who have abandoned God; at the same time, there is no salvation outside this world. This is how Saint Augustine reasoned, supplementing or even correcting his predecessor Cyprian of Carthage (+258), who claimed that "there is no salvation outside the Church."
“There was a man there who had been ill for thirty-eight years” (John 5:5). Interpreters of New Testament texts and theologians have still not reached a consensus on the age of Christ. For many centuries there was a belief that Jesus was crucified at the age of thirty-three. "The age of Christ" is the corresponding set expression in various languages. However, one of the earliest Christian authors and Church Fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons (130-202), wrote that Christ had lived through all the ages and was crucified in his old age.
Modern commentators assume that Jesus may have been thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old at the time of the Crucifixion. If so, then Jesus, in the Gospel account of the healing of the paralytic, has met his match.
Thirty-eight years is a very long time, and for a person who is immobilized, it is an eternity. The words of the Gospel literally cry out his helplessness. Jesus, seeing him lying there and learning that he had been in this condition for a long time, said to him, "Do you want to be healed?"
From a theological perspective, the discourse on Jesus' age reveals the essence of Christian dogma, according to which the Lord took upon Himself all that is ours and gave us all that is His. He has shared and continues to share with us all circumstances, all misfortunes, all centuries of humanity and all ages of people.
The Church Fathers, and particularly the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) insisted that God, in Jesus Christ, took upon himself the whole human nature. He had, has and will have a human body, a human soul and a human spirit. Let us call this the horizontal dimension of redemption. The idea that Christ lived through all the ages of man can be called the "vertical" dimension.
In our world, people have ceased to be happy at their old age, and older people are constantly rejuvenating themselves with the help of appropriate behavior and technology. After many years of life, they were finally able to take "all the money in the world" into their hands, but they found themselves deprived of mobility and, above all, of physical youth. The theology of redemption in Christ can help us at any age to escape the despair of this "unbearable lightness of being" spoken of by our contemporary, the writer Milan Kundera (1929-2023). “This is the age of which I am always a prisoner, the skin in which I live,” our world seems to say, paraphrasing one famous director.
In the Gospel narrative, the water, touched by the Angel, awaited the first to enter. Here, the Lord Himself comes to meet the sick person. "Do you want to be healed?" This question may seem surprising in the biblical context. At that time, humanity was different from ours. Health, fertility, and longevity were absolute categories. No one at that time would have renounced the desire to receive healing or preferred to remain sick. In our postmodern context, these questions become very relevant. Today, humanity often refuses to be healed; it has simply become accustomed to illness. At the same time, medicine is becoming unaffordable, and, at the same time, it is acquiring a religious dimension, replacing state power and becoming an end in itself. The recent pandemic demonstrated this very well. The end justified the means in the recent past, but in postmodern times the means are the end in themselves, and the end no longer exists. “Means without an end,” as the great contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) writes.
"The sick man replied, "Lord, I have no one to put me into the pool while the water is stirred; and while I am about to enter, someone else steps down before me" (John 5:7). It is perhaps difficult to find a story in the entire Gospel text whose every word would allow for such a wide range of different, even opposing, interpretations as the story of the paralytic.
Thus, the words “I have no one” can be interpreted as simple despair. The paralyzed man simply had no friends; he was seriously ill and alone; no one needed him. “What is your name? No one calls me by name; I live alone,” wrote Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) in one of his fairy tales.
But the paralytic's words can also be seen as a condemnation. If this is so, he considered others to be the cause of his condition and blamed his neighbors for the fact that God had distanced himself from him. Moreover, by saying that there was simply no one nearby, he seemed to be asserting that those around him were not at all humans. The "logic" of dehumanization was very characteristic of 20th-century dictatorships.
The Lord healed the paralytic but said nothing about Himself. After a while, "Jesus met him in the temple and said to him, 'Look, you are healed; sin no more, lest a worse thing happen to you. The man went and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. '" (John 5:14). These words are also mysterious. Thus, one of the ancient apocrypha says that it was this very paralytic whom Jesus had healed who, at the end of the Gospel account, struck Jesus and accused him of disrespecting the high priest (cf. John 18:22). We will never know if this man who appears at the end of Jesus’ earthly life was the same paralytic in the Gospel story.
The sick man replied, "Lord, I have no one to put me into the pool while the water is stirred; and while I am about to enter, someone else steps down before me" (John 5:7). "Behold the man," Pontius Pilate will say at the end of the Gospel (cf. John 19:5). Theology contributes to giving the words of the Gospel a profound existential dimension. According to Christian dogma and biblical conviction, the one true Man was indeed the Lord Jesus.
The Sheep Gate becomes the prophecy about baptism, and the paralytic is the image of what those who are redeemed in Jesus Christ will be like. According to the words of Revelation, they will wash their garments in the baptismal font in the Blood of the Lamb (cf. Revelation 7:14). Jesus is the true future of humanity; God is our future.
Finally, the moral application of the paralytic's words about his inescapable need to be immersed in water reminds us of the waters of baptism and, more importantly, of Christ's command to baptize all nations (Mt 28:19). Mission is a great grace and a great blessing. Mission is, above all, a commandment and a duty. The Church is called to multiply not through demographics, but thanks to evangelization; it is the remedy for the paralysis of postmodern Christianity and the testimony that the Christian faith is able of helping others and that orthodox Christianity is truly alive. Christ is risen!