Acts 9.32-42

John 5.1.15

Our Scripture lesson this morning offers us a powerful image of the Church. For, with the LORD’s death by which He destroyed death, the power of the LORD’s Resurrection is now working in the world (Jn 5.17). It works in His Holy Church because the Church is His very Body risen from the dead. (Eph 1.23)

If we are striving to follow the LORD in His Resurrection, we should recognize ourselves immediately in the paralytic this morning. For, we experience our own soul paralyzed by the law of sin that dwells in us, that wars against our desire to do good, so that when I want to ‘perform the good’ I find that I am captive to the law of sin that has become incarnate in me, making my body a ‘body of death’, (Rom 7.17f.) an ‘unburied corpse’, as the Church describes the paralytic in her hymns.

Holy Scripture depicts paralysis of the body as a physical form of idolatry, which St Paul says is covetousness. We therefore experience our paralysis in our love for the idols of our lust for the flesh, the lust of our eyes, the pride of life. Paralysis does to the body what idolatry, the indulging of the passions – lust, greed, anger and the rest – does to our soul. It destroys the natural capacity of our eyes to behold the wonders in God’s Law – the wonders of His death and Resurrection in the flesh. It destroys our spiritual ears natural capacity to understand the oracles of God; it destroys our soul’s innate desire for the Holy Spirit. Instead, our soul cleaves to the dust and lusts after the emptiness of the corruption that is in us because of our lusts, our idolatry.

Note how the liturgical season of Pascha moves from the risen LORD Jesus breathing His Holy Spirit on the twelve disciples in the Upper Room on the Eighth Day of His Resurrection to Pentecost. I.e., we are making our way to Pentecost in the doctrine of the apostles that proceeds directly from the Holy Spirit breathed on them by the risen LORD Jesus. The doctrine of the apostles alone liberates our mind from the paralysis of its blindness – to understand Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, who became flesh and who has destroyed our death by His death, and has given life to us who were in the tombs. Within the proclamation of the holy apostles that Christ is risen, which we were granted to experience mystically on Pascha night, we are making our way to Pentecost and to the Fountain of Life from which flows the power of the Holy Spirit that we received in our baptism, our own ‘personal’ Pentecost.

Paschatide, then, is the exact image of our life on this earth in the Church. We are moving in our life on this earth from our baptism, our own personal Pentecost, to our grave as to the mountain of the LORD’s Ascension, when the Pentecostal mystery of our baptism will be consummated in our passing over from this earthly life corrupted by death into the incorruptible Life of the Kingdom of Heaven that was sown in our earthly bodies at our baptism.

So, when you were baptized into Christ, the root of your being, your heart, was cleansed of death. The old heart of stone, the dead heart, was extracted (Eze 19). A new heart of flesh, a living heart, formed from the pure blood and water that flowed from the side of Christ that was pierced, was placed in your body as the LORD’s crucified body was placed in the Tomb. In your baptism, you were transplanted from the dust of death and grafted onto the living ‘vine’ of the LORD’s Body risen and ascended in glory. You were clothed with Christ as the disciples were clothed with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. You put on Christ’s human nature as a garment and so you put on the Holy Spirit by whom the LORD became flesh of the Holy Virgin and by whom He was raised from the dead. Clothed in the garment of Christ’s deified human nature, the wedding garment, you were brought to the Chalice as a newborn baby is brought to his mother’s breasts, and you became a partaker of Christ’s own divine nature.

So, you see that, in our earthly life, we still live in the corruptible body, the old wineskin, of the old man that is paralyzed by death. But your inner man has died to that paralysis because he was united to Christ in the likeness of His death. There is now working in your flesh, in the ‘tomb’ of your inner man, the power of Christ’s Holy Spirit. The very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is working to raise you to the immortal Life of Heaven in the Glory of Christ’s Holy Resurrection and Ascension.

In this life, then, you see that we live at the crossroads of two paths in our inner man, and that we are faced with a choice every day, every hour, every moment, as to which path we will choose to walk: either the broad and easy path of our old man paralyzed by death, and that ends in the condemnation of death, or the narrow Path of the New Man, which is Christ Himself, who has sown His Holy Spirit in us through our baptism.

Understand, we are in Paschatide, and so we read our Sunday Scriptures in the Taboric Light of Christ’s Holy Resurrection. It is the risen LORD Jesus who comes to the paralytic in our Gospel this morning, just as it is the risen LORD Jesus who comes to us this morning in His Church, in His crucified and risen Body. He comes to us in the doctrine of His holy apostles, just as He came to the paralytic and to Dorcas in the person of St Peter in Acts, and raised them to strength and life. And the same question the LORD posed to the paralytic He poses to us: ‘Do you want to be made well?’ If so, then, as the LORD said to the paralytic, rise, take up your bed and walk. You can take up your bed and walk; you can master your paralysis, because you have received the Power of the LORD’s Holy Spirit, the very same Spirit that raised the LORD from the dead. You will find yourself in a spiritual battle that can get exceedingly fierce, but you can do it because the Power of the Holy Spirit is working in you, and if we choose not to give the energy of our soul to the enticements, the idols of the passions, but choose instead to cleave to the Name of the LORD in prayer, and to keep the eyes of our inner man steadfastly on the vision of the LORD’s Beauty and Glory, then the power of the Holy Spirit works in us to raise us from death to life, to destroy our paralysis and to infuse our soul and mind with the living Hope of ‘Christ in you, risen from the dead, trampling down our death by His death and upon us who were in the tombs bestowing life!’ Amen! Christ is risen! Most Holy Theotokos, save us!