Romans 12.6-14

Matthew 9.1-8

Our Matins Gospel for this morning was of the risen LORD proving to His disciples that He was not a ghost because He had a body of flesh and bones. Yesterday, our Gospel was of the hemorrhaging woman whose body was healed from bleeding to death by touching the hem of the LORD’s garment and receiving into her body healing power from the LORD’s Body; this Tuesday we will celebrate the LORD’s Transfiguration when His Body shone brighter than the sun; on Friday, we celebrate the glorification of St Herman of Alaska, whose body in repose shone with the Light of the LORD on Mt Tabor. We are now in the season of the Theotokos’ Dormition, when Her Son and God raises Her bodily and receives Her as the Queen of Heaven.

And now we come to this morning’s Gospel of a man whose body is paralyzed. The contrast of the paralytic’s body with the body of the LORD, His Holy Mother, and His saints, and those whom the LORD heals could not be more stark. Beneath all our Scripture lessons leading up to this morning, and into the next couple of weeks, one makes out a profound theology of the body.

Faith, as it is given in Holy Scripture and in the fathers of the Church, is a movement of the heart drawing near to God in fear and love. Faith encompasses our mind, our desires, all our faculties, and our body. When we turn in our heart away from God, there are huge consequences for our mind, our soul, our body. We become spiritual paralytics; ‘unburied corpses.’ Those who worship the idols, says the Psalmist, become just like them: they have eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, hands and feet that do not move, a throat that cannot speak. They become blind and deaf to the beauty of God, unable to walk in the ways of God, the ways of divine Beauty and eternal Life, because they have united the desire of their heart to the flesh darkened by sin, that is here today and gone tomorrow.

Since the industrial age, the human body has been likened to a machine. This has been applied even to the soul. We speak, for example, in mechanical terms of a ‘dysfunctional’ personality, someone who has a couple of loose screws. But according to Holy Scripture, we are not like machines. We are like God. The holy fathers speak of the ‘nature’ of the body and the ‘nature’ of the soul. Never do they refer to our body or soul or mind as a ‘machine.’ The word for ‘nature’ has to do with living and growing plants. This takes us back to Holy Scripture where man is likened to the ‘grass’ of the field. But, even as grass that is here today and gone tomorrow, man is a deep mystery worthy of God’s care and attention: ‘What is man that Thou, O God, art mindful of him!’ cries the Psalmist.

A machine is created by man. It is lifeless. So-called artificial intelligence is both the product of human delusion, and the source of deeper delusion. It equates human intelligence and personhood not with the fear of God, with faith and love, but with a dialectical intelligence that is rooted in lifeless mathematical logarithms.

But a plant grows from the soil of the earth. And its health is determined by the nutrients of the earth it’s rooted in. If man is like a plant, it’s because he is rooted in the ‘good’ earth that God created, and in Christ, the ‘Rock,’ the ‘Fountain of Life,’ the Image of the invisible God. Like the plant, man’s vitality and health are determined by what or Who he is rooted in.

Man comes into being as male and female from within the Image of God, who is Christ (Col 1.15). He is rooted in the Fountain of Life, who is the LORD (Jer 2.19), whose Living Waters, the Holy Spirit, nourish and give life to him as male and female in the whole of his composite ‘nature’ of mind, soul and body. Made in God’s image as male and female, man in his body also is a ‘fountain of life;’ for, as male and female, he is constituted with the natural capacity to create life from within himself – like God does. So, even in his body, as male and female, as St Gregory of Nyssa observes (4^th cent), man is ‘according to the Image and likeness of God.’

And, the first commandment given to man is to ‘multiply and fill the earth,’ i.e., to create children, not in the image of the beasts that perish, but in the image and likeness of God, which man is able to do from his own body, because he is male and female in the image and likeness of God.

Following the holy fathers – e.g., St Kallistos Angelikoudes (Philo V) – the story of the Garden (Gen 2), takes us from the outer visible creation of the body to the ‘hidden man of the heart.’ In the Garden, man is given the command to deny himself, which he can do by choosing not to eat from the tree of learning good and evil.

You see how man is revealed to us in Holy Scripture as a creature made in the image and likeness of God, with the power of self-determination, the freedom to love and obey God, or to choose not to love and obey God, and to love and obey another lord.

Here in the Garden we catch our first glimpse of the ‘Vine’ that is Christ, whose branches we are. ‘I am the vine,’ the LORD says, ‘You are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers. [Jn 15.4-6] His soul, mind and body ‘wither’ like the limbs of a paralytic.

If we are like branches that grow from a vine, and not machines, that means that the vine we grow from will determine whether we bear much fruit, or become spiritual corpses and wither away as paralytics. We read in Deuteronomy that because Israel gave her heart to the false gods of the nations, she became paralyzed like the idolatrous nations because, as it says, ‘their rock is not as our Rock. For their vine comes from the vine of Sodom, and from the fields of Gomor'rah; their grapes are grapes of poison, their clusters are bitter.’ [Deu 32:31-32] What is this vine of Sodom and Gomorrah? It is the vine of sex, the ‘uroboric serpent’ whose life is nourished by the sexual ‘waters’ of the human body, a sexuality whose roots go no deeper than the desires of the body, a life that is never able to escape death. It is the vine of sexual immorality and perversity and unfaithfulness that gives birth to thorns and thistles that destroy the soul and wither the body away.

Contrast that to what happens to us when we present our bodies as a living and holy sacrifice to God (Rm 12.2), and receive into our bodies the Most Pure Body and Precious Blood of Christ in Holy Eucharist. We are made to become members of God’s Body. We receive the Heavenly Spirit. We are nourished in the Living Waters of Christ’s Body by which He has cleansed us from our sins and delivered us from the tombs, as He did the Gergesenes last Sunday. We are healed as was the hemorrhaging woman yesterday. We are raised from the bed of our paralysis and our spiritual death as was the paralytic this morning. We are transfigured in the renewing of our mind according to our obedience to the will of God. The sexual desires of our body are sanctified through the sacramental mystery of marriage to produce fruit in the form of healthy children formed in the fear, the faithfulness and the love of God.

Our native gifts and talents are sanctified in the Holy Spirit to become offerings of our faith through which we build up the Body of Christ in the fear and love of God that heals and makes alive, that fills the soul with joy and hope, and the mind with the Wisdom of God, to whom we ascribe glory, honor and worship. Amen!

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