Luke 24:1-12 (Matins)
Acts 9:32-42
John 5:1-15
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In these lay a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed.
One man was there, who had been ill for thirty-eight years. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. |
Do you know that every day is both Christmas morning and Easter? Yet, each day is also the cold darkness before the Nativity, when the pre-solstice nights are long, and hope seems far off. Each day is also the steel-gray sky and stone-hard ground of March with soft Spring an impossible memory. Ours is a world of both. Always both.
The Fathers of the Church and Orthodox Christian teaching today affirm the goodness of humankind. Each of us is born perfect and pure and good, bearing the Image of God. We are invited into a life of Heaven-on-earth, in which we follow God's Son into the fullness of our divine birthright .... unto eternal life. Yet, the world itself is everywhere filled with disease and death.
Theologians see two propositions. The first proposes original sin — the mistaken doctrine that all humans are born evil, invented at the turn of the fifth century, which Orthodox Christians reject. The second proposes ancestral sin, which sees evil in the world which we call disease and death.
The second-century Patriarch of Antioch, Theophilus, wrote that the first humans in Eden and each of us still today were created to be immortal, dwelling in happiness with God eternally. We also were created to be free, having the power to reject God and His marvelous world. That is, Adam and Eve were made to live in happiness forever with God as we are today. But they chose their own life, their own rules, their own way of doing things. Theophilus wrote,
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As a burnished mirror, so ought man to have his soul pure. When there is rust
on the mirror, it is not possible that a man's face be seen in the mirror; so also when there is sin in a man, such a man cannot behold God. (Apology to Autolycus, 2). |
| "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." (Mt 5:8) |
To be with God — to love Him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength — is to see Him, to live under grace where deep calls to deep, where Heaven's light enlivens your world, where everything in your life is enlivened by His Presence. Yes, He provides all that you will need, and His force of life, His dunamis, shines within you. In this all-important circle of love and life, worldly prosperity and personal health do not count for much, for He has overcome the world (John 16:23), and life in Him and with Him is above and beyond worldly cares.
This is the doctrine that Jesus taught, and which the Community of St. John the Theologian and the Most Holy Theotokos carried forward. This is the doctrine that the Orthodox Church everywhere and always has repeated without revision. We are not born in a state of helpless depravity as Augustine of Hippo and the Protestant Reformers have claimed. We are able to live a pure life in harmony with God and His Heaven.
Then what shall we say about death? As we have seen, the Early Church Fathers recognized that Eve and Adam's free choice to reject God and His ways led to a separation between themselves and Heaven's life. This separation, which is a perversion of our natural state of health, is called disease and its follow-on death. We see in the New Testament over and over again that those who draw near to God in sincerity are touched by the great force of life which alone is God's power. In our Epistle reading this morning, the sick are healed and the dead are raised. In our Gospel lesson a paralytic man resumes the full use of his body and limbs.
Let us be clear here. God did not send His Son into our world to found a healing ministry. But it so happens that being near to God, even to those whom He has given His life-giving power, is like being near a radiant light that scatters disease and burns off even the mold of death revealing life, pure life.
The scene we enter in our Gospel lesson this morning is a many-layered complex of disease whose root cause is the rejection of God. The place is called Bethesda made from a Hebrew word meaning "house of mercy" and an Aramaic word meaning "shame" or "disgrace." It is the House of Mercy that has become the House of Shame. The building Jesus enters — five connected colonnades encircling a pool of water — is an Asclepion, a pagan temple worshipping the Greek god Asclepius, commonly found throughout the Hellenized world. Here diseased people would lay awaiting the ministrations of Asclepius. These temples also might function as medical clinics, where physicians, called the "children of Asclepius," would come to heal the ones they could. (Some physicians today where the caduceus, a symbol of Asclepius, on their lapels.)
But the Gospel intends us to contemplate not a first-century medical clinic, but rather a condition of life. Here we find "dog-pack think," life lived at its meanest level. A dog-eat-dog darkness pervades the place. The ways of God are distant and alien. Here, we find not the life of Chesed, enjoined by the Hebrew Scriptures, which is kindness and mercy but rather cut-throat rivalry. We find no love of neighbor, enjoined by Jesus of Nazareth or Hillel or Shammai, but rather predators. Yes, an angel of God bestirs the water from time to time, and this is to remind the people of God's kindness and mercy. But instead of imitating God's mercy, we find selfish frenzy as people push each other aside to be first into the pool. One poor man has languished in the plain sight of all for thirty-eight years. (They have a name for him rendering him invisible and of no acount: he's "a loser.")
From the standpoint of Heaven's norm of life, commanded by God on Mt. Sinai and taught by His Son, this Asclepion is the anti-world, a merciless food chain. Here the rejection of God is explicit and devout, for people gather to worship a pagan god (who, by the way, was was born from an adulterous relationship according to the Greek myths). The people place their trust, not in God, but in Asclepius. They live as solitaries in the terror of the wolf pack, which erupts into a melee each time the water is bestirred. Truly, this is Heaven and life with God stood on its head: idolatry, compulsive sin, predatory selfishness, alienation from others and from God. As our own pandemic has shown, people joined in disease and suffering are presented with a choice: generosity and kindness (a neighbor across the street placed three masks on the Hermitage gate yesterday .... these are hard to come by these days) or hoarding, daily drunkenness, and selfishness. Jesus confirms the sinful character of this place explicitly by warning the healed paralytic, "See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse befall you." Here's the norm of life in the Asclepion: sin.
Walking away from the scene, Jesus encounters yet another layer of dog-pack think. Religious authorities seek to condemn Him because He has healed on the Sabbath. (We wonder if the Temple police will move to arrest the angel who has bestirred the waters on Saturday.) And now we contemplate a vast food chain of predatory competitiveness, petty jealousies, and deadly rivalry that proceeds up through the bureacracy of Judea through the Roman Legions to the Tribunes and Procurators unto Caesar, who rules the world with merciless and deadly force.
In our reading from Acts this morning, we find a contrasting mirror image of the story of the paralytic. Instead of the Asclepion described by St. John the Theologian, we find ourselves in the midst of a Christian Ecclesia described by St. Luke. Instead of mean-spiritedness, we find caring love. In the place of the paralytic who lay in abject neglect for thirty-eight years, we find Aeneas who has been bedridden eight years in paralysis. His name, invoking the founder of Rome, suggests all Roman citizens, and he is healed by St. Peter. Instead of stampeding the paralytic man at Bethesda, we find fellow Christians who lovingly display the beautiful garments made by Tabitha-Dorcas, grieving the loss of a gentle friend, whom Peter raises from the dead.
This morning we survey two worlds.
We see the Kingdom of Heaven:
people gathered in loving communities
imitating God's Son,
living out His kindness and mercy
in an atmosphere of mutual encouragement.
We also see the world we are free to choose:
a rejection of God's ways,
a rejection of God's love,
a rejection of God's commandments,
which always devolves into a free-for-all among the diseased and dying .... unto death's door.
Each of these worlds leads to eternal life,
for all of us were created to be permanent.
Which will we choose?
Rivalry around a pool of contagion
or
love,
pure love,
in the light-filled Heaven of our God?
Each life born into the world
repeats the story of Eden,
and
we must stand at the same crossroads.
Which way will we go?
As we find in the opening sentences of the Apostles' Teachings,
the
Didache,
"Two ways there are: life and death."
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.