SUNDAY OF THE PARALYTIC

The fourth Sunday after Easter is called the Week of the Paralytic. During the liturgy, the conception from the Gospel of John, chapter 5, verses 1–15 is read. The text tells of the Lord Jesus healing a paralyzed man.

According to the Gospel of John, the Lord came to Jerusalem for the feast. “After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus came to Jerusalem” (5:1). What kind of holiday it was, we cannot say with certainty. Apparently, this was one of the three major holidays where Jewish tradition at the time required a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate. Such “Pilgrimage Feasts” were Passover, or Passover, in memory of the Exodus, Pentecost, or Shavuot, in honor of the giving of the Torah, and the Setting of Tabernacles, Sukkot, in memory of the wanderings in the wilderness of the biblical people. For the exercise of piety, it is important to remember that the Lord Jesus in His earthly life, like us now, was Himself a pilgrim. We make pilgrimages in His footsteps.

“There is a pool in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate, called Bethesda in Hebrew, which had five covered passages. In them lay a great multitude of the sick, the blind, the lame, the withered, waiting for the movement of the water,” the Gospel further says (5:2-3). The Hebrew name for the pool, Bethesda, usually translated as “House of Grace” or “House of Mercy” is rich in biblical symbolism. Reading it immediately in translation during the service is of course clearer and preferable.

When interpreting the texts of Scripture, the Church Fathers paid attention to the smallest details. In the Bible they saw a special, weighty, “wink of God”, a mysterious melody of words, the mysticism of light and fire. Thus, the “five covered passages” of the Sheep Pool, according to St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), pointed to the Law of Moses, in particular, to the Pentateuch. The enumeration of “the sick, the blind, the lame, the withered, the waiting” spoke of the Law’s ability to reveal disease and prohibit crime, and its complete inability to heal it. It is interesting that the Father of the Church meant both human laws and divine law.

Following this method of interpretation, we could add that such a Community of the Helpless represents all humanity not included in the House of Grace, that is, the Church of the Living God, through the sheep’s Font of Baptism. “Hell is others,” as Sartre once said in a different, philosophical way about undisguised human freedom. According to the philosopher, man is self-realizing freedom. The hell is that there are infinitely many such freedoms. And God “looms” over all this. With His freedom He will “overwhelm” everyone. This is another image of the Sheep Font - humanity, as a community of God-forsakenness.

“There was a man who had been sick for thirty-eight years” (John 5:5). Researchers of New Testament texts and theologians have not yet come to a consensus about the age of Jesus. It was generally accepted that he was crucified at the age of thirty-three. At the same time, one of the early Christian authors and Church Fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons (130–202), wrote that Christ lived through all ages and was crucified as an old man. Modern biblical scholarship suggests that Jesus was thirty-seven or thirty-eight at the time of his crucifixion. If this is so, then in the person of the paralytic at the Sheep Pool, Jesus met someone of the same age. Thirty-eight years is a very long time, and for an immobilized person an eternity. The gospel words literally speak of the pain he experienced, the doomed helplessness. In the theological sense, through the mention of age, the essence of the Christian belief is revealed that the Lord took upon Himself all of ours and gave us all of His. He shared and continues to share with us all circumstances and all misfortune.

“When Jesus saw him lying down and learned that he had been lying there for a long time, he said to him: Do you want to be healthy? The sick man answered Him: Yes, Lord; but I do not have a person who would lower me into the pool when the water is troubled; but when I come, another has already gone down before me” (John 5:6-8). The water, at the touch of an Angel, awaited the one who had time to descend into it first. Here the Lord Himself comes to meet the sufferer. “Do you want to be healthy?” This question may seem surprising in the context of those biblical times. Then humanity was much more simple and natural, and therefore hardly anyone could not want healing, wanted to remain sick. Placed in a modern context, they gain relevance and become topical. In our last times, humanity often does not want recovery; it has simply become accustomed to illness. Medicine becomes unbearable, and, at the same time, acquires a religious dimension, replacing power and becoming an end in itself.

“Yes, Lord; but I have no man to lower me into the pool.” It is perhaps difficult to find any narrative in the entire Gospel text, every word of which would allow for such a wide range of different, even contradictory interpretations as the story of the paralytic.

Thus, the words “I have no man” can be interpreted as simply despair. The paralyzed man simply had no friends, he was seriously ill and lonely, no one needed him. “What is your name? Nobody calls me by name, I live alone,” wrote Andrei Platonov. At the same time, condemnation can be seen in the words of the paralytic. If this is so, it turns out that he considered people to be the cause of his condition and condemned his neighbors. The Lord forgave him for this despair: “Then Jesus met him in the temple and said to him: Behold, you are healed; Sin no more, lest anything worse happen to you” (John 5:14).

“Behold, the Man,” Pontius Pilate will say, as if in reminder of the event at the Sheep Font (cf. John 19:5). In a paradoxical intersection of images, he himself washed his hands in the font of condemnation. Theology helps to give the words of the Gospel a special, spiritual dimension. After all, according to Christian belief, indeed, the only and true Man was the Lord Jesus. He is the true future of man, the Image of what the redeemed in Christ will be in the age to come. They, according to the word of the Apocalypse, will wash their clothes in the font of the Blood of the Lamb (cf. Rev. 7:14). Finally, the moral application of the words of the paralytic about the need for a person who could lower him into the font reminds the Church of Christ’s commandment to preach and baptize all nations (Matt. 28:19). Mission is a great grace and benefit. The Church is called to multiply not by demographics, but by preaching, this is the healing from paralysis and evidence that she is truly alive.

CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED!