Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord!

Today’s Gospel reading begins where last week’s reading ended. Remember, a week ago we read how the Gergesenes asked that Christ leave them, how He entered into a ship and sailed away to His own town of Capernaum. Here people had a different attitude towards Jesus. No one asked that He leave them, but instead everyone gathered around Him, both admirers and enemies, to hear Him speak. Notice how quickly the situation changed. There the inhabitants were literally afraid of Christ, afraid that He would ruin their lives; here, even enemies like the Pharisees are interested in hearing and seeing Him.

The Holy Evangelist Matthew is not the only one to record today’s miracle. Both Mark and Luke also write of these events, but they add an interesting detail (if you’re curious, you can compare these passages: Matthew chapter 9, Mark chapter 2, and Luke chapter 5). They note that the friends of the paralytic could not reach Jesus because He was in a house surrounded by a throng of people. So as to deliver their sick friend to the Saviour, they disassembled the roof of the house and lowered their friend right before Christ. In such a way their flaming faith and sincere love for their neighbour became clear to everyone.

Without a doubt, today our attention is focused on the miracle of the physical healing of the paralytic. We can surmise that this man at one time in the past fell, or something fell on him, and he was left paralyzed. His life was changed, it would seem forever. It may be more accurate to say that his life stopped. What was left was just a shadow of what had been earlier. And here Christ returns to him his past. It’s as if he resurrected! Who wouldn’t be awed by such a miracle?

Despite the obviousness of everything that has been said, John Chrysostom, our faithful guide through the Holy Scriptures who explains each divine word with such keenness, leads our attention not to the second miracle in today’s reading (physical healing), but to the first. Note that before doing anything else Christ forgives the sins of today’s unfortunate person and in such a way gives him not only a rejuvenated physical life, but also a spiritual one. All the man’s spiritual illnesses and wounds, all the grime that had collected throughout his whole life, everything was cleansed and healed. Truly this is a great act.

Today before us we have the image of a physical miracle (the healing of an illness) as well as a spiritual, invisible miracle (the forgiveness of sins). They are both marvelous, though the spiritual is much better. They both point to the Divinity of Jesus Christ. One of these miracles (complete physical healing) is extremely rare. The other (forgiveness of sins) is, on the contrary, extremely common. How many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people weekly confess their sins and receive from God remittance and the chance to start from scratch living for God? Therefore, let’s focus our thoughts on the great spiritual acts that our Lord manifests on us continually. Let’s not search for those rare signs or other worldly physical miracles from God, because they are in no way comparable with that which the Lord always offers us.

priest. Alexis