Many of us have been following the news of the day. Over the last week, riots have broken out in major cities over the deaths of two different black men who were arrested for criminal activity while in police custody. Needless to say, this news has both polarized our ethnic minorities and paralyzed our nation.
Sin also causes paralysis and it comes in a multitude of flavors. The Pharisees exhibited one form of paralysis. Jesus heals a paralytic on the Sabbath no less, and incurs the wrath of a group of men, leaders of the Jewish community. Could sin be at work here? Let’s take a look. In his book, Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller, a well-known Presbyterian thinker and minister with Orthodox Christian leanings discusses misuse of power and seeking of power over people as putting ourselves in God’s place, or making ourselves to be gods. The Pharisees made the process holier than the results the process was intended to produce.
Why would it be OK to water one’s animals that provided their livelihood on the Sabbath, yet it is not OK to heal someone of disease, such as paralysis or dare I say some life-threatening disease such as cancer? I can just see those Pharisees now. Our Dr. Prescop is making his rounds at the medical clinic on the Sabbath. You can’t do that you have to wait until Sunday or Monday to to that. “Well, if I wait until then, my patient may be dead and I would be negligent of my duties.” The Pharisee says, “So what, the Sabbath is a holy day and that takes precedence.” This vignette is not about the Sabbath, but about use of power and leadership.
When we put ourselves in God’s place, that is, when we make ourselves to be god, we are no longer God-like. We become counterfeit gods. God gave us our processes as a means to get to a spiritual end. The struggle we have as Orthodox Christians living in Silicon Valley—or anywhere else in the United States for that matter—is that we are doing Orthodoxy. We reduce our faith to doing certain prescribed things in prescribed manner, whether it is fasting, our manner of prayer, the services we attend and what we do during these various processes. While these are important, they are not the most important. The important thing that our Lord intended the Pharisees and us to do is to become unparalyzed by focusing on being Orthodox Christians. Being an Orthodox Christian is about cultivating the fruits we call the virtues. These are things like charity, respect for others, empowering others, caring for others who need it. It is not about controlling other people. We are not a cult, but rather, the Church is an institution set up by our Lord himself to allow people to heal and empower each other through God’s grace working through each and every one of us.
That is, the Church is in the words of Timothy Keller, “a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” He is not putting down saints in and of themselves as many of the saints gave up their lives to defend and protect the Church from the ravages of heresy. We as Orthodox Christians would do well to keep this in mind, we are not a museum but a living organism, one that truly is a hospital for healing sinners.
Our Lord gave his life up and suffered on the Cross for all of us, taking on all of the sin of the world and creating a path to life for us that cost him his life. He demonstrated the proper use of power in his earthly life. It was not about destroying us and controlling us. It was about freedom of choice. To empower others, we by nature have to give up some power. Anyone who is a teacher knows that you have to allow a child to make mistakes in the learning process. We learn more from our mistakes than from what we do right. If we do something right consistently, we already know that skill. It is expected that when we are learning a new skill, we will be a bit awkward.
Christ not only heals physical paralysis, but spiritual paralysis as well, if we let him. The paralytic asked the Lord to have mercy on him and heal him. What does this say to us? It says that we need to focus on the balance of process and look at the results we generate. Doing so prevents us from turning the process into a counterfeit god. Focusing on the results allows us to use the process the way God intended. We are blessed in our parish because for the most part that is what we strive to do just that. Our humanity, however, does occasionally get in the way, which is why we must be aware of our propensity for building our own idols—and even worse—giving them Orthodox-sounding names!
However, we also must not get haughty and live in our past. We need to understand what we are dealing with in our American culture and not run away form the world. If our Lord ran away from the world, he might not have given up his life for us and we might not be saved as a result. We as Orthodox Christians must embrace the world and take the proverbial bull by the horns if we are to be effective as Christians and as a Church. That is how we heal the paralysis in our lives—by letting God in to do that healing—we also get the bonus of being more effective in doing God’s work in our lives and in the lives of others.
Our Lord gave himself as food for the faithful so that the faithful are spiritually nourished and empowered to empower themselves and others and change the world, not to bow down to a process that is only the means to the ends. We must focus on our being rather than doing if we are to have the phenomenal results the apostles and countless other Christians after them attained. The choice is ours because God gave us the freedom to choose.