'Do you want to be healed?'

Dear Parish Faithful and Friends in Christ,


CHRIST IS RISEN! 
INDEED HE IS RISEN!

When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” (JN 5:6)

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Saint John - read yesterday during the Liturgy for the Fourth Sunday of Pascha - we find the account of the healing of the paralytic by the Pool of Bethesda near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem and the profound discourse that follows. Archeologists have fairly recently discovered this pool, demonstrating the accuracy of Saint John’s description.

The paralytic had taken his place among a human throng of chronic misery, described by the evangelist as “a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed” [verse 3]. Being there for 38 years and not being able to experience what were believed to be the healing capacities of the waters of the pool, the paralytic seemed resigned to his destiny.

Then Jesus appeared. He saw the paralytic and He knew of his plight. Jesus then asked the paralytic a very pointed and even poignant question: “Do you want to be healed?” [verse 6].

Surprisingly, considering what must have been his own misery, the paralytic’s answer was less than direct and not exactly enthusiastic: “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is troubled, and while I am going another steps down before me” [verse 7].

Nevertheless, and even though the paralytic does not commit himself to an act of faith in the healing power of Jesus, he receives the following directive from Jesus: “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” And then, in that somewhat laconic style of describing the healing power of Christ that characterizes the Gospel accounts, we read simply, “And at once the man was healed, and he took up his pallet and walked” [verse 9]. The “sign” is that Christ can restore wholeness to those in need.

I believe that we need to concentrate on the question Jesus posed to the paralytic, “Do you want to be healed?” (The King James version of the question is: “Wilt thou be made whole?”) For, if the various characters that Jesus encountered in the Gospels are also representatives or “types” of a particular human condition, dilemma, or state of being, then the question of Jesus remains alive in each generation and is thus posed to each of us today.

If sin is a sickness, then we are “paralyzed” by that sin to one degree or another of intensity. But do we really want to be healed of the paralyzing effect of sin in our lives?

The answer seems obvious, even a “no-brainer,” but is that truly the case? Or, are we more-or-less content with continuing as we are, satisfied that perhaps this is “as good as it gets” in terms of our relationship with God and our neighbors?

Do we manage to politely deflect the probing question of Christ elsewhere, counter-posing a reasonable excuse as to what prevents us from exerting the necessary energy from our side? Our teaching claims that we must also contribute to the synergistic process of divine grace and human freedom that works together harmoniously for our healing.

Perhaps it is easier and more comfortable to stay as we are – after all, it’s really not that bad - a position reflected in the non-committal response of the paralytic. For to be further healed of sin will mean that we will have to make some changes in our life, in our interior attitudes and in our relationships. It certainly means that we will have to confess our faith in Christ with a greater intensity, urgency and commitment. Are we up to that challenge?

Actually, we could more accurately say that we have already been healed. That happened when we were baptized into Christ. (There are baptismal allusions in the healing of the paralytic by the pool of water).

Every human person is paralyzed by the consequences of sin, distorting the image of God in which we were initially created. Baptism was meant to put to death the sin that is within us. We were healed, in that baptism is the pledge to life everlasting, where death itself is swallowed up in the victory of Christ over death. For we are baptized into the Death and Resurrection of Christ.

So, with a slight variation, the question of Christ could also imply: Do you rejoice in the fact that you have been healed, and does your way of life reflect the faith and joy that that great healing from sin and death has imparted to you? Are you willing to continue in the struggle that is necessary to keep that healing “alive” within you?

Direct and simple questions can get complicated, often by the paralyzing effect of sin in our lives. We can then get confused as to how to respond to such essential questions. Every time we walk into the church we are being asked by Christ, “Do you want to be healed?” Responding with a resounding “Yes!” would be a “sign” of the faith, hope and love that are within us by the grace of God.

The 'Apostles to the Apostles'

Dear Parish Faithful,


CHRIST IS RISEN! 
INDEED HE IS RISEN!

We are in the week of the Myrrh-bearing Women, as we extend last Sunday's commemoration of these extraordinary women throughout the entirety of this week. At all the Vespers and Matins services for this week, the Church will sing and chant primarily about the myrrh bearing women and their role as apostolic witnesses, implying their role as "apostles to the apostles." 

Their eyewitness testimony of both the empty tomb and the Risen Lord continues to amaze me, and I can only imagine the excitement and intense response with which this testimony must have been greeted when they shared their experience with the other members of the earliest Christian communities. Their timeless witness is with us until "the end of the world." As the New Testament scholar, Richard Baukham writes:

"These women, I think we can say, acted as apostolic eyewitness guarantors of the traditions about Jesus, especially his resurrection but no doubt also in other respects. As we have seen, that their witness acquires textual form in the Gospels implies that it can never have been regarded as superseded or unimportant. For as long as these women were alive their witness, 'We have seen the Lord,' carried the authority of those the Lord himself commissioned to witness to his resurrection.... 

"They were well-known figures and there were a large number of them. They surely continued to be active traditioners whose recognized eyewitness authority could act as a touchstone to guarantee the traditions as others relayed them and to protect the traditions from inauthentic developments." (Gospel Women, p. 295)

If "fear and trembling seized them" when they departed from the empty tomb (MK 16:8), perhaps in our more focused moments we, too, can experience that same "fear and trembling" when we again read or listen to St. Mark's account in the Gospel.

There is something unforgettable and awe-inspiring about that ever-memorable morning when the sun was just rising and the stone to the tomb had been rolled away; followed then by the appearance of the "young man" dressed in "white robes" announcing:

"Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him." (MK. 16:8). 

The angel understood their amazement, because the women sensed the numinous presence of God filling that empty tomb with an other-worldly reality. Their own disorientation at this unexpected turn of events when they left the tomb is probably behind their initial silence. (This does not mean that the women failed to fulfill the command of the angel to tell the disciples that they would see Jesus in Galilee. It probably means that they did not share this news with others until the time the risen Christ appeared to His disciples confirming the proclamation of the angel that He had indeed risen).

We, in turn, have to always guard against over-familiarity dulling our response to the Good News of Christ's Resurrection from the dead. This is not a message to be nonchalant about! The Resurrection has changed the world and certainly change the lives of Christian believers. And we, too, are "witnesses of these things" (Lk 24:48).

The role of the Myrrh-bearing Women has always been treated with great respect and recognition within the Church. In one of our most beloved paschal hymns, "Let God Arise," two of the stanzas are dedicated to the myrrh-bearers and their witness. These hymns build upon the scriptural accounts of their visit to and discovery of the empty tomb, poetically developing those terse scriptural verses in a more embellished manner that weaves together a host of scriptural messianic images together with the Gospel accounts:

Come from that scene, O women,
bearers of glad tidings,
And say to Zion:
Receive from us the glad tidings of joy,
of Christ's resurrection.
Exult and be glad,
And rejoice, O Jerusalem,
Seeing Christ the King,
Who comes forth from the tomb like a
bridegroom in procession.

The myrrh-bearing women,
At the break of dawn,
Drew near to the tomb of the
Life-giver.
There they found an angel sitting upon
the stone.
He greeted them with these words:
Why do you seek the living among the
dead?
Why do you mourn the incorrupt amid
corruption?
Go, proclaim the glad tidings to His
disciples.

As an aside of sorts, when listening to Rimsky-Korsakov's "Russian Easter Overture," I always feel that he musically captures the excitement and energy of the myrrh-bearers discovering the empty tomb.

The myrrh-bearing women did not mysteriously disappear following the Resurrection of Christ.There were many of them, and we have the names or a reference to at least the following:

• Mary Magdalene, 
• Mary the mother of Joseph the Little and Jose, 
• Salome, 
• Mary of Clopas, 
• Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, 
• Susanna, 
• and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. 

And, of course, the "mother of Jesus," as she is referred to by the Evangelist John (19:25), was at the foot of the Cross. They must have shared their experience innumerable times, and their credibility is what lies behind their inclusion in the Gospels. They must have therefore been very prominent figures in the apostolic era of the Church.

I would again stress their presence in the liturgical services of Pascha. Their presence permeates these services as the empty tomb is always an object of pious and reverential celebration:

Before the dawn, Mary and the women came
and found the stone rolled away from the tomb.
They heard the angelic voice: "Why do you
seek among the dead as a man the one who is
everlasting light? Behold the clothes in the grave.
Go and proclaim to the world: The Lord is risen.
He has slain death, as He is the Son of God, saving
the race of men." (Hypakoe)

To again include a fine summary by the New Testament scholar, Richard Baukham:

"As prominent members of the early communities, probably traveling around the communities, they were doubtless active in telling the stories themselves. They may not usually like the male apostles, have done so in public contexts, because of the social restrictions on women in public space. But this is no reason to deny them the role of authoritative apostolic witnesses and shapers of Gospel traditions, since there need not have been such restrictions in Christian meetings and since they could witness even to outsiders in women-only contexts such as the women's quarters of houses." (Gospel Women, p. 302-303)

Jesus turned things upside down by proclaiming joy to the world through the Cross. Overcoming social prejudices, He raised to great prominence these humble women who would otherwise be unknown to the world. He granted them an integral role in proclaiming the Good News to the world that the sting of death has been overcome through His rising from the dead. As long as the Gospel is proclaimed, we will venerate and celebrate the memory of the Myrrh-bearing Women and rejoice with them.

'The Fulfillment of all Creation'

Dear Parish Faithful,


CHRIST IS RISEN!  INDEED HE IS RISEN!

"In the Orthodox Church everything begins and ends at the 'empty tomb'. Until His Resurrection, the Lord taught about eternal life, but with His Resurrection he showed that He is the eternal life. 

"The Church is the entrance to the resurrected life of Christ, the joy in the Holy Spirit. The expectation of the 'day without evening' in the Kingdom is the fulfillment of all animate and inanimate creation. The Pascha (passover) of the world from corruption to incorruption is realized in the Church. We can now cry aloud: 'Christ has risen and life reigns'!"

Found in From the Passion to the Resurrection - An Anthology of Hymns, Literature and Icons on the Resurrection of Christ

Becoming Witnesses of the Resurrection

Dear Parish Faithful,


CHRIST IS RISEN!
INDEED HE IS RISEN!

"And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour." MK. 15:33)

"And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen." (MK. 16:2)

St. Mark the Evangelist is rather precise when he narrates that the Lord was crucified at the third hour (MK 15:25); that darkness fell over the land at the sixth hour (15:33); and that Christ died at the ninth hour (MK 15:34). According to the Jewish reckoning of time, that would mean that the Lord hung upon the Cross from about 9:00 a.m. (the "third hour") until 3:00 p.m. (the "ninth hour") on that first "Holy Friday." For the last three hours, then, "there was darkness over the whole land." 

This is not a weather report from the Evangelist. Rather, this unexpected darkness was in fulfillment of the prophecy of Amos (read as the OT reading at the Sixth Hour on Holy and Great Friday) that was a "sign" of great significance for the early Church as it began to reflect upon the "scandal" of the Cross:

"And on that day," says the Lord God, "I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning and all of your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day." (AMOS 8:9-10)

The fulfillment of this prophecy revealed the cosmic dimension and significance of the Lord's death on the Cross: all of creation mourned the death of the Son of God. Truly this was an awesome mystery! Yet, while at the time of the Crucifixion this very darkness may have intensified the solemnity of the Lord's death, it also intensified the starkness of Christ dying on the Cross seemingly abandoned by all, including His heavenly Father:

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "E'lo-i, E'lo-i, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (MK 15:34)

Again, the impression is that there was no one with Jesus in his hours of darkness upon the Cross. Yet, at the very moment of His death and seeming abandonment, St. Mark narrates that a Gentile centurion was the first to realize that this was not the case:

And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that he thus breathed his last, he said, "Truly this man was the Son of God!" (MK 15:39)

In addition, there was actually a silent presence of deeply sympathetic figures within some proximity of the Cross that St. Mark accounts for:

There were also women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salo'me, who, when he was in Galilee, followed him, and ministered to him; and also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem. (MK 15:40-41)

Their role was of further great importance, for their vigilance allowed them to know where the tomb of the Lord was located:

Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid. (MK 15:47)

The presence of these faithful female disciples of the Lord - the women we now know and venerate as the Myrrhbearers - prepares us for the awesome revelation that will occur "very early on the first day of the week." (MK 16:2) The account of the discovery of the empty tomb; the angelic proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus to the women by the angel in the tomb; and the astonishment of the women is narrated in a rather succinct manner by St. Mark in only eight verses (MK. 16:1-8). 

When the myrrhbearing women arrived at the tomb carrying their spices in the hopes of anointing the dead body of Jesus, the darkness that will soon be lifted from their hearts was already being dispelled by another sign from the world of nature, for the women arrived "when the sun had risen" (MK 16:2). The cosmos had mourned the death of the Son of God; but it will now rejoice by "announcing" the Resurrection of the Sun of Righteousness. 

The movement from darkness to light is a powerful motif throughout the Gospels. The darkness may represent sin or the final horror of death. Jesus is the very presence of light, and that light is so strong that neither sin nor death can resist its strength. This is not simply a literary "symbol," but a living reality. St. Mark then narrates that the women "were amazed" when, upon "entering the tomb they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe" (MK 16:5). This "young man" was clearly an angel. And it is this angelic being who will first announce the Resurrection of Christ with a definitive clarity that cannot be misunderstood:

"Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him." (MK 16:6)

The Jesus who had been crucified is the Jesus who was now raised from the dead. The risen Jesus is neither a "ghost" nor a "spirit." The Crucified One is now the Risen Lord - Jesus the Christ and King of Israel. The Father had not abandoned His Son; but rather vindicated the One whose resurrection will now be announced to the disciples/apostles, and through them to the whole world. As the biblical scholar, Francis Moloney has written:

The question asked of God by Jesus from the cross, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" (MK 15:34) has been answered. Jesus has not been forsaken. Unconditionally obedient to the will of God (see MK 14:36), Jesus has accepted the cup of suffering. On the cross he is Messiah, King of Israel, and Son of God (see MK 15:32, 39). God's never-failing presence to his obedient Son leads to the definitive action of God: He has been raised! The apparent failure of Jesus has been reversed by the action of God, who has raised Jesus from death. (The Death of the Messiah, p. 11).

St. Mark - and the other evangelists - recorded the events of that first and glorious Easter morning. The evangelists have preserved for us this precious - and exciting - eyewitness testimony of the myrrh bearing women to the empty tomb and the Resurrection of Christ. We accept their testimony and proclaim the same "Good News" to the world today through the Church. And we invite others to share that life - including "harlots and tax-collectors."

Yet, like the myrrhbearing women, we need to experience the Resurrection on a deep and personal level.  In and through faith, the "stone" that covers the entrance to our own hearts can be "rolled away" by the grace of God, and a new dawn can pierce the darkness of sin and death that leaves us as if living an entombed life hidden from the light.

This is the work of God. When the Resurrection of Christ is genuinely experienced in the very depths of our being, we may at first be silent because "trembling and astonishment" lay hold of us. (MK. 16:8) But when we recover our voice we may then joyfully share with others - through our faith and our lives - that CHRIST IS RISEN!

Thomas and The Beloved Disciple: Foreunners of Faith in the Risen Christ

Dear Parish Faithful,

CHRIST IS RISEN! 
INDEED HE IS RISEN!

PASCHA - The Sixth Day (Bright Friday)



This coming Sunday, the Second of Pascha, will concentrate on the movement from unbelief to belief by the Apostle Thomas (hence, Thomas Sunday, as we call it). Not only will Thomas become "believing," but he will make the greatest Christological confession of faith in the New Testament, when he proclaims to Jesus once he sees him and his sacred wounds: "My Lord and my God!" And yet Jesus will respond by telling him - and through him all later generations of Christians - that it is more blessed to believe without seeing, meaning seeing the risen Christ as did Thomas. We call that belief "faith," and faith has its own assurances.

The two texts below capture some of this based on a close reading of JN. 20:19-31, the Gospel passage that we will read on Thomas Sunday:

Even if Thomas did not actually touch Jesus before his act of faith, his insistence upon the need to investigate the wounds so physically and deeply adds immeasurably to the significance of his confession when at last it is made. His movement from faithless insistence on proof to an unparalleled expression of faith brings out the sense of divinity streaming from the One who has been wounded unto death in such a way. As in the foot washing at the beginning of the Supper, God is revealed here not only as incarnate but as the One who gave himself up to the most degrading of deaths in self-sacrificial love for the world. Before Thomas and the group of the disciples gathered in the room stands an unambiguous depiction of the truth that God is love.

If the coming to faith of later believers is different from that of Mary, Thomas, and the other disciples (who actually saw the risen Lord), it has a forerunner in the faith of the Beloved Disciple. As we have seen, when this disciple entered the tomb of Jesus, the separately placed and folded face veil was sufficient to serve as a sign of the resurrection: "He saw and believed" (20:8). True, his faith was based upon sight but it was sight of the grave clothes not sight of the risen Jesus. In his coming to faith without seeing the risen Lord the disciple foreshadows and models the faith of the later community. As in his presence at the foot of the cross and his taking Jesus' mother to himself, in this respect too he stands in for believers of all later generations.

From Life Abounding - A Reading of John's Gospel, by Brendan Byrne