His Eminence Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (1914 – August 4, 2003) was bishop of the Diocese of Sourozh, the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland. He wrote masterfully about Christian prayer, and many Orthodox Christians in Great Britain and throughout the world consider him to be a saint.

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

How tragic today’s story of the life of Christ is. A man had been paralysed for years. He had lain at a short distance from healing, but he himself had no strength to merge into the waters of ablution. And no one – no one in the course of all these years – had had compassion on him.

The ones rushed to be the first in order to be healed. Others who were attached to them by love, by friendship, helped them to be healed. But no one cast a glance at this man, who for years had longed for healing and was not in himself able to find strength to become whole.

If only one person had been there, if only one heart had responded with compassion, this man might have been whole years and years earlier. As no one, not one person, had compassion on him, all that was left to him – and I say all that was left to him with a sense of horror – was the direct intervention of God.

We are surrounded by people who are in need. It is not only people who are physically paralysed who need help.

There are so many people who are paralysed in themselves, and need to meet someone who would help them.

Paralysed in themselves are those who are terrified of life, because life has been an object of terror for them since they were born: insensitive parents, heartless, brutal surroundings. How many are those who hoped, when they were still small, that there would be something for them in life. But no. There wasn’t. There was no compassion. There was no friendliness. There was nothing. And when they tried to receive comfort and support, they did not receive it. Whenever they thought they could do something they were told, ‘Don’t try. Don’t you understand that you are incapable of this?’ And they felt lower and lower.

How many were unable to fulfil their lives because they were physically ill, and not sufficiently strong… But did they find someone to give them a supporting hand? Did they find anyone who felt so deeply for them and about them that they went out of their way to help? And how many those who are terrified of life, lived in circumstances of fear, of violence, of brutality… But all this could not have taken them if there had been someone who have stood by them and not abandoned them.

So we are surrounded, all of us, by people who are in the situation of this paralytic man. If we think of ourselves we will see that many of us are paralysed, incapable of fulfilling all their aspirations; incapable of being what they longed for, incapable of serving others the way their heart speaks; incapable of doing anything they longed for because fear, brokenness has come into them.

And all of us, all of us were responsible for each of them. We are responsible, mutually, for one another; because when we look right and left at the people who stand by us, what do we know about them? Do we know how broken they are? How much pain there is in their hearts? How much agony there has been in their lives? How many broken hopes, how much fear and rejection and contempt that has made them contemptuous of themselves and unable even to respect themselves – not to speak of having the courage of making a move towards wholeness, that wholeness of which the Gospel speaks in this passage and in so many other places?

Let us reflect on this. Let us look at each other and ask ourselves, ‘How much frailty is there in him or her? How much pain has accumulated in his or her heart? How much fear of life – but life expressed by my neighbour, the people whom I should be able to count for life – has come in to my existence?

Let us look at one another with understanding, with attention. Christ is there. He can heal; yes. But we will be answerable for each other, because there are so many ways in which we should be the eyes of Christ who sees the needs, the ears of Christ who hears the cry, the hands of Christ who supports and heals or makes it possible for the person to be healed.

Let us look at this parable of the paralytic with new eyes; not thinking of this poor man two thousand years ago who was so lucky that Christ happened to be near him and in the end did what every neighbour should have done. Let us look at each other and have compassion, active compassion; insight; love if we can.

And then this parable will not have been spoken or this event will not have been related to us in vain. Amen.

© 2010, Fr. John A. Peck. All rights reserved.

His Eminence Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (1914 – August 4, 2003) was bishop of the Diocese of Sourozh, the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland. He wrote masterfully about Christian prayer, and many Orthodox Christians in Great Britain and throughout the world consider him to be a saint.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Many are those among you who have come to confession either yesterday or the days before, on occasions before, before you received communion, and I want you to reflect later on a very important point. The early Church knew nothing of the private confession which we use nowadays. People came to confess their sins to the whole community, to all their brothers and sisters in Christ because it was felt – as it should be felt by us but is very little perceived – that when one member of the body sins the whole body is wounded, that whatever sin I commit it soils and pollutes the whole body, and moreover that whenever I commit a sin against a brother, against a sister, indeed against myself I am partaking in the Crucifixion of Christ. Because He came into the world to save sinners and whoever is a sinner is to a greater or lesser extent responsible for the Incarnation He accepted in order to die for us. And in the early Church people had an intense sense of community and therefore when sin was committed it was confessed to all the community.

And I know of two communities in the early days of the Revolution when two spiritual guides whenever anyone wanted to make a confession called together all their spiritual children and the confession was made aloud before all in his presence, standing there as the friend of the bridegroom and endowed with the power to forgive or to bind which was given by Christ to His disciples. And when the sinner had confessed his misdeeds these spiritual guides turned to the community and said: you have heard now, are you prepared to carry the weight of his sin, are you prepared to take him on as a beloved brother or sister, are you aware that you are sharing with him his misery? If you are prepared to take him on wholeheartedly, completely, unreservedly in the name of Christ I can give him forgiveness, if you refuse to do this, I cannot do it, but also you will be answerable before God for having rejected one for whom Christ had given His life.

This was the early attitude of the Church: come to the whole community and open one’s heart. And this was possible as long as the community was small, as long as it was persecuted, as long as it was an act of heroism to be a member of the body of Christ. But when the Church was recognized by the State, when there was no danger in belonging to it, moreover when it was easy and advantageous to belong to it, then a confession of that kind was impossible because it was nor received by people who considered that the sin of their brother was their own sin and that they had to carry one another’s wounds and weaknesses; and therefore individual confession was introduced.

You have a certain experience of what this common confession can be at retreats when the priest having prayed with you, talked to you, standing before God with you, makes aloud his own confession before God. You participate in his own confession and you can identify with him as he accepts to share with you his frailty, his sinfulness and his need of forgiveness. This is a small approximation but we must learn to share together the burden of one another sins.

I remember by hearsay the story of a Russian officer who came at a youth conference in the 1920ths and said to the priest in confession that he was in a position to mention all the sins he has committed but his heart was of ice and of stone and he had no feeling about it. He could give a list but not shade a tear. And this priest, father Alexander Elchaninov, commanded him not to make his confession to him but the next morning when the Liturgy would be celebrated to come /off/ before the Liturgy and to all the youth conference assembled there to make the confession he intended to make to the priest.

And this man, feeling the desperate need of his resurrection from the dead, because he was dead at heart, came out, explained what he was about to do. He expected that everyone would move away from him in horror instead of which he felt that all the conference moved towards him in compassion, in sympathy, in oneness; he began to speak his confession and his heart broke and he burst into tears and he was redeemed.

And therefore when we come to confession let us not be content to come to the priest and to speak in his presence to the Lord Jesus Christ who stands there with the wounds of the Crucifixion to which we have added our own. But let us turn to everyone whom we may have offended individually between our last confession or perhaps a long, long time before, open our heart, tell the truth, obtain forgiveness for our victim, heal that limb of the body of Christ which we have wounded at time almost mortally and then only come to the priest and confess our sins to the Lord Jesus Christ who stands crucified and obtain from the priest in His name forgiveness of the sins for which we have truly repented. Amen.

© 2010, Fr. John A. Peck. All rights reserved.

His Eminence Metropolitan Anthony Bloom (1914 – August 4, 2003) was bishop of the Diocese of Sourozh, the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland. He wrote masterfully about Christian prayer, and many Orthodox Christians in Great Britain and throughout the world consider him to be a saint.

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Together with the Holy Scriptures we proclaim that our Lord Jesus Christ is King, Prophet and High Priest of all Creation. And the Lord has told us that in the Christian Church and in the Kingdom, a King is not one who overpowers others to exact from them unconditional and slavish obedience, but He is the one who serves and gives His life for others.

St. John Chrysostom teaches us that anyone can rule, but that no one but a king gives his life for his people, because he so identifies with his people that he has no existence, no life, no purpose but to serve them with all his life and if necessary with his death.

When we keep the Feast of the Cross we can realise with new strength, perceive with new depth what the Kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ means. It means a love for us so complete, so total that He can forget Himself ultimately, without any reservation, forget Himself to the point of existing, of living and of dying for us and together with us; forgetting Himself to such an extent, and identifying Himself with us in such a way that in His humanity He accepts the loss of the perception of His oneness with God, with the source of life eternal – indeed, with life eternal within Himself, and become one with our deadness, with our mortality.

This is the love that makes our Lord Jesus Christ our worthy King; this is a Kingship which makes every knee to bow before Him.

And it is because He is such that He can also be the High Priest of all Creation. The high priests of the pagan world as well as the High Priests of Israel brought forth as a sacrifice victims with which they identified only metaphorically, symbolically, ritually.

The Lord Jesus Christ brought as a victim His own Self, although there was nothing in Him that condemned Him to the death He has taken upon Himself. Doesn’t He say in His High-priestly prayer, talking to His disciples that the adversary is coming near, but there is nothing in Him – in Christ – that belongs to him. There is nothing in Christ which belongs in the realm of death and of sin.

And to His Father He says: I sanctify Myself for them, I bring Myself as a holy offering for My people. The High Priest who brings Himself frees thereby all other creatures from the horror of blood-offering, but confronts us with an immensity, a depth of love divine which otherwise we could not even fathom: life accepting to be quenched, light accepting to go out, eternity accepting to die the mortality of a fallen world.

And that is why the Word of God can speak to us as a Prophet. A prophet is not one who foretells the future; a prophet is one who speaks for God.

One of the prophets of old says that a prophet is one with whom God shares His thoughts. Christ, the Word of God, Christ, the perfect image of Love divine, Christ who not only speaks for God, but who acts, enacts in His life and in His death the Love of God, sacrificial, total, perfect, given …

And this is why the Feast of the Cross is such a wonder in the experience of the Church. We will never be able to experience what it meant for Him to die upon the Cross, even our own death cannot disclose to us what His death was: how can Immortality die? But what we can learn, what we can discover by communing ever more deeply, ever more perfectly through a daring, wholehearted endeavour with the life, and the teaching, and the ways of Christ – what we can learn is to love in a way that approximates more and more to that love divine, and discover in this love the quality which unites death as forgetfulness of self, ultimate and perfect, with the victory of love, Resurrection and eternal life. Amen.

© 2010, Fr. John A. Peck. All rights reserved.