The Sunday of the Paralyzed Man
You must want to be healed
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today is a joyous day in the life of our parish. As a community, we are blessed to witness the full entrance of a new sister into the Orthodox Church. Now called Anastasia, she was sealed this morning with the gift of the Holy Spirit through the sacrament of Holy Chrismation.1
A moment of great grace! And it is fitting that it should fall on this particular Sunday, when both the Epistle and the Gospel readings point to what happens when Christ enters the brokenness of our world and brings forth life—when he transforms paralysis into movement, death into resurrection, and isolation into communion.
The Gospel passage today, from John 5, is one of the most haunting and mysterious. We see an unnamed man who has lain for thirty-eight years by the Pool of Bethesda, waiting—hoping—for healing. He is paralyzed, helpless, and without a friend to lower him into the healing waters.
Thirty-eight years. That’s not just a long time. In Scripture, it is the exact number of years that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, unable to enter the Promised Land. And like them, this man is stuck—on the edge of grace, but unable to reach it.
Christ comes to him, but doesn’t heal him right away. He asks him a question first—a question which echoes within every human heart: ‘Do you want to be made well?’ He doesn’t assume. He doesn’t override the man’s will. He waits for his answer. And he also waits for ours.
Let us pause here. How many of us actually do wish to be healed? I don’t mean that superficially. I mean in the depths. How many of us, if we were to look truly into ourselves, could honestly say that we want Christ to change us? That we’re ready to be made free from the sins that comfort us, the habits that have come to define us, the illusions that we cling to? We may pretend to ourselves that we wish to be free of sin. But all too often, we like our sin. We identify with our sinfulness. It’s what brings us pleasure, what gives us a sense of meaning, and what fuels our ambition.
That is not good. We must truly wish to be healed if we are to receive Christ’s healing gift.
Like the paralysed man. He wants to be made well—that’s why he has come to the sacred pool. But, he thinks, the healing is not available, not to him. ‘I have no one to help me,’ he says. His answer is not a deflection. It is an answer full of longing mingled with sorrow. And he’s right, for thirty-eight years he has been alone. And yet, still he waits.
Now, the pool of Bethesda, we are told, was visited from time to time by an angel. When the angel stirred the waters, the first person to enter the pool would be healed. It was a place of divine encounter—but limited, occasional, and partial. The angel came at intervals. Only one person could be healed at each descent. Only the fastest, or the one with the strongest friends.
But when Christ comes to the pool, that all changes. He does not wait for the water to be stirred. He does not need to work through an angel. He brings healing himself.
Christ tells the man: ‘Rise, pick up your mattress and walk.’ And with that word, the paralysis ends. The man walks. He is healed. No competition. No mad stampede toward the pool. No limit on God’s mercy. No favouritism. Grace has come to him personally, freely.
And what does he do once he is healed? He goes to the Temple. That detail matters. The man does not run off to indulge himself or vanish into the crowd. He has returned to the place of worship. He has returned to thank God. And here we see what healing really means. It is not simply restoration of physical health—it is restoration of spiritual purpose. To be healed is to be able once again to love God as we ought. To go to the Temple. To pray, to praise, to worship—with our bodies and our souls.
Later, Jesus finds him in the Temple and says something that is both sobering and full of truth: ‘Do not sin again, lest something worse happen to you.’
These are hard words. But they are the words of a surgeon who has cut away the rot and warns against reinfection. Grace is free, but not cheap. It is not unconditional in the way we sometimes like to imagine. We do not earn it—but we can lose it. Sin remains real, and deadly.
And the sins Christ tells us not to commit ever again are not only of the flesh—though those, too, enslave us—but even more so, the deeper sins of the spirit: pride, envy, resentment, deceit, sloth, vainglory. These are what really turn healing into relapse, freedom into bondage.
And so, Anastasia—newly chrismated—you must remember this. You have been anointed with holy chrism. Not merely an angel but the Holy Spirit has entered into you. You are not waiting at the edge of the pool; you are now filled with the presence of the one who stirred the waters at the creation of the world. You are no longer paralyzed. You are now able, in Christ, to love God and to love your neighbour. The grace is real. The healing is real.
But so is the warning: ‘Do not sin again, lest something worse happen to you.’ We all must heed this warning.
And it is sadly very true that once you have felt the presence of Christ, once you have experienced his healing power, once you have felt the Spirit illumine and empower your conscience, every lapse is a fall more terrible than the first!
In a way, the saying is true: ignorance is bliss. Not true bliss, to be sure, but those who live with no knowledge of Christ can often, in a way, live easier, more complacent lives—for now. Those of us who live in Christ, however, may no longer plead ignorance. We have been given the gift of knowledge. If we abuse it, the consequences will be more serious than before.
It goes without saying, this is not offered as counsel of despair. The Lord is merciful and always accepts our repentance. This is why he has given us the sacrament of Holy Confession, whereby our baptismal grace is renewed and we are reconciled to him. Yet, again, only when our repentance is true, when it is truly felt—only when we truly desire to be healed.
Now, if we turn briefly to the Epistle reading from Acts, we find another paralyzed man—Aeneas—and a woman who has died—Tabitha, also called Dorcas. Notice that Luke emphasises the Greek version of Tabitha’s Aramaic name—for a reason, as we will see. Peter heals Aeneas. He raises Dorcas from the dead. These miracles are signs, yes, but they also carry a deeper, almost prophetic message.
The name Aeneas would have struck any educated reader of Acts. (And Luke, remember, was an educated man. He was a physician and an artist. His Greek was good. His readers were educated.) Aeneas, in Roman mythology, was the Trojan prince whose journey and battles laid the foundation for the Roman Empire. In Virgil’s Aeneid, written only a few decades before Luke composed Acts, there is a powerful scene in which Aeneas’s son kills a beloved female deer—a pet raised by a Latin girl. Her people rise in grief and fury. That single act triggers war. The deer dies, and through violence and conquest, Rome is born.
Now look at what Luke gives us. In Acts 9, a man named Aeneas is not a conqueror. He is paralyzed. And a woman named Dorcas—a feminine word for deer in Greek—does not die to make way for empire. She dies surrounded by weeping widows—just as women extravagantly mourn the slain deer in the Aeneid—but her death is reversed. She is raised to life by the Prince of the Apostles.
Do you see? It is a reversal of Rome’s founding myth. Christ does not found his kingdom by killing the innocent. He is the innocent one whose self-sacrificial death redeems the guilty and raises the dead. He does not conquer by war, but by healing. He does not glory in domination, but in love.
And yet—and here is the mystery—Rome herself is not rejected. The Roman Empire, once a persecutor of the Church, is in time healed and baptized. And today, we commemorate not only the healing of the paralytic, but also the founding of Constantinople, the new Rome consecrated to Christ by St Constantine, who saw the cross in the sky and heard the words, ‘In this sign…’ the sign of self-sacrificial love, ‘…conquer.’ And he did conquer—not by the sword, not really, but by raising his empire to the worship of the One True God.
And the story continued. For example, eastward and northward toward the Slavs. It just so happens that today we also commemorate Sts Cyril and Methodius, who carried the light of Orthodoxy from Rome and Constantinople to the Slavic lands. So, what began with a small group of scared and persecuted Jews in Jerusalem spread outward to the furthest ends of the earth.
And that story continues down to today—right here in our own community. By being chrismated today, Anastasia becomes part of the story. We are all a part of it. For, the first missionaries to this island also came from Jerusalem and then from Rome. We wholeheartedly embrace that story, and importantly we do not hold anything that came after in ignorant or proud contempt.
No, we do not reject our past—not as Christians, not as Englishmen, not as modern westerners. Rather, like Christ’s disciples in every generation, we work toward the redemption and renewal of the past, in the present, while looking forward to a future of ever-greater glory. The Orthodox tradition, here in England, is being grafted onto the old trunk of British Christianity. God willing, we will see it soon burst back into full bloom.
And as we contemplate the mystery of Church unity, let us not overlook the significance of this past week, when the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed a new pope, Leo XIV. Our own Patriarch, John X of Antioch, sent a message marked by dignity, love, and deep Christian hope. He wrote to the new Pope:
With great joy, emotion, and hope we received the news of your election to the Apostolic See of Rome. We extend to you our sincere greetings in Christ, our Risen Lord. We pray that Christ the Almighty Redeemer may receive the soul of Pope Francis into his divine light. We pray with all our hearts that the All-Good Lord may grant us the grace to embody together the spirit of the Gospel, which the world so greatly needs, and that he may set us as servants after his example. Pray, Your Holiness, for the Church of Antioch, as well as for Syria and Lebanon. May the Lord preserve you for many blessed years.
We are blessed to have a wise and compassionate patriarch. Let us also pray for the renewal of unity among all who confess Christ—unity built on holiness and truth, and on the genuine repentance that is required from all sides of the divide. Only then will the Church receive the healing that comes from the Lord.
And may we Orthodox here in Britain—small though we may be—live our lives of faith in that same spirit: seeking not triumph, but communion.
This will never happen unless we listen carefully, inside ourselves, for the question which Christ is always asking each of us, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ When we hear it, let us respond, not with excuses or any deceit or false piety, but with true faith and fervent desire. Let each of us answer as Anastasia did this morning: Yes.
And may Christ, who raises the fallen and gives life to those in the tombs, grant to us and to all Christians—indeed to all human beings everywhere—the healing that leads to eternal life.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Anastasia is not her real name. Her name has been changed to protect the innocent.