“Lest a Worse Thing Come Upon You”
Sunday of the Paralytic
Acts 9:32-42; John 5:1-15
"See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you." (John 5:14)
What can be worse than being paralyzed for 38 years, unable to walk or move? - Death? - Probably not. If we could have a choice: to be paralyzed for 38 years or to die, I don't know if anyone would choose the former...
What did Jesus Christ mean when He said: "lest a worse thing come upon you"? What could be worse than being paralyzed for 38 years? Spiritual paralysis, paralysis of the soul, death in sins, leaving this world without repentance, without unity with God.
People sometimes primitively imagine (and different painters depict) hell. But hell is a state of being alone, without unity with God, with eternal remorse, with mental torment -- this can be the worst.
There are people who in glimpses of consciousness feel grave sins, but the hardened soul is incapable of repentance. A person drowns out the remorse of conscience with alcohol, drugs, deepens sinfulness, drowns in sins, and dies without repentance of sins.
The state of loneliness, alienation from people and from God is the worst. To punish a prisoner, they put him in a solitary confinement cell for a long time. The worst sinner on earth tries to communicate with people. It happens that innocent but believing people have been put in solitary confinement for many years and they have endured because they felt faith and unity with God and with many people outside, even though they were not allowed to communicate with them.
For example: Petro Kalnyshevsky, the last Cossack of Zaporizhzhia, after the destruction of the Zaporizhzhia Sich in 1775, was arrested and imprisoned in Solovki, in the Solovetsky Monastery, in a dungeon until 1801, for 25 years. He endured that isolation for more than 25 years because he felt a constant unity with God and his people. Petro Kalnyshevsky died on December 4, 1803, having lived for 112 years.
But people with spiritual paralysis die in their sins, without repentance, unable to endure isolation for long. The creation of ethnic settlements in the countries of the New World, such as in the United States and Canada, and the creation of these districts in cities, is a counterpoint to loneliness, so that a person of a particular nationality is not separated, but can communicate and speak with people like himself.
The question arises: Why in this festive season, after Easter, when we still sing "Christ is Risen!", is the Gospel story of the healing of the infirm paralytic read? What does the healing of the paralyzed have to do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead?
The Holy Fathers of the Church, great righteous men and Christian thinkers of the first centuries of Christianity, draw our attention to the fact that just as the man who was physically paralyzed for his sins for many years (after all, Christ told him: "Sin no more"), did not lose faith in God, had hope in God's mercy, and was raised from the bed of infirmity by Jesus Christ, so we, if we keep faith and hope in God, in the Lord Jesus Christ, will, although we die bodily, be raised to new life by the same Jesus Christ, our Lord.
That something "worse" does not happen to us, as Jesus said, that we be not spiritually paralyzed, that we do not die in sins without repentance – we recognize that this would be much worse than being in physical infirmity.
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
