On the second Sunday of Great Lent, at the Divine Liturgy, the gospel reading is taken from the Gospel according to St. Mark. Indeed, all of the Sundays during Lent except the first one—the Sunday of Orthodoxy, where the gospel is from St. John, and then of course we have the Sunday of the Lord’s Entry into Jerusalem—but the other Sundays of the Great Lent—the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth—the gospels are taken from the Gospel according to St. Mark.

St. Mark’s gospel is the shortest one. Some people think it may have been the original one; other people think not. But in any case, what is really interesting about the Gospel according to St. Mark is that it is a very stark gospel; it’s often even called the apocalyptic gospel, or the Gospel of God and Jesus presented in the literary genre of apocalypse, which means the clash between God and evil, light and darkness, the powers of goodness and the powers of evil, the holiness of God and the powers of Satan. This starkness of the Gospel according to St. Mark is also shown in the fact that in this gospel no human being calls the Lord Jesus Christ “the Son of God”—until he is crucified, and then the soldier on the cross says, “Truly, this was God’s Son.” But throughout the gospel, no one, not even the apostles, confess him as the Son of God. When Peter confesses him in Mark’s gospel, he said simply, “You are the Christ.” We find that in Luke also: “You are the Christ.” Only Matthew has: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

However, in Mark’s gospel, the demons know who he is right from the beginning. The demons say, “We know who you are,” already in the first chapter. “Why have you come to bother us? Why are you here? You are the Holy One of God.” And so we see that the human beings in the story are kind of caught between God and these evil powers, and Christ has come to confront them; God’s Son has come to cast them out, to heal, to forgive the sins, to bring the reign of God, the kingship of God, into the world. And we know also, in St. Mark’s gospel, very interesting, is that if you don’t consider the last chapter, which the early Christian versions of the gospel do not have—it’s pretty much accepted that it is an added chapter—the gospel simply ends with the empty tomb. And it’s the angels who proclaim, “He is not here. He is risen!” So that the very witness to the risen Christ is done by God himself. It’s done by the angels of God; it’s not done by a human being. There are no resurrection appearances in Mark’s gospel as it originally stood. You just have the angels saying to the women, “He is not here. He is risen,” and they leave, wondering what had happened.

Now, on the first Sunday of Great Lent, the gospel reading at the Divine Liturgy is one of these first encounters, the first encounter of Jesus with this fallen world. It says that he was returning to Capernaum, and he was at home. It’s interesting that Jesus moves from Nazareth to Capernaum, and that’s where he stays. That’s where Peter, also, and Andrew are from. And he’s there in his house, and the people are gathering around him already, because in Mark’s gospel already by the second chapter, that Jesus, having called the sons of Zebedee, James and John, and having called Simon who was named Peter, and Andrew his brother, he began preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, saying, “The time is at hand. The kingdom of God is here. Repent; believe in the Gospel.” And then he begins already showing the messianic signs.

He begins by announcing the Gospel, which the Christ will do: the good news of God’s victory. And immediately the devils say to him, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God,” the demon says to him. But Jesus rebukes the demon and tells him to be quiet and casts him out, and everybody’s amazed. “What is this?” they say. “A new teaching. With authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

So then his fame spreads, and then he enters the synagogue there in Capernaum, and then he preaches and he goes to the house of Simon and Andrew. He heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, who is having this fever. And then they start bringing him all these people who were sick, possessed with demons. It says the whole city gathered around the door of his house, and that he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out demons—but he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. They knew him, and they knew why he came. And then he heals a leper. And so there’s this fame being spread all over, the news that Jesus is there, people coming to see him.

So the gospel begins, at that Liturgy, the reading begins where he’s at home, and there’s this huge crowd around his house. There’s so much room that you can’t even get near the house. And he was preaching the word of God to them.

Then it says that some came, and they were carrying a paralytic; four men were carrying a paralytic. And the crowd was so great that they could not get near the house. So they did this spectacular act: they crawled up on the roof of the house, took away the tiles from the roof, made an opening of the roof and in the ceiling of the house, and then they let down on this stretcher, on this pallet, the paralytic who was lying there. And then it says Jesus saw their faith, and he says to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.”

Now the scribes are there, and you have this clash again. The clash is starting, now not with the demons but with the leaders of the people. They say, “It’s blasphemy! How can this man speak this way? Who can forgive sins but God alone? Only God can say: Your sins are forgiven you. No man can say that. No man has the right to say that. It would be really blasphemy.” But Jesus says to them, “Why do you question in your hearts?” He said, “What’s easier to say to the paralytic: Your sins are forgiven, or to say: Stand up, take your pallet, and walk?” And then Jesus says, “But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then he turns to the paralytic and he says, “I say to you: Stand up, take up your pallet, and go home.” And the paralytic stands up, he takes his bed, he goes out before them all, and they’re all amazed and they glorify God. And they say, “We never saw anything like this.”

So that’s the beginning of the Gospel of the kingdom: the clash with the demons, the clash with the leaders of the people, and then Jesus pronouncing what he has come for. He has come to heal and to forgive; to forgive and to heal. And in the gospels, and particularly in this gospel, in this event, he shows that that’s the same thing. When people’s sins are forgiven, then they are healed; and when they are healed, when their soul is healed, their body is healed, that means that sin and the powers of demons have no more power over them. And he shows in this paralytic who stands up, who arises—he says, “Arise! Stand up!”—this is loaded language, you see. “You were there, lying, wallowing, in the power of evil, because the power of evil is sickness. Sickness comes from evil.” If human beings were not evil, we would not be sick; we would not be sick—the world would not be sick. And when the healing takes place and the forgiveness takes place, then the healing takes place, too.

And that’s why you have in this gospel a kind of a strange way that Jesus speaks. He says, “That you may know that the Son of Man”—which is a messianic title, the man from heaven, the Son of Man… It doesn’t mean just any human being; it means the One whom God will send; it’s a messianic title. “That you may know that the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sins,” then he doesn’t say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven you”; he says to him, “Stand up and walk, that you may know that I have power to forgive sins—I have authority over sin; I have authority over demons; I have authority over sickness and disease”— And of course Jesus will ultimately show that he has power of death itself, and only God does that. And he does it in his own name: “That you may know that the Son of Man has this authority”—and he doesn’t say, “Your sins are forgiven”; he says, “Stand up, take up your pallet, go home.” And the man stands up, takes that stretcher that he was carried on, and he goes home before them all, and they’re all amazed and they glorify God. They say, “We never saw anything like this.”

And then the gospel continues, and the clash also becomes greater and greater until the point where the Christ himself is ultimately betrayed and crucified—not in spite of the fact that he cast out demons, forgave sins, healed paralytics, opened the eyes of the blind, make the lame to walk, the dumb to talk, the deaf to hear—not in spite of the fact that he preached to the poor, not in spite of the fact that he set a table in the wilderness and feeds the people, the hungry people, and walks on the water and calms the winds—not in spite of it, but because of it. Because evil can’t stand that. Evil loves sickness, evil loves sin, evil loves paralysis, epilepsy, lunatics, madness, possession. Evil can’t stand good! It can’t stand the power of God. It can’t stand God.

And so when the Son of God appears on earth, speaking in his own name by his own divine power, given to him from all eternity by the Father, as Light from Light and true God from true God and begotten, not created, having everything of the very nature of God as his very nature, as being begotten of the Father before all ages and born on earth of Mary the Virgin—because of who he is, he is hated, he is rejected. The leaders are jealous of him. The demons, screeching, can’t stand him. And ultimately they try to put him to death, and they succeed.

Nevertheless, they are destroyed by that death, because that ultimate power of God is shown in that ultimate love and truth and beauty and light of God, by taking on the sin of the world and saying to the whole of creation, not just that paralyzed man, “Stand up; your sins are forgiven.” But he says to us, “Stand up from the dead! Arise out of the tombs! Lying not on a stretcher being paralyzed, but lying in the tomb being in the paralysis of death.” He says, “Stand up; your sins are forgiven. Eternal life is here.” And hopefully we will always be amazed and we’ll always glorify God, and we’ll always say, “No one has ever seen anything like this.”

Now there’s one very important point in this gospel that we must notice, and that is that this paralyzed man couldn’t get to where Jesus was. He couldn’t get there on his own because he couldn’t walk. There is no way that he could get himself into the presence of Jesus so that his sins could be forgiven and he could hear those words: “Stand up. Rise; walk. Take your pallet. Your sins are forgiven you.” And that he could really stand up and walk. There’s no way that he could do that by myself.

But thankfully, he had four friends. And those four men—it says he was carried by four men—they decided to pick him up and to carry him to where Jesus was. And when they finally got him to where Jesus was, they couldn’t get near Jesus because of the crowd. It was just too crowded; they couldn’t even get near the door. So these four men did a crazy thing: they crawled up on the roof, they dragged that paralytic up there, they dismantled the roof, they took it apart, they made an opening, a hole in the roof, and then on these ropes, you could imagine them letting down this paralyzed man into the room where Jesus was. And you can imagine Jesus looking at this sight. There he is, preaching to this huge crowd, and all of a sudden, through the roof, there starts to come down into his presence this paralyzed man, [lying] on his pallet.

And then it says these words: “Jesus,” it said, “saw their faith, and he said to the paralytic, ‘My son, your sons are forgiven.’ ” Jesus said that he saw their faith. It doesn’t say a word, actually, in the gospel event here, about the faith of the paralytic. Let’s hope that the paralytic had faith. We assume that he did, because he wanted to be taken there. We don’t know whether or not he asked these four men to take him, but one thing’s for sure: if the four men hadn’t had taken him, he wouldn’t have been there and he wouldn’t have been in the gospel story, and we would not be talking about him right now.

And Jesus saw their faith. It’s in the plural! Not “his” but “theirs.” He saw the faith of the four men who carried him, and the paralytic himself. Now, when we hear this, we cannot help but think that someone has carried us, who are believers and who are forgiven and who are being healed by Jesus Christ, the Messiah, Son of God. Someone carried us to where he was. I can’t help but think this month, because it’s the month of my birthday, that I was carried to where Jesus was as a little baby. My parents, my godparents, carried me to where Jesus was.

And I can tell you that right now, as I’m speaking to you, I’m looking at my windowsill here in front of my desk, and there’s a picture of my father and my godfather, and they’re standing in front of our old house in upstate New York. And my father has his arm around the shoulder of my godfather, and they have on their suits and their white shirts and their neckties, and they look really spiffy, as we would say; they look really great. And they’re working men. And they’re smiling at the camera. And my sister sent me this photo, and she said, “Here’s an old photo of Dad and your godfather.” In our Slavic language we would call them kresni, the one who held me at the cross, who held me at the baptismal fount. And she says, “I found it among some old papers.”

And when I looked at the back of that picture, I saw the date stamped on there when the photo was developed, and I’m absolutely convinced that that photograph was taken on the day of my baptism. It was the day when my dad and my godfather, who are in this picture, with my mother and my godmother, carried me to where Jesus was. And then Jesus, seeing their faith, was able to say to me—and I wasn’t lying there paralyzed, but I sure was lying there as a little baby; I wasn’t even a month old—and they brought me, and they put me into that water, like the paralyzed man in John’s gospel—never got into the water; Jesus healed him before he got into the water—but they carried me to where Jesus was, and so I was baptized for the forgiveness of my sins, for the healing of my soul and body, and for everlasting life.

And then, every day and every Sunday in my life after that, I was brought to the church. Again, they carried me. Somebody carried me, and they brought me to holy Communion. They took me up to the chalice, being carried in arms. And into my mouth was put the consecrated bread and wine, the very body and blood of Christ himself. What for? For the forgiveness of my sins, for the healing of my soul and body, and for the attaining of everlasting life.

And so we could say we were all—if we are believers—were brought and carried somehow to where Jesus was. And we were not only brought and carried if we were fortunate, by our parents or by godparents—some of us were fortunate that way; others of us were not—but every one of us can think of someone who brought us to where Jesus was. And even through our life, after being baptized, when we fall away, when we doubt, when we want to be taught, when we want to be rebuked, when we want to be helped, when we want to be healed, there are always those people who carry us to where Jesus is.

And there’s some sense in which we all are being carried and are carrying. Hopefully we are carrying other people to where Jesus is. Hopefully even on this broadcast, in some small way, maybe I could be helping to carry someone to where Jesus is. But we are all carrying and being carried. And all through our life we can think of those people who in certain moments—in our church school or our pastors or if we went to seminaries and we had teachers or monasteries and had spiritual fathers or mothers or friends or parents of our friends who were Christians—they served to carry us, to bear us, to where Jesus is, especially when we’re paralyzed by our own sin, by our own madness, by our own doubts, paralyzed by our own fears, so that we can’t walk: someone is carrying us.

And in our Orthodox Church, we even believe that the saints carry us. The holy Theotokos, the Mother of Christ, she carried us, like she carried her Son, Jesus. She now carries us to where he is, by her intercessions and her prayers. All the saints who are glorified with Christ—because we Orthodox believe that all those who are dead in Christ are alive with him, that he emptied Sheol; he destroyed death. He raised the dead, and the dead in Christ we believe are already somehow with him. Can’t explain too well how, and there are different explanations—maybe someday we’ll talk about that—but one thing we know for sure: that the dead in Christ—who are in Christ, who have been baptized into Christ, who have been sealed by the life-creating Spirit—they are no longer simply dead.

If Christ is alive at the right hand of the Father, living to make intercession on our behalf with God his Father, all those who are in Christ are also alive in him, like the thief, where he said, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Or as it says in John’s gospel: “The hour is coming and now is, when all those who are dead will hear the voice of the Son of God.” So we believe that there are the holy people—the holy people: the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, preachers, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, ascetics, teachers—all those holy people who have fallen asleep in the Lord and have met him already in their death, because when we die now we meet the risen Lord, and we are alive in him. We’re not comatose. Sure, this world is not over yet; sure, we are all waiting for the ultimate end—but in the meantime, those who are already in Christ are interceding and carrying the others, whether they’re still alive on this earth or whether they have already departed and are raised with Christ in the presence of God, before the end comes for the rest of us.

So we are carried. We are carried to where Christ is. And we should thank God for those who carried us, because they are many. We should thank God, for example, for St. Mark who wrote this gospel, because without Mark we wouldn’t have this gospel. And without Matthew and Luke and John, we wouldn’t have these gospels. Whoever wrote them or wrote them in their names, or whoever know—it’s a mystery there—but all the Scriptures were written by someone. The Church hymns were written by someone. The melodies were composed by someone. The icons were made by someone. All those people serve to carry us to where Jesus us.

And when we hear this gospel, we should thank God for them, just like that paralytic undoubtedly thanked not only Jesus Christ himself, who healed him and forgave him, but he was certainly also boundlessly grateful to those four men who picked him up and who carried him to where Jesus was so that his sins could be forgiven, that he could be healed, that he could raise up, that he could walk, and that the glory of God could be shown in him.