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

The importance of this Gospel is that it is a demonstration of God’s love, and forgiveness for us. The two go together. The Lord wants to draw us back to Himself, and He wants to forgive us. The Pharisees, and the ordinary people around Jesus Christ today couldn’t comprehend how it is that a human being can forgive sins, because they didn’t know Who Jesus was. They thought that He was perhaps a prophet, perhaps a gifted man, but they did not understand, as we do, that He is the Son of God. To demonstrate that He has the authority to forgive sins, to make it clear, He says to the man: “Get up, and take your bed, and go home”. And he did.

Human beings always have difficulty with accepting the love of God for what it is. That has been our problem, and our weakness from the time of Adam and Eve, in fact. Ever since the beginning, we have had difficulty accepting the depth of the love of God, and living according to His love. We always try to limit the One who is unlimitable. He, Himself, it is true, limited Himself when He became Man, but that was His self-limitation, His self-emptying. We cannot do the same for Him. We cannot close Him in, and measure Him somehow, and make Him more acceptable to our limitations. It is not we who pull Him down from heaven, and reduce Him to our level. It is we who have to come up to Him. It is we who have to grow up into Him. The way human beings have been behaving is still contrary to this truth.

We must have a correct understanding of our relationship with Christ. Two things stand in the way of our relationship with Him. In the first place, we are afraid. Human beings are always afraid. In the second place, we have our pride, and our self-confidence in our so-called intelligence. In the time of Gregory Palamas, there was a big controversy between the East, and the West because this was at the time when Scholasticism in the West had grown up, and taken precedence in Christian life. This means that everything was subjected to philosophical, and logical systems. On the other hand, Gregory Palamas was telling, and is telling us that the most important thing for Christians is to know the love of God, and to live in the love of God. The intelligence, the logic, the reasoning – everything has to be subjected to that relationship of love. We can know God, not in the essence of WHO HE IS, but in His energies, says Gregory Palamas. We can know Him as He reveals Himself to us. However, we cannot know Him so as to control Him.

That is one reason, by the way, why we never are speaking the Name given by God to Moses as to WHO HE IS. There is a four letter Hebrew word that people have been trying to pronounce for a few hundred years under the influence of this sort of so-called illuminated logic. Jehovah, or Yahweh, or something like that, is not even close to the correct pronunciation. On the other hand, even if it were close, it is completely inappropriate for human beings ever to try to pronounce the Name of God. For human beings, to name something is to control it. We put names on things so as to have control over them. There is a famous Protestant saying: “Name it, and claim it” which is related to this. This “Name it, and claim it” – which really means “Name it, and control it”, when it comes to a relationship with God, is crazy. God is not some sort of cosmic cow that you can milk if you know just the right technique. God gives His gifts, and everything to us freely. We cannot extract them from Him according to some technique.

Who do we think we are, anyhow, to approach God with such insolence, and such pride? To think that we can milk God like a cow! God gives His gifts to us, and we live these gifts according to what the gifts are, and what is the nature of our love which gives life to those gifts. We are not all the same. We do not all have the same gifts (as the Apostle Paul said) (cf. 1 Cor. 12:4-6). We each have unique gifts because God creates each of us uniquely once, and only once. God is not in the recycling business. We don’t go, and come back. This is our one time. God is not limited in how many people He creates because His love is unending. It is His love that creates all of us.

There is a relationship of love between us, and God. This love is the raison d’être of our life. We must live in the love of Jesus Christ. We have to do all things, pronounce all words, pray all prayers, in this relationship of love with Jesus Christ. God created us for this reason: to live in a relationship of love with Him. As St Seraphim of Sarov said: “The goal of the Christian life is to acquire the Holy Spirit”. He meant that we should live all of our life in the love of Jesus Christ. That is the aim of our whole life. Let us enter into the love of Jesus Christ, continue in the love of Jesus Christ, grow in the love of Christ, do all things, think, and pray in the love of Jesus Christ, whom we glorify, together with His Father, and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

† Archdiocese of Canada - Orthodox Church in America