Wilt Thou Be Made Whole? - Sermon for the Sunday of the Paralytic (2025)

The paralytic in today’s Gospel presents an apt image of our fallen human nature. In our fallen, sin-bound state, we are subject to a kind of spiritual paralysis. No matter how much we strive to do good and please God, we often find ourselves powerless against the base and selfish impulses that occupy so much of our lives. Even if we manage to do a little good externally, even if we make an effort and restrain ourselves from self-indulgence, it is usually short-lived and intermittent. We often taste the bitterness of abstinence rather than the sweetness of self-sacrifice. We fail to lay hold of the true goal of all our spiritual efforts, the acquisition of the love of Christ. Instead, we remain impotent, paralyzed, inactive in the doing of truly God-pleasing deeds, waiting helplessly by the sheep pool, waiting to be healed.

It’s in this state that Christ comes to us and asks us the question upon which hinges the entire Christian life: Wilt thou be made whole? (Jn. 5:6). “Do you want to be healed?” The answer may seem self-evident. Why else would the man be laying there by the sheep pool? But significantly, the paralytic does not simply say, “Yes.” He begins to explain why he can’t be healed. Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool (Jn. 5:7). We do something very similar. We presume that we want what’s best for ourselves, we presume that we truly desire spiritual health and salvation. “Why else would I be living a Christian life? Why else would I have come to the monastery?”

But when we are actually confronted with the prospect of healing, we immediately come up with excuses for why it’s just impossible. “Yes, I want to be healed, but there’s no way I could do that. There’s no way I could cut off my heart’s attachment to its cherished passions and desires. There’s no way I could live without them.” Like the paralytic who sat waiting to be healed for 38 years while observing the cruel spectacle of others always finding healing before himself, we too have a story to tell about why we just can’t overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of our spiritual growth. We assume that the future will always be like the past, that our wounds and our weaknesses are what defines us, that our passions are simply “who we are,” that radical change is impossible.

This is the state in which Jesus finds us when He comes and asks, Wilt thou be made whole? “Do you wish to be freed from bondage to the passions, from slavery to the past—your personal past of poor choices and the weight of sin that you’ve inherited from past generations?” This is the question He poses to us when He offers us visitations of His grace. He gives us brief glimpses of what our life would look like if we were made whole.

Consider Pascha, for instance. For one night at least, in the radiant grace of the Feast, our souls are transported by joy. Gone are the usual cares of life, gone are the petty squabbles and resentments that often separate us from one another and hold our hearts back from being able to love. Instead, grace expands the heart and makes it easy and natural to love, and for a time, the world and everyone in it seems brilliant and blessed. But we can scarcely abide such grace for long. We return to our usual preoccupations out of habit and a compulsive desire for the familiar. God’s grace cannot be conjured or controlled, but we are used to being the ones in control.

Pascha is just one instance of this visitation of God’s grace that is shared by us all. But each of our Christian lives is marked by moments of exaltation—experiences of revelation that show us who we could be in Christ, indeed, who we are meant to be in Christ. Little by little, He begins to show us the features of our eternal countenance. These moments may be few and far between, but eventually there comes a point in our repentance where it dawns on us that these moments are not supposed to be isolated instances, rare and exceptional, but ought to characterize our whole life. With difficulty, we start to grasp the true extent of the change that God wishes to bring about in each one of us. He does not want us just to be “good people” who go to church and say our prayers. He wants to live in us, to abide in us, to pour His love into our hearts, to transform us into new beings, into little Christs, into gods. When He visits us with grace, He shows us just how easy it is for Him to do this. Just like the paralytic, He can heal us with a word. And His word is mighty to dispel the story that we tell ourselves about how and why such healing and transformation is impossible. His word can cut through all of our excuses, if only we’re willing—sincerely willing—to be healed.

And just like so many of those He healed, Jesus tells us, Sin no more (Jn. 5:14). What does it mean to “sin no more?” How is it possible? What does it look like? The problem of sin is not a moralistic one, but rather an existential one. Sin is missing the mark. It’s not hitting the target of who we are created to be in Christ, a falling short of the love of God. Sin is a state of separation from God, which has as its inevitable consequence the doing of sinful deeds. To “sin no more” means simply to give our whole heart over to God, without calculation and without reservation. It means the surrender of our whole being to Him, especially our own will.

This self-offering is a process that has no end. The Psalmist says, I saw an end to every perfection, but Thy commandment is exceeding broad (Ps. 118:96 LXX). In other words, it has not limit. And we know God’s commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength (Mk. 12:30). Another Psalm says of those who approach God that they will go from strength to strength (Ps. 83:8 LXX), or from “glory to glory” in the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa. There is no room here for a comfortable moralism or a complacent formalism. God requires all of us. Yet He give us His whole self in return. To “sin no more” means to give ourselves wholly to this dynamic process of perpetual ascent into the realm of divine love. Sin is our refusal to cooperate with God in our own deification. Sin is not simply doing something wrong; sin is a refusal to grow. It’s a state in which we wish to remain static, fixed within set boundaries, so that some portion of our life, of our heart—however small—remains solely and exclusively our own.

Some Fathers say that the paralytic healed in today’s Gospel was later the one who slapped Christ in the face and taunted Him saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, who is he that smote thee? (Mt. 26:68). It’s a terrible thought, and it may strike us as implausible on the surface. How could someone who was so dramatically helped by Christ become so cruel and hateful towards Him? The truth is that we too are perfectly capable of such a fall if we refuse to cooperate with God, if we wish to remain static when we find Him calling us onwards to greater and greater degrees of self-sacrifice, which is to say, greater degrees of love. If at any point we say, “Stop, Lord, I’ve had enough. This is really getting out of hand, God, please leave me alone,” then our heart will start to turn in the opposite direction, and Christ will become hateful to us. Nothing in the spiritual life remains static. Either we are moving towards Christ and growing in His love, or else we are moving towards the enemy and growing in his malice. God keep us from this latter.

Instead, like St. Paul, let us forget those thing which are behind, and reach forth unto those things which are before, [and] press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus; for he says as many as are perfect should be so minded (cf. Phil. 13-15). May we too have such a mindset, and so obtain the healing that our hearts so desperately seek. Amen.