4th Sunday of Pascha; Paralytic

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Christ is risen! Christos voskrese! Christos anesti!

There is a lovely and very cute film which some of our younger parents might be familiar with: Finding Dory, the sequel to Finding Nemo, about a fish who suffers from extreme short-term memory loss. One day, as she's going about her life in her community, something happens which triggers a deep memory that awakens her to the recollection that she has, in fact, been searching her whole life for her parents whom she lost as a child. Her entire life up to that very moment, it turned out, had been one great distraction. And so she begins anew in her struggle to always bear in mind what she had lost, in order never again to abandon her search.

Swimming through the ocean and struggling to remember, she discovers more and more clues. As she remembers more clearly, she finally arrives at the place where she had grown up, only to discover that it had long since been abandoned. She leaves her empty childhood home, and it is as if she is forced to relive the separation she felt as a child once again. But it was in that moment, when everything seemed to be entirely lost, that she sees a shell on the ocean floor, one with which she played as a child. Her parents had planted the love of shells in her heart. She saw that one shell was lined up next to another and to another, and following the trail of shells, she arrives at an empty cave and turns around to see two figures emerging impossibly from the darkness of the ocean. Her parents had been laying shells by their home over the course of their daughter's entire life with the impossible hope that one day she might remember them.

In today's Gospel, we read the account of the paralytic, a man who was unable to move and waited by the waters of healing for 38 years. As we hear from the Prophet David, "The length of our years is but seventy, and if we are in strength perhaps eighty, and what is more than these is toil and travail." Very little has changed since then. This man had spent more than half of his entire natural life waiting by the waters with the impossible hope that somehow he might be made whole again. For his patience, he meets the Lord himself in the flesh, who forgave his sins and raised him up from his weakness—a remarkable image of what He accomplished for Adam, who for generations waited helplessly in the depths of Hades.

We are all still very much basking in the light of Pascha, which the Church continues to celebrate until the Feast of the Ascension, only a few short weeks away. Pascha is an all-consuming joy. It is ultimately the transformative light of God's ineffable mercy. It is our ultimate end. It is the purpose of every Christian life, and because of this, this end is actually for us our beginning. It is by the experience of Pascha that we gradually come to live our lives not for things that are passing, but for the sake of the light of the eternal Pascha that is to come, should we endure in our Christian struggles.

But like Dory, most of us unfortunately live in a state of perpetual spiritual amnesia, always forgetting the joy that was implanted in us. It is precisely by this joy and the promise of our union with Him that we are able to persist in spiritual growth, no matter how hopeless or dark circumstances may seem. And so, like Dory, we must struggle to remember the light that was given to us, so that like her parents and the paralytic, we may keep the flame of our hope alive.

I am reminded of what the Apostle Paul writes in Romans: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us."

May we continue to struggle to keep the joy of the feast, not only for the remainder of the season, but always, knowing that if we are faithful in our struggle to remember God, He will be faithful in remembering us on our last day, when we are to give an account for the light that we have received.

Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy upon us. Amen.