Second Sunday of Great Lent – Gregory Palamas

(Mark 2:1-12)

On this second Sunday of the Great Fast, the Church teaches us a further lesson in the compassion and accessibility of God.

As you remember, last Sunday we celebrated the Triumph of Orthodoxy and all the icons were set out in glorious display. This celebration is not just a commemoration of the council in which the icons were defended, but it is a triumph of the truth of the understanding of the relationship between God and man, between the spiritual and the material, and that God did indeed become a man in the Person of Jesus Christ and that He transfigures and heals that which was fallen into the image of God that it was created to be. The veneration of the icons confirms this understanding of the reality of matter transfigured by the healing presence of God.

Today we commemorate St Gregory Palamas - another key figure in understanding and clarifying both the relationship between man and God and of the reality of how God interacts with us to heal and transfigure us into that which He created us to be.

At the time of St Gregory there were debates raging about the absolute unknowability of God. St Gregory, who had spent many years in ascetic striving, knew and had personally experienced the true presence and grace of God, and so he clarified that God in His essence is eternally distinct from His creatures, but that mankind can and should strive to participate and commune with God through His energies, His grace – which is truly an experience of God Himself. The analogy that is often used to help us understand this is the sun in the sky. While we cannot approach the orb of the sun, we do have a true and direct experience of the sun through its warmth and light.

St Gregory’s articulation of the essence and the energies of God may seem obscure at first – but it is an important declaration and clarification of the proper understanding of the relationship between God the Creator and man, His creature… and underscores just how intimate that relationship is and can be.

This awareness of the intimacy and nearness of God is essential for us to understand.

God is not a distant deity sitting on His throne in heaven… We do not live in, as Fr Stephen Freeman puts it, a ‘two story universe’, with God upstairs in heaven and us downstairs here on earth. God is present and the miracle of the triumph of Orthodoxy is that He is imminently accessible!

This is cause for both terror and for our greatest hope!

As the blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose once said, ‘The thing about understanding that God is both personal and present, is that He requires something of you!’

We may be terrified to realize that God is present… that He is involved in our lives and that He does demand something of us. He calls us to take up our cross, to deny ourselves, and to follow Him. Every moment of our lives is a pull toward either love and participation in the life of Christ or toward selfishness and isolation.

            The more we give of ourselves in selfless love to God and to others, the more we begin to realize and recognize the nearness of God and of His Heavenly Kingdom. God transforms us by His grace… by His life creating and life restoring energies.

The Gospel account given to us this morning is an excellent example of this selfless love. The friends of the paralytic had zealous faith that Christ could heal their friend, and they stopped at nothing out of their love and concern for their brother – even lowering him through the roof to seek his cure. And through those efforts born of love, they encountered Christ and He healed the paralytic.

The theology of St Gregory Palamas is the theology of living experience. It is not born out of the intellect and the academy, it is born from a life lived in humility and prayer which gives direct contact and communion with God. God offers Himself to us and is apprehended by us not in the ivory tower of our mind, but in the humble manger of our heart and self-sacrifice.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ… these first two Sundays of Lent speak to us of the intimacy and accessibility of God, Who is present and seeking to share His life with us.

May we all be engaged in that awareness of God and respond to that invitation to participate in the life of Christ.