Christ is risen! Indeed He is risen!
Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” (John 5:5-8)
The Church Fathers in seeking out a spiritual rather than literal interpretation of the Old Testament texts, “rescued” some of those texts from giving us images of a God who is capricious, overly anthropomorphized, motivated by human passions, or even immoral or wickedly demented. They thought the entire Old Testament must be read through the lens of “God is love.” If the text seemed to give some other impression of God, then they felt the problem was with the interpretation of the text not with the scriptural text itself. This often meant the most literal interpretation simply couldn’t be true. But since they considered the scripture to be the Word of God, they didn’t throw the text out, rather they looked for a meaning in the text consistent with understanding that God is love. They concluded there was mystery in these texts which required the Holy Spirit to reveal to us its true meaning, or that God felt we weren’t yet ready to understand the text.
The Church through time used this spiritual way of reading the Scriptures even in interpreting the New Testament. Sometimes the Gospel text is valued not because of the historical event it reports but because the narrative could be interpreted to apply to the life of each of us today. We cannot go back through time to live the events when Christ was on earth, but we can bring those events into our lives by showing how they apply to our lives today. (For example, it is miraculous that a blind man is healed, but how does that help us today? The text can be interpreted to refer to our spiritual blindness and Christ healing us.) This is commonly seen in some of the liturgical hymns of the church, the Canon of St Andrew of Crete is a good example of reading Old and New Testaments allegorically (a biblical example is Paul’s interpretation of Genesis 2:24 in Ephesians 5:31-33).
Even today’s Gospel lesson of Christ healing the paralytic is used as a parable in liturgical hymns to apply to our life now:
I am grievously paralyzed in a multitude of sins and wrongful deeds. As You raised up the paralytic of old, also raise up my soul by Your divine guidance, that I may cry out, “Glory to Your Power O Compassionate Christ.” (Kontakion for the Sunday of the Paralytic)
Even if the scripture text can be taken literally or historically, it is sometimes also given a spiritual meaning to bring us into the story. The Gospel lesson isn’t just about people who lived 2000 years ago – we cannot enter into the historical story, but the story can become part of our spiritual sojourn today.
Below is a comment by St John Chrysostom, in which he offers a spiritual lesson from today’s Gospel reading but also a theological one.
When a maidservant is rebelling but then sees her master coming, she grows humble and returns to her good behavior. So, too, the paralytic’s body had revolted like the maidservant, and this caused the paralysis. But when the body saw its master coming near, it returned to its good behavior and resumed its proper discipline. And the Word of Christ accomplished all this. Yet the words were not mere words but the words of God, of which the prophet said: ‘The works of his words are mighty‘ (Joel 2:11). For if God’s words made man when man did not exist, much more will they make him whole again and restore him to health even though he has grown feeble and weak with disease. (ON THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE NATURE OF GOD, p 297)
Fraternized 