Today's reading offers us two accounts linked by a single theme: religion and Revelation. The first describes Jesus healing a man whom Luke calls a “paralytic” (vv. 17-26). Jesus heals him by saying, “Thy sins are forgiven thee,” thereby displeasing the Pharisees present, who are absolutely certain that only God can forgive sins. In their view Jesus' words were therefore tantamount to blasphemy: by saying what He did, He placed Himself in God's position in their eyes (v. 21). In response Jesus reminded them of a generally accepted belief of the time: the Messiah, the “Son of Man,” has authority from God to forgive sins, for the messianic Kingdom comes into the world with the Messiah and the day of Judgment arrives. He immediately proved by His action that His words were not mere theory and that He truly had authority from God to forgive sins. The man He healed really did rise and walk, and Jesus had connected this healing precisely with the forgiveness of sins (vv. 22-25).

It is no wonder that everything that happened made such a strong impression on those around Him. They understood that before them stood no ordinary teacher, of whom there were many at the time, nor even a prophet, but perhaps the Messiah Himself, although He did not speak directly of His messiahship (v. 26). But such a Messiah did not fit the Pharisees' theological theories. They saw in Him only a man who did not heal by revealing the fullness of the Kingdom but cured the sick as others cured them, sometimes likewise resorting to the power of prayer or possessing a special gift of healing from God. A cure, even a supernatural or miraculous one, did not go beyond the boundaries of religion; those boundaries had no room for the Kingdom.

We see the same thing in the account of the events that took place in Levi's house (vv. 27-39). For a religious person, fellowship with a sinner is not merely unpleasant but dangerous: sin defiles, while religion presupposes the mandatory observance of the norms and rules of ritual purity. But Jesus had no intention of creating a new religion. He brought the Kingdom into the world in order to give everyone a chance at a new life in that Kingdom. So He asks an entirely natural question: who needs a physician, the healthy or the sick (vv. 31-32)?

The question is rhetorical, but within the framework of religion it has no solution. Even a religious person can essentially do nothing to help a sinner beyond calling him to repentance and conversion. Religion has no power to heal or renew a person by changing his sinful nature. The most it can give him is the possibility of temporary cleansing from the consequences of a particular sin, and even that is not always possible. A religious person really has nothing to do among sinners; he cannot help them in any way. But Jesus is not the founder of a new religion. He is the Messiah who brought the Kingdom into the world. He can heal and cleanse. And in His disciples He sees servants of the Kingdom who can help everyone who wants to enter it.

One of the Gospel's constant qualities is newness. In every age, regardless of the degree to which it has been "Christianized," the Gospel has always turned out to be "new wine in old wineskins," tearing apart people's settled ideas about the world and about God. People always have ideas about justice, about the rules of religious life, about what is permissible and what is not. Therefore, when Christ comes to them, for whom the only rules are God's love, He inevitably comes into conflict with those whose religious ideas have obscured God, those who do not want to believe in the forgiveness of sinners and cannot understand that the sick are closer to the physician than the healthy, or those who consider themselves healthy.

And it is important to remember that this newness of the Gospel must without fail be revealed and recognized by us as well, and not only by Jesus' contemporaries, so that the paradox of His Message can also blow open our little world, opening it toward God.

Here there are very difficult words that require a very careful approach: they crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. These words are generally seen as a basis for every kind of asceticism. This theme itself appears very often in the Apostle Paul. There are many other words related to these: "But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal 6:14). I have heard it said that these words mean: I have died to the world and the world to me. But if the apostle had wanted to say that, he would have said exactly that, whereas he said something different.

Here is what Fr. Georgy Chistyakov says: "The point is that the Bible has no orientation toward fighting the passions. The New Testament, through the mouths of the holy apostles, calls us not to fight anger, rage, malice, and so on, but to 'put off,' that is, to take off like old clothing, or to 'strip off' all these vices from ourselves. These two words are used many times in Scripture when it speaks of passions and vices, but nowhere here is there talk of fighting the passions. One must think that everything concerning the struggle with the passions that rule over us and nest inside us entered Christian literature from Stoic and, more generally, ancient philosophy at a later time.

The holy apostles see the Christian's path not as a road of fighting the passions, but precisely as the throwing off of old clothing, as growing out of that clothing... But if we begin to take sin apart bone by bone and subject it to analysis, then we are inevitably seized or sucked in by the very process of struggle, we turn into fighters, and at that point our Christianity simply comes to an end. From the depths of our consciousness we transfer the struggle into the outside world and begin to fight everyone who, as it appears to us, thinks the wrong way, does the wrong thing, and so on."

Let us feel the important circumstance that our Lord Jesus did not derive pleasure from His suffering, the pleasure that we at times derive from our own asceticism. After all, there is such a mental disorder as masochism - that is where Freud had grounds to accuse us. And this is, in fact, essential.