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.

As is evident, already in the early Christian era there were people in the Church who were sure that Christians "may do anything." And the apostle, arguing with this widespread view of spiritual life, responds: "anything is permitted," yes, but not everything is beneficial. "Anything is permitted," of course, but not everything serves upbuilding. The corresponding Greek word literally means building or constructing a house, and it is assumed that the matter is not walls alone. "Anything is permitted" sounds like a slogan of complete liberation from everything that binds and limits a person in the untransformed world. It appears that the people who advanced it understood and remembered only one thing: the Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of freedom. They had not reflected much, apparently, on what this freedom is filled with.

Perhaps the situation was aggravated by the peculiar "charismatic" views of some new converts who, having experienced the reality of the Kingdom for the first time and having felt what grace is, decided that they were now free from sin and could do anything whatever without any spiritual harm to themselves: after all, as they were probably convinced, the untransformed world with all its evil no longer had power over them. Paul reminds them, however, that everything is not as rosy as it may appear in the first days after conversion or in moments of spiritual uplift. Ahead lies a long path, the path of inner, spiritual upbuilding, that ordering of inner and outer life which the concept of the inner Torah presupposed.

And on this path the struggle with sin is inevitable, for the path into the Kingdom is not yet finished; it is only beginning. And the very upbuilding of the Kingdom, that same upbuilding of which the apostle says that not everything is beneficial for it, was also only just beginning then, for the matter concerns, in essence, the first two generations of Christians. And the path of each individual Christian is finally completed only on the day of the complete transformation of the world, the day of the Savior's return and the triumph of the Kingdom. And the apostle does not tire of reminding people that Christianity is not "grace-filled" relaxation, but intense spiritual work and the upbuilding of the Kingdom, without which Christian life loses all meaning.