SUNDAY'S MESSAGE (audio message)
BY HIS EMINENCE THE METROPOLITAN
KYTHIRA & ANTIKYTHIRA SERAPHIM
SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT - ST. GREGORY'S PALACE
(08-03-2026)
WRITTEN DIVINE PROCLAMATION
Today's Gospel passage shows us Christ teaching in a house in Capernaum where a great multitude had gathered.
But it was a mixed crowd, a crowd with different moods, because most of them ran to see and hear out of curiosity. Among them were the Pharisees and Scribes, who follow Christ, as always, to spy on Him and criticize Him. There were also those who approached Christ with Faith and redemptive expectation, like the four men who broke the roof of the house and brought down the paralytic with a bed before Christ.
The crowd remained speechless with awe and emotion before the miracle of the healing of the paralytic. The Pharisees and the scribes were unmoved and condemned Christ with their thoughts. They saw that the healed man obeyed Christ's command to take his bed and leave. The bed was a sign of his suffering and a proof of God's grace.
And today, our Holy Church honors Saint Gregory Palamas, one of the great Saints of Orthodoxy, who, in the face of the Western heresy, proclaimed the inner experience of ascetics and believers: that God's grace is not a created gift, but is God Himself expressing Himself in us, so that, flooded by His uncreated presence and with the only condition of His acceptance in us, we gradually open ourselves to Him and become partakers of His divine nature.
This is not just a promise, but a great certainty, as it has happened and is happening to thousands of thousands of men and women, whom we honor as Saints and who have become partakers of the Divine nature and partakers of Divine Grace and are for us a revelation and certainty of what we are called to be and become.
St.Gregory Palamas, concerning today's Gospel passage, explains and says that in the person of the paralytic, the whole human race is depicted, who needs God to be redeemed from diseases and sins. He says that the four who lift the paralytic represent four factors necessary for man's salvation. The first factor is self-humility, that is, to have humility and to feel one's sinfulness. The second factor is the confession with a broken heart. The third is the firm decision not to repeat the same sins, as much as possible. And the fourth and last, to pray unceasingly to receive the grace of God.
The «breaking of the roof» means to cleanse the mind from the obsessive thoughts, thoughts, desires and passions, so that, humbled, it can «descend» to the heart and meet the Grace of Christ, which remains and waits there from the day of our Baptism.
Here, St. Gregory and the Holy Fathers speak of the «royal» descent of the mind into the heart, from where the humbled man not only hears the prayer being reflected to God, but has become a prayer himself and receives God's rich blessings and enjoys a ray of health, even if he suffers physically and is ill.
Archimandrite Frumentios Demetriou
