Today, 12 July 2015, the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, also called of the Healing of the paralysed man of Capernaum, His Beatitude Daniel, Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church visited the community of “Saint Mary” Monastery – Techirghiol.
To end with the Divine Liturgy, His Beatitude delivered a sermon in which he showed that the evangelical pericope of the Healing of the paralysed man of Capernaum (Matthew 9:1-18), read today in all the places of worship, presents us three great spiritual truths: “First of all, we see that the disease of the body calls the man to the healing of the soul, of the disease of sin. Secondly, the Gospel shows us that Jesus Christ, our Lord, is the perfect Father Confessor and Doctor, and thirdly, that in fact the faith of those who take care of the sick and take piety on them can contribute to their healing. The disease of the paralysed man was a disease of the body, but it was hiding a disease of the soul too. Thus, the disease of the body was the visible sign of the disease of his soul. His long sufferance brought the paralytic to repentance and strengthened his faith, so that he thought that only Jesus of Nazareth could heal him”.
Then, the Patriarch of Romania also showed that the divine power of Jesus Christ, our Saviour, to heal, resurrect the dead, and most of all to have the the power to forgive sins is the one that He gives to the Church: “He gives the power to forgive sins to His Church, so that He does not selfishly keep it only for Himself. Thus, we receive the forgiveness of our sins through the Sacrament of Repentance or of Confession, through the Holy Communion which is administrated for forgiving the sins and for eternal life, and the healing of the body is given through the Sacrament of the Holy Unction. Christ, our Lord, shows Himself as the perfect Father Confessor and Doctor. When he tells the sinful man: “Take heart son, your sins are forgiven!”, we see Christ - the Father Confessor, the spiritual father. We know that He calls son or daughter only the people in whom He has sees strong faith. When looking at this paralysed man, in whom sufferance brought about repentance and faith, strengthened through repentance, He saw the man’s faith that it was only Jesus who could heal him. When He said son, He not only thought He would forgive him, but He also raised the repentant man to an unexpected dignity, namely He adopted him through grace, to the dignity of spiritual son. Christ, the Lord, does not say what sort of sins the man committed, but keeps the secret of his sins, and covers his sins with His silence, and so He is a merciful and discreet Doctor and Father Confessor. Why discreet? Because He does not want to diminish the dignity of the man tried by the sufferance of his disease and who shed tears of repentance. Here we see that He does not want to humiliate the man saying in public what his sins were, because the one who comes to him is already devoted, humiliated by his long hard disease. Hence the Church learned the truth that the father confessor must keep the secret of confession”.
In the end, His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel offered several religious books to the library of “Saint Mary” Monastery, and the faithful present received a small icon of the Mother of God the Prodromite. Abbess Lucia Rosu offered His Beatitude a bunch of flowers on behalf of the community of the monastery.
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