Second Sunday of Lent — Gregory Palamas
Oops!
We turn to religion because we need to.
Not as a lifestyle choice. Not as a cultural habit. We turn to it because life, if we are honest, can be brutal. People get sick — really sick — and they don’t get better. Marriages fracture. Children suffer things they should never have to suffer. Wars grind on. Depression settles in like a fog that doesn’t lift. Jobs disappear. Bodies fail. And underneath all of it, quiet but persistent, runs the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die.
This is not pessimism. This is just reality.
And so we turn to religion. Because we need something that can hold all of that — something that can redeem this life, or at least make it bearable. We need hope that is bigger than our circumstances. We need a horizon that doesn’t end at the grave.
Religion offers this. And in offering it, it does something real. It gives us a new way of seeing. It reframes our suffering. It tells us that we are not alone, that there is meaning, that the darkness does not have the final word. For millions of people, this reframing has been the difference between despair and survival.
But here is where we have to be honest. Because what I have just described — as real and as valuable as it is — is not quite Christianity. Or rather, it is not the whole of it. And the part that is missing turns out to be the most important part.
Ugh!
The version of religion most of us have absorbed — whether we realize it or not — is essentially mental. It works on the inside. It changes how we think, how we perceive, how we cope. At its best it is profound. But it remains, fundamentally, a shift in perspective.
The world is broken, but if I can find the right frame — the right story, the right practice, the right community — I can bear it. I can rise above it.
This is a very old idea. The philosophers had a name for it. The Platonists taught that matter is the problem and mind is the solution. The body drags us down; the spirit lifts us up. True salvation is escape — from the physical, from the temporary, from the flesh — into the pure realm of thought, or soul, or light. And this idea is so woven into Western culture that it has infected Christianity without most people noticing.
We see it in how people talk about heaven: as a place where we are finally free of our bodies, finally pure spirit, finally done with all this messy material existence. We see it in how we talk about prayer: as something that happens in the mind, behind the eyes, safely interior. We see it in how we think about salvation itself: as a transaction that happens between God and the soul, while the body waits in the lobby.
But what if this is exactly backwards? What if the escape route we have been sold is not Christianity at all — but its ancient rival wearing Christianity’s clothes?
Aha!
In the fourteenth century, a monk named Gregory Palamas got into a fight about this. The controversy sounds technical, but the stakes were as high as they get.
There were those who argued — as sophisticated, educated people — that God is so far beyond us that any real contact between God and human beings is impossible. We can think about God. We can be inspired by ideas about God. But actually touched by God? Actually transformed by God’s own life? No. The best we can hope for is a kind of created gift — something God makes and hands over, like a package left at the door. God himself remains safely elsewhere.
Palamas said: no. And he said it with everything he had.
What is on offer in Christianity, he insisted, is not a new perspective. It is not a coping mechanism. It is not God sending a gift from a distance. It is God genuinely giving himself — his own life, his own light, flooding into ours and changing us from the inside out. Not a change in how we see. A change in what we are.
And — this is the part that scandalized everyone — this transformation reaches the body. The monks on Mount Athos were not just having interesting interior experiences during their long hours of prayer. Something was happening to them. The light they encountered — the same light the disciples saw blazing from Christ on Mount Tabor — was real. It was God. And it was transforming flesh, not just mind.
Three things, then, that Palamas fought to preserve. The gift is God himself, not something God merely creates and sends. The transformation is real — it changes what you are, not just how you think. And God remains beyond our full grasp even in the giving — this is not us absorbing God, but God overwhelming us with a generosity we can never exhaust.
This is not a new perspective on a broken world. This is the broken world being healed.
Whee!
Now the gospel reading snaps into focus.
Last Sunday — the Sunday of Orthodoxy — we stood before the icons and were reminded to see differently. Nathanael met Jesus and went in a single moment from skeptic to worshipper: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God.” The icons press the same claim on us: look at these faces, these bodies rendered in gold and pigment, and learn to see what they are becoming. Learn to see the divine life shining through human flesh.
That was the first movement. Eyes opened. Perception transformed.
But today we are taken further.
Four men carry their paralyzed friend across the city and tear open a roof to lower him into the presence of Christ. And Jesus does not just give the man a new perspective on his paralysis. He does not offer him a framework for finding meaning in his suffering. He says: your sins are forgiven — and get up and walk. Soul and body together. One act. One whole person, restored.
The scribes are outraged: only God can forgive sins. And Jesus answers not with an argument but with a body standing up and walking out the door. The man who could not move picks up the mat that had defined his helplessness and carries it home.
This is what Palamas was defending. Not a theory. This. The God who refuses to divide us. The God who will not save the soul and abandon the flesh. The God whose light reaches all the way down — into the paralyzed places, the shameful places, the places we have given up expecting him to touch.
Sunday of Orthodoxy taught us to see. Palamas Sunday shows us that true seeing was never just seeing. It was always the beginning of being made whole.
Yeah!
So what do we do with this?
We are in the middle of Lent. And if the version of Christianity we have inherited is mostly about interior states — thinking better, feeling more hopeful, achieving a purer spirituality — then Lent is just a season of mental discipline. Give up something. Reflect more. Try harder.
But if Palamas is right, Lent is something else entirely. It is a bodily practice. And that is the point.
When we fast, we are not punishing the body or transcending it. We are training it. We are saying to our flesh: you are not the enemy. You are not a cage. You are the very thing God wants to transform. And so we bring you — hungry, tired, present — into the work.
When we pray with our bodies — standing, kneeling, making the sign of the cross, bowing — we are not performing ritual. We are enacting the truth that God’s light reaches the body. We are refusing the Platonist lie that says the spiritual is up here and the physical is down there and never the two shall meet.
When we show up — physically show up, in this room, with these people — we are doing what the four friends did. We are carrying each other into the presence of Christ. Some of us are being carried right now and don’t know it. Some of us are carrying someone without realizing it.
The body is not what we escape in order to find God. The body is where God finds us.
This Lent, bring it. Bring the hunger and the tiredness and the aching knees and the distracted mind. Bring the parts of you that feel paralyzed. Bring the mat.
The light reaches here.
Amen!