Homily for the Sunday of the Paralytic - On Sinful Habits (St. Makarios of Patmos)

Homily for the Sunday of the Paralytic 

On Sinful Habits

By St. Makarios Kalogeras of Patmos (+ 1737)

A person is naturally inclined to feel sorrow and pain at the misfortunes and calamities of others. Perhaps because they are common, or because we are all of the same substance, or because a person does not know “what the coming day will bring.” He is not certain that later the thorns of pains which he sees in others will not also grow in himself. For these reasons, one is rightly drawn into a sympathetic disposition when he observes the illnesses and sufferings of his fellow human beings.

Who, then, would be so hard in heart, so beast-like in disposition, as not to grieve and not to feel compassion today, hearing from the holy Gospel of those many years which today’s paralytic spent lying down, like an insensible stone, upon a bed? Whose soul would not feel pain, hearing that this wretched man was not only paralyzed but also in extreme poverty, and for this reason was deserted by friends, deprived of relatives? Who would not feel compassion, when he considers not only the pains caused to him by the very grave illness of paralysis, but also the sorrow and the complaint that he felt when he saw the Angel troubling the water of the pool, another being healed and departing, while he himself remained always lying there?

Synaxarion of the Venerable Hierodeacon Makarios Kalogeras of Patmos

 

Synaxarion

By Metropolitan Kyrillos (Kogerakis) of Rhodes

On the 19th of the same month [January], the Commemoration of Saint Makarios Kalogeras.

Verses

You partook of a life worthy of your name, O Father,
having brought your life to completion in piety.
On the seventeenth day Makarios ascended to the heavens.

This Saint was born toward the close of the seventeenth century, around the year 1668, on the island of Patmos. Having acquired the first foundations of general learning in his native land, and ardently desiring to become the possessor of much greater education, he went to Constantinople, where he studied theology and philosophy. Being thus filled with abundant learning and knowledge — or rather with faith and evangelical wisdom — he was ordained a Deacon.

In the year 1713 he returned to Patmos and enrolled himself in the Brotherhood of the Monastery of Saint John the Evangelist there. He founded there, beside the Sacred Cave of the Apocalypse, the Patmiada School, in which he also slept the sleep of the righteous, on the 17th of January in the year 1737, having composed many writings and left them to the Church.