Faith in Action: St. Gregory Palamas and the Call to Lived Orthodoxy

In this sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent, Daniel McInnes reflects on the feast of St. Gregory Palamas and the Gospel account of the paralysed man lowered through the roof by his four faithful friends. Drawing on the theological legacy of St. Gregory Palamas — including his defence of Hesychasm and the distinction between God's essence and energies — Daniel calls us to move beyond intellectual faith into a truly lived, embodied Christian life. A timely reflection for the Lenten season on what it means to act on what we believe. Preached at The Good Shepherd Orthodox Church, 8th March 2026.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we are celebrating St. Gregory Palamas, one of the great saints of our Church. This Sunday is often called the Second Triumph of Orthodoxy, because of the importance of St. Gregory Palamas to the establishment of our understanding of what it means to be Orthodox — an understanding quite distinct from that of the Latin West. We will come to that a little later, but first I want to look at the Gospel reading.

This is a very well-known story. If you remember, it is the account of four men who bring their paralysed friend to see Jesus. Jesus is in Capernaum, in his house, teaching people, and there are so many people gathered that they cannot possibly get inside. So these four friends go up onto the roof, break a hole through it, and lower the man down so that he can be brought before Jesus. When they do that, Jesus sees the faithfulness of these men and says, "Your sins are forgiven." Some people get upset about that — the scribes in particular — because they say only God can forgive sins. But of course, Jesus is God. So he says, "To demonstrate that I have the power to forgive sins, I will also say: rise up and walk." And the man rises up and walks.

We see here the power of God responding to the faithfulness of people who were bringing this person to Jesus for healing. And I think this reading, together with the feast of St. Gregory Palamas, gives us something very important to reflect on during Lent: our Orthodox faith is not simply something cerebral. It is not something we merely think about. It is good to have knowledge of the faith. It is good to understand it in depth. But that is not enough.

Consider those four men. What would have happened if they had said, "We believe Jesus can heal him, but look at all those people — what can we do?" We have to act on what we believe. I have said it before and heard it said many times: the word "faith" is probably better translated as "faithfulness." For us as English speakers, faith tends to imply belief — something we hold in our minds. But faithfulness implies more than that. It implies actually doing what you believe. It implies living in accordance with your belief. These four men did not simply believe that Jesus could heal their friend; they took action to bring him to the place where he could be healed.

So for us, especially during Lent, we need to remember that as good as it is to immerse ourselves in Orthodox theology — whether that is the Ladder of Divine Ascent or whatever you happen to be reading — if that is not accompanied by true, lived-out works motivated by faith, by a genuine understanding of what it means to be Christian, then we are not taking full advantage of what Lent offers us, and we are not living as proper Christians.

This is a good opportunity during Lent to ask: what can we do? What can we do for the people around us? Where is the need? What can we do for our family, for the people at work, for anyone at all? Perhaps we cannot do much given our circumstances, but we can always do something. We need to act. We need to not just think about things, but actually do things. Our faith is not just cerebral. It has real consequences in the world when we live it properly.

We also see this truth in the life of St. Gregory Palamas, who was an extraordinarily educated man. His father was an official in the imperial court in Constantinople, but he died early. St. Gregory was then sponsored by the emperor and given the finest education available at the time. If you read his life, he mastered all the arts and disciplines of his day. His teacher of philosophy said of him that when you were speaking with Gregory, you could not tell whether you were speaking with Gregory or with Aristotle — in other words, he was a supremely sophisticated thinker.

So when we hear about his debates with Barlaam, we should understand what was at stake. Barlaam was a monk from Calabria with Greek heritage, but he had been formed in the Latin West. By that time, the Latin West had been working almost exclusively from Latin theological writings for a very long time, and had lost its connection with the Greek language and the Greek East. Over the centuries, as a result, certain understandings had shifted. This is part of why the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches differ so markedly in their understanding of certain things — it was a gradual process that unfolded over a long period of time.

By the time of Barlaam, the understanding of God in the Latin West had moved toward something closer to a philosopher's God — an almost completely inaccessible being whom you could not truly know or touch. On this view, the only way we could have access to God was through created things, which meant that grace itself had to be created. Any action from God had to be a kind of created intermediary, because God himself was completely untouchable.

St. Gregory Palamas responded by saying: if that is true, then we have no real participation in God. If we can only participate in created things, we cannot participate in God himself. And this is where the famous distinction between essence and energies becomes so important. The essence of God is what God is in himself — and we do not have access to that, any more than I have direct access to another person's inner being. What I have access to is how they work in the world: what they do, what they say, how they present themselves. In the same way, God has divine energies — his love, his mercy, his healing power, the divine light — and that is how God works in the world, how God presents himself to us. We do not have access to his essence, but we do have real access to God through his energies.

So St. Gregory said to Barlaam: it is not true that when the Hesychasts see the divine light, they are seeing something created. It is not true that all of their practices are a waste of time because God is inaccessible. We do have real access to God through his energies.

Barlaam's position was also that we do not need to do anything physical — that practices of stillness are unnecessary. Hesychasm, if you are not familiar with it, is essentially stillness — the stilling of the mind and body in order to draw close to God. It is acquired through ascetic practice over a long period of time, which is why visions of divine light are most often associated with monks, since they are the ones whose way of life makes such experience most likely.

The Hesychasts practised certain physical techniques: they would sit in particular postures, bending forward and concentrating on the heart, and sometimes regulating their breathing. These physical methods were not strictly necessary, but they helped — and the reason they helped is precisely what St. Gregory was also teaching: the body is not something you can simply separate from the soul and dismiss. The soul is not the only thing that matters while the body is unimportant or even evil. That is a philosophical idea that had crept into Western thinking. St. Gregory insisted that the soul is the life of the body. What you do with your body matters. What you do with your body affects the life of the soul and the spirit.

Think about what we are doing when we prostrate. We are placing our head lower than our heart — the heart is above the head. The thinking mind is subordinated to the heart. And that is exactly as it ought to be. Our lives, especially in the West, are so dominated by our heads, by thinking and analysis. So what we do with our bodies is important. Our bodies make a difference. We can use them as part of our path to salvation — for good or for ill — but we must use them.

In St. Gregory Palamas, we have the example of an incredibly intelligent and educated man who understood very well that all of that education means nothing if we do not have a real connection with Christ. And that real connection comes through working with our bodies, through ascetic practice, through the lived path the Orthodox faith has laid out for us.

As we go forward through Lent, let us remember once more: our faith is not merely intellectual. It is good to know things and to understand the faith, but if that knowledge is not accompanied by a truly outworked and lived Christian life, it does not really help us — in fact, it can become a hindrance. So look for every opportunity to do good. Look for every opportunity to help other people. Jesus himself said that the things you do to the least of these — to children, to the sick, to the vulnerable — you do unto him. All of those things work toward our salvation.

Let us look for what we can do, all around us, every day, to draw closer to Christ. If we do that, we will have had a good Lent. If at the end of Lent we can say that we truly tried to live our faith out in our community — in the places where we are, helping people, doing what we can — we will have had a good Lent.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.