Leave-taking of Pascha: Christ is risen!
Acts 19:11-20 Magical Thinking
11 And God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, 12 so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. 13 Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.” 14 Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. 15 But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” 16 And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. 17 And this became known to all residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks; and fear fell upon them all; and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled. 18 Many also of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices. 19 And a number of those who practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all; and they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver. 20 So the word of the Lord grew and prevailed mightily.
Ephesus was a center for the practice of magic, and especially magical healing. (The flip side of healing was magical cursing, and that too was a regular practice, with written curses sometimes written on lead tablets to call down disease upon adversaries.) Everywhere Paul and the disciples went there followed incidents of physical and spiritual healing. And as we see here, the healing grace of the resurrection, working through the saints imbued with the Holy Spirit, works materially even through “handkerchiefs or aprons.” Earlier in Acts we heard that the sick hoped that even Paul’s shadow might pass over them and bring healing (Acts 5:15.)
In the Orthodox Church we are accustomed to this. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of our church life is its sacramental materialism. This is a normal outgrowth of our faith in the incarnation, in the invisible God entering human history in the flesh. He is born, lives, dies, rises again and ascends physically, thereby transforming our physical and material existence. This is why we venerate icons and relics and why our sacramental life involves all the senses.
But this can easily be misunderstood as magic, as the sons of Sceva found out. To be fair, even the disciples of Jesus during his earthly ministry thought they could just imitate his actions, say a few words and then “poof”: healings would magically follow (along with power, praise and popularity). But as Jesus told them after a failed healing attempt, “this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting” (Matt 17:21.) True healing is not magic. It emerges from a demanding way of life rooted in prayer and ascetic practice. And it produces humility, not pumped-up pride.
So, a warning to us all, especially those in the priesthood tempted to use the church to satisfy our egos in any way. “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?”
Update
In Saint Sergius Chapel, we will have a Paschal Liturgy for the leave-taking of the feast. This evening and tomorrow morning Father Basil Summer will serve for the Holy Ascension.