Therefore, all people without exception (Christians and pagans) are equally sick (as seen from the types of sin), but why only Christians, as we stated above, know the truth about themselves, about their destructive state? Because only Christianity has the criterion of a healthy person, the ideal of a person – Jesus Christ Theanthropos. Only God reveals to us the truth about ourselves: how low we have fallen and the glory that God has prepared for us in Christ, having seated us at the right hand of the Father.
The task of each person is to know themselves, to discover the truth about themselves: who I am, where I am, where I am going, why I am living?! Christianity provides the means to know oneself – the Gospel commandments. A person becomes a Christian only when they feel the need (ontological and existential at all levels of being) in Christ, and that alone, without God, they cannot be healed. A person comes to this state (thirst for Christ, as the only hope) by diligently following the Gospel commandments, which reveal our destructive, fatally dangerous state – without God I can do nothing good (forgive from all my heart; love another, not to mention an enemy, etc.). This state of seeing oneself “as I am” is called humility. Therefore, diligently following the commandments does not make a person holy, but reveals to the person their weakness, removes the veil of illusion and self-satisfaction, and gradually brings them to their senses (to self-awareness), leads out of delusion (in which we all exist to some extent), out of the narcotic intoxication provided by the sinful, egoistic way of life. When a person stops, distances themselves from a sinful life, and begins to live according to the Gospel, then the deadly wounds caused by the three types of sin begin to be exposed.
The sick need a doctor, not the healthy. Christ came to the earth not to save the righteous, but sinners (cf. Mk. 2:17; Mt.18:11). Therefore, seeing one’s unworthiness – sins as wounds on one’s being is precisely the factor that makes me worthy to approach the Lord’s Table, to run to the only Doctor. Thus, we expose, reveal in the sacrament of confession our soul, “show” the Doctor our wounds, diseases in order to be healed in the Sacrament of Communion (not a one-time act of communion, because both physical and spiritual diseases are not healed immediately).
There is a difference between a debaucher and one who has debauched but has stepped away, a murderer and one who has repented (at least started on the path of repentance). Not committing sin does not mean being healed from the passion that generates it. If a person stops debauching, it does not mean that the nature is healed, but it is a condition under which it can be healed. The Lord brings the robber into paradise for his humility, introduces him into the Kingdom of God, which is the Eucharist – the actualization of this eschatological perspective (we receive the Kingdom of God, rather, we reveal what has already been given in fullness, according to our spiritual measure). We see that entry into the Kingdom of God does not depend on the state of nature (after the resurrection of Christ). To better understand this, let’s take the example from the life of Mary of Egypt. She received the Holy Mysteries of Christ immediately after returning, converting to God (were the sinful state, the passions immediately gone? – no), but after communion, she still fought the beasts in her flesh for seventeen years. Thus, she, with sin (with the wounds from the sins she committed, which she renounced as personal acts in repentance, and without which she could not enter into communion with God), received communion worthily. Thus, it is possible for a person who is unworthy (as all who approach the chalice) to receive communion worthily. The Lord Himself, having incarnated, did not disdain to take into His hypostasis the nature crippled by original sin and healed it Himself, restoring it to health and incorruption. Thus, we see that worthy or unworthy communion does not depend on our unworthiness, on the diseased state of the soul. Therefore, to be healed from diseases, wounds, we partake of the Medicine of Immortality. Since all medicines have contraindications, if they are used incorrectly, they can harm.
Thus, we can conclude that the unworthiness that we so dread (sincerely or pretentiously, to justify our passivity), that is, the damaged, wounded nature, the passions – the countless number we see in ourselves, does not constitute an obstacle to worthy communion.
The example of this is all the gospel sinners who repented (the robber who first entered Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the harlot, the tax collector), many saints (an example is Mary of Egypt) and even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who accepted into His hypostasis, made His own the sinful, distorted sinful nature (Became sin for us: 2 Cor. 5:21 and Rom. 8:3). Worthy and unworthy communion (its essence) is not hidden in nature, no matter what it is (pure as the sun? But Lucifer, the highest angel, with the purest nature, partook of Divine life unworthily and became the devil! Adam, with an immaculate nature before the fall, was expelled from Paradise because he communicated improperly with God and unworthily partook of Him; but the robber, a great sinner, a villain, was the first to enter Paradise, and after him all sinners who repented entered the Kingdom of God, partook of Divine life, joined the dynamic of Trinitarian love), but in the fact that a person is not primarily nature, but first and foremost a person who possesses nature.