38.

John 5:1-18.  (March 15, 2015)

I.

This gospel measures itself according to Jewish holidays.  By doing this, it shows how Jesus is taking the stagnant well-water of our old religious institutions, and replacing it with the wild new wine of the Spirit.  Jesus goes up to Jerusalem from Galilee for an unnamed festival. 

Jerusalem is the holy city.  It is God’s chosen city.  It is supposed to reflect God’s power and presence.  It is also supremely representative of the Jewish religion.  We would expect it to be a place of joy, peace, and health.  Instead, when he gets there Jesus finds a crowd of sick people languishing around a reflecting pool called Bethsaida.  One guy has been waiting by this pool to be healed for 38 years.

I am told that there is in Jerusalem today a counseling center dedicated to helping bitterly disappointed tourists and pilgrims.  People come to Jerusalem from all over the world.  Many of them only know the city from the Bible, and they have some very exalted expectations.  When they get there they discover that Jerusalem is a chaotic, dirty, under-maintained, ancient, conflict-ridden Middle Eastern city.  For anyone expecting the streets to be paved with gold and everyone loving each other and lost in ecstatic prayer all the time, the reality is a crushing disappointment.  In Jerusalem the Christians don’t even get along with each other!  Do people expect maybe the Disney World version?!

Jesus plays on this discontinuity between what Jerusalem is supposed to be, and what it actually is.  For him it represents the chasm between what religion is intended to do for us, and what it is actually doing to us.

The last time Jesus is in Jerusalem, probably about six months earlier, he encounters the corruption of the Temple by business interests.  This time, what he finds is a lot of sick people.  It is another indication of the failure of the religious institutions.  People were coming to Jerusalem and they were not being made whole  They were not being made well.  The place was not working.  38 years?  Seriously?

Jesus sees all these broken people lined up along porticoes next to these two rectangular pools.  And he finds the guy who has been there 38 years.  Now, numbers in the Bible are almost never only about quantities.  In Deuteronomy 2 we learn that 38 years was how long it took for virtually all the adult Israelites who had escaped from Egypt to die as the people wandered in the wilderness of Sinai.  So we get the impression that for this sick man in Jerusalem, his time of brokenness and languishing in vain by this pool is over.  It is time for this life to change.

Jesus kneels down and asks the man, “Do you want to get well?”

The man answers with this eruption of self-pity about how he never has anyone who will put him in the water at the right time, and as he’s trying to get there, someone else beats him to it.  Apparently there was this legend that if you got yourself into the water when it was “stirred up,” you would be healed.  This man never seems to make it into the water in time.

This is how he answers Jesus’ question, with this whining about how unfair it all is, and nobody will help him, and it’s not his fault, and nobody likes him, and everybody else gets healed but not him, and so forth.  For 38 years he’s been stewing in this resentment and frustration.

If we stew long enough in resentment and frustration it becomes the only thing we know.  It becomes the only way we know how to feel or relate to our world.  Years ago I was on a train, sitting in the dining car with other people.  I asked one of these people what he did for a living, by way of small talk.  And he launched into this well-rehearsed sob story about how he is a professional accordion player, but no one will hire him.  People these days only want guitar music or piano music.  No one wants an accordion player.  Next to him was his wife, giving him loads of understanding comfort in his misery.  Accordion music is obsolete and forgotten, and woe is me, was his basic tune.  In my ignorance I started asking him about musical styles that still used accordion.  Ever played Zydeco?  No.  He never heard of that.  How about New Tango?  And I went through two or three other kinds of current music in which accordion figured prominently.  But no.  He didn’t know anything about any of those.  And his wife starts giving me dirty looks.  Because if it ever turns out that anyone anywhere will actually hire an accordion player, their whole relationship would have to be reconfigured.  They were getting too much mileage out of his tragic failure.

All of our personalities are like this.  We have learned some rudimentary ways of coping with the world.  And God help anyone who threatens our chosen methodology, or questions the circumstances that brought us to this point.

II.

Jesus is utterly unconcerned with the morass of self-pity the man by the pool has churned up for himself.  He does not try to get the man into the water, or have him participate in this superstitious and cruel version of God who punishes people because they can’t get into a pool fast enough.  He just says, “So get up!  Pick up your mat.  And start walking!”  You don’t need any pool.  You don’t need any religious institution or tradition.  You only need to trust in the Word of God.  You only need to hear and obey me.

And the man is immediately made well.  Obeying Jesus, he gets up, picks up his mat, and walks! 

We do not immediately realize what a bind the man is in here.  He has probably been told for 38 years that the reason he is so sick is that he must have broken God’s law.  Now there is this man who has healed him… and requiring that he break God’s law, by picking up his mat and carrying it on the Sabbath.  The text doesn’t mention that significant detail until after he does it: oh, by the way, this is all happening on a Sabbath.

The man starts walking carrying his mat.  I can only imagine that he is ecstatic and amazed, walking in astonished glee among the other crippled and sick people.  He must have attracted a lot of attention.  He certainly attracted the attention of the Jewish leaders, the Sabbath police.  

And in typical fashion, because we see this kind of attitude in the New Testament a lot, they have no concern for the person.  They only have this laser-like focus on the fact that he is carrying a mat, which is against the Sabbath laws.  Just because you’re walking for the first time in 38 years does not mean you can just ride roughshod over the law.  Put. The mat. Down. Sir.   Or we’ll have to bring you in.

It’s all about the rules.  The person is immaterial.  Spectacular miracle?  Who cares?  Thirty-eight years of pain and misery?  Doesn’t matter.  Just don’t carry anything on the Sabbath, for God’s sake.

The other night we watched one of my wife’s favorite movies.  It’s called Chocolat, and it’s about this village in France in the 1950’s that experiences a reawakening of life and joy because a woman arrives and opens a chocolate shop.  The plot revolves around the fact that she does this at the beginning of Lent, in this strictly Catholic town.  The season plays out as a battle between the oppressive, pious conformity enforced by the mayor, Alfred Molina, and the playful freedom of the chocolatier, Juliette Binoche.  My point is that Jesus would be with the outsiders and their chocolate, not the upright, uptight Christians and their morose, paranoid, legalistic, self-flagellating religion.

Jesus brings joy!  He brings health!  He brings delight!  He brings freedom!  And he is famous for breaking the social, religious, and moral rules.  Jesus seems to go out of his way to wait until the Sabbath day to do stuff like this, just to make the point that these oppressive rules are part of what is making and keeping people sick.  

III.

And the thing is, the man, even though he is healed of his physical disease, still has this law-phobic prison in his head.  Just because his body is better, doesn’t mean that his mind has caught up with his new status.  Indeed, he seems to just transfer his resentment from his situation to Jesus, the one who heals him!

After the authorities complain about how he is carrying his mat, he deflects responsibility for his own actions.  “It’s not my fault!” he says.  “The man who made me well told me to pick up my mat and walk.  He made me do it!”

The discontinuity here of course is that it’s breaking the law that’s supposed to make you sick.  Sickness is supposed to be God’s punishment for law breakers.  But here, in this man’s experience, breaking the law is associated with healing.  The man is required by Jesus to look within himself for the truth, not to the law.  This should make us a bit nervous.  Jesus is asking him to decide for himself which is better.  He can keep the law and stay sick.  Or he can break the law and get well.

And the law is not just, you know, some municipal code, or some rules of the condo association.  It’s the Bible.  Don’t do any work on the Sabbath; that’s in the 10 Commandments.  And Jeremiah 17 says don’t carry a load on the Sabbath.  What do we do with this kind of discontinuity?  The man has to make a choice to obey Jesus or the Bible, as usually interpreted by the accepted authorities.

We have to make this choice more often than we know.  And obeying the letter of the law and the plain sense of the text is way easier than obeying Jesus.  But one of the things I learn from our Presbyterian Book of Confessions is that: a) Jesus Christ is the Word of God, and b) the Scriptures bear unique and authoritative witness to him.  There is no contradiction between Jesus the Word of God and the word of God in the Bible; and if there appears to be a contradiction, then Jesus Christ rules.  If you think the Bible is saying something contrary to Jesus Christ, then you’re reading it wrong.

Unfortunately, the man at the pool is not familiar with the Book of Confessions.  Still less so are the authorities giving him a hard time.  All they had was a self-serving interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, such that they decided that carrying a mat constituted prohibited work, even if someone has just been miraculously healed after 38 is years of illness.

The reference of Scripture to Jesus is not just a matter of hermeneutical or theological methodology.  It is not an arbitrary choice or even a statement of a faith commitment.  Saying that the Bible refers to Jesus Christ means that the words in Scripture express and reflect the Word of God, God’s self-expression, God’s overflowing love pouring into the nothingness of the primordial chaos, speaking order and beauty and goodness into existence.  The very atoms that make up the universe, including our bodies, were breathed into being by God and informed by God’s Word, and declared very good.  

This means that Jesus, as the living Word of God, is an inherently and essentially healing presence.  To experience him truly is to experience healing.  This is what happens to the man in the story.  He doesn’t need a copy of the Book of Confessions to know the effect that simply being in the presence of the Lord Jesus has on his own body.  The man feels and knows the difference between being broken and whole, between pain and in joy, between paralysis and mobility.  He knows one is right and the other isn’t.  He knows that one qualifies as part of the “very good” world that God created, and the other is a broken, tormented aberration.

The Word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us full of grace and truth in order to restore people and creation to their original blessing and goodness.  We have that goodness and wholeness inside of us already; Christ comes to set it free, to let it emerge in our hearts, and to let God’s love flow again in our bodies.  The man experiences this.  He knows it directly.  He doesn’t have to read about it.

IV.     

The leaders ask him, not “Who healed you?”  They don’t care about that.  They only care about their law.  “Who is this man who told you to pick up your mat and walk?”  Who told you to break the Sabbath laws?  Who is this nefarious influence, this outsider, this unpatriotic atheist, going around among these poor sick people and telling them to break the law?  Who is creating a problem out here, getting people into trouble, changing everything?

The man looks around.  But Jesus has moved on, and has mixed into the crowd.  The man can’t find him anymore.  Jesus has left him.  And in this confusion and absence he starts to piece back together the house of resentment that was his home for so long.  Think about it.  His life has changed.  He is healed and whole again.  But there are new challenges he now has to deal with.  The man is able-bodied, but has no job.  His only goal in life, to get in the pool at exactly the right time, has been rendered pointless.  He’s broke, but now has no way to appeal to people’s pity or charity anymore.

Plus Jesus puts him in this difficult position with the police, telling him to break the law, and then disappears.  Perhaps the man feels somewhat entrapped, abandoned, hung out to dry.    

When Jesus does come across him again, he tries to encourage the man.  “See!  You have been made well.  Don’t sin anymore in case something worse happens to you.”  Don’t give in to the resentment that you sucked on for so long.  Don’t go back to your crippled approach.  You body is healed; your mind and heart need to catch up.  It is one thing to be subject to disease and disability.  That’s bad enough.  But it is another to consciously choose it.  To experience healing and deliverance and liberation, and then decide that you would rather keep cooking your resentment and stay broken because that’s just easier and more familiar and comfortable… that’s the “something worse” Jesus is talking about.   

Unfortunately, that’s where the man has gone.  After Jesus walks away again, the man goes and finds the police to rat on Jesus.  

The leaders then go and start harassing Jesus over his lax attitude towards the Sabbath laws.  He says, “My Father doesn’t stop ‘working’ on the Sabbath.  And neither do I.  You have chosen to define compassion and faithfulness and shalom and justice as ‘work,’ and prohibited them on the Sabbath, even though these are what humans are created for.  You have turned the Sabbath into a day of oppression and sour-pussed piety.  You have separated the Sabbath from the One who made it.  You have drained it of all joy and turned it into a 24-hour commemoration of your own power.  Of all times, the Sabbath should be a day of liberation and joy!”

But what the authorities get out of this is that Jesus adds to his reputation as a troublemaker and lawbreaker the additional title of heretic.  And then these leaders, these authorities of the old religious institution, these experts, recognize the truth about Jesus.  That in making God is Father he makes himself equal to God.

Which would indeed be a problem were it not the truth.  Like the demons in the other gospels, the authorities here recognize who Jesus is and accurately name him the Son of God.

V.

When Jesus first speaks to the man, when the man is still languishing paralyzed by the pool, the word Jesus says to him, the word in Greek, is “arise.”  It is the same word used for resurrection.  “Rise up!” says Jesus to the broken man.  Jesus walks among the crippled and sick and calls for an uprising.

He invites us to entertain the possibility that if we lose the dead weight of our resentments, our despair, our subservience to illegitimate and oppressive authorities… if we become free of the old religion… if we do not let that stuff hold us down anymore… we will ascend, and emerge into new life with and in God.

“Rise up!  Pick up your mat, that enables you to make your home, lay your head, anywhere; pick up your mat and show that you’re not coming back here.  And start walking in the light!

We too have to rise up.  Not by jumping or flapping our arms really fast.  But by trusting the word of the Lord, who shows us that what we think is holding us down isn’t really anything at all.  It’s made up.  It’s not real.  Our true self doesn’t need to get to the capricious, unreliable, and intermittent #water of the old institution.  Our true self needs only to trust that the person Jesus is talking to, whom he completely expects to rise up and walk in the light, is who we really are.  Free.  Light.  Blessed.  And very good.

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