John 5:1-9
Eighth Sunday after
Pentecost
Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
“Now that day was the sabbath” (Jn.
5:9b). Six simple words (seven in
Greek), tucked away in this story. The
first nine verses in chapter five focus on the healing of the paralytic at the
Pool of Bethesda. We don’t know his
name, but we know he’s been ill for thirty-eight years. He’s in the company of others like him,
“invalids,” we’re told, “blind, lame, and paralyzed.” Jesus approaches this man, asks him if he
wants to be made well. The man tried to
get into the water when, tradition has it, the water stirred and its healing
properties were most potent. But he
could never get there. Someone always got in his way. So, Jesus heals him, by-passing the pool
altogether. “Stand up, take your mat and
walk.” At once the man was made well,
and he took up his mat and began to walk.
There’s much to be explored in this
healing story. There are many directions
we could go with this text.[1] We could explore the relationship between sin
and disability. Jesus tells the healed
man, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse
happens to you” (Jn. 5:14). This is a tough text. Is Jesus saying that disability is caused by
sin? We could explore the relationship
between disease and disability and health.
We
could explore individual culpability and healing. Who is to blame? Jesus asks the man whether or not he wants or
wills to be healed. He says he does, but
he seems to offer an excuse. Do we stand
in the way of what we say we want in our lives?
But we have to be careful that we don’t blame the victim.
Maybe
there’s a problem with the healthcare system. Today, many hospitals are named Bethesda. The pool is part of the
ancient healthcare system. He’s been
under its care for thirty-eight years and he’s still looking for a miracle
cure, as life passes him by.[2] Maybe he just saw himself permanently sick; being
sick was his core identity, an identity reinforced by society.
Maybe
we shouldn’t focus on the individual man, but turn, instead, to society as a
whole. We have here “invalids,” people
who have been at the pool, searching for healing for some time. What does this
say about society, failing to care for those in need? Is the man, as some contemporary scholars
suspect, the victim of cultural forces, “disabled by the Roman Empire and his
own society, a territory occupied by Rome”?[3] We know, for example, how deeply “the
politics of a society get mapped onto real bodies, particularly bodies
considered deviant from the [normal or] normate body of a given society.”[4] The violence of society is marked on our bodies.
Yes, we could move in all of these
directions; each approach is worthy of our attention. But we’re told that the day that Jesus chose
to approach this man and talk to him and heal him and offer a new direction in
his life, “Now that day was the sabbath.”
And it’s because the healing takes place on the sabbath and because Jesus
tells him to take up his mat and walk on the sabbath, thus performing work on a
day that one should rest, that the religious authorities are furious. “It is the sabbath,” they say, “it is not
lawful for you to carry your mat” (Jn. 5:10).
The healed man is in serious trouble and he blames it all on Jesus. The religious authorities eventually find
Jesus and start badgering him for healing on the sabbath. Jesus replies, “My Father is still working,
and I am also working” (Jn. 5:17), which infuriates them all the more.
Is Jesus’ breaking the Torah/Law by
ignoring the sabbath? Are we breaking
the Law by ignoring the sabbath? How many of us truly observe a day of
rest? Christians have an ambiguous
relationship with sabbath-keeping. Some say that Christians aren’t bound by the
Old Testament Law, that we don’t have to worry about observing the Sabbath. Is Jesus rejecting the Rabbinic sabbath
laws? He does this often in John’s
Gospel. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus allows
his disciples to pluck ears of corn on the sabbath (Mk. 2:23).
What if we turned this around? Instead of viewing Jesus’ action as a violation
or rejection of the Law, what if healing is what the sabbath is for? Jesus did not abolish the Law, he came to
abolish the dead letter of the Law; he judged reductive legalism, the binding,
constricting literalism that prevents God’s people from seeing the purpose of
the Law, including the sabbath. Healing
this man on the sabbath, inviting the man to get up and walk on the sabbath,
sending him into life healed, forgiven, restored, renewed tells us something
about what the sabbath is for!
In
his classic work, The Sabbath (1951),
rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) wrote, “There is a word
that is seldom said, a word for an emotion almost too deep to be expressed: the
love of the Sabbath.”[5]
And why is it to be loved? Because it’s time
set apart, hallowed (that’s what hallowed
means, “to set apart”), to rest and delight in the goodness and love and
faithfulness of God. It’s time to rest,
but rest is in service to renewal and restoration. It’s not only hallowed time,
set apart for our rest, it is time for God’s
rest, when God is fully present in the creation. The sabbath might be a day absent of work,
but not absent God’s presence and glory and joy.
Actually,
significantly, the Hebrew verb “Shabbat” does not mean “to rest” but “to be
complete.” It refers to completeness. “Shabbatu,
the noun, means in Babylonian a cycle in a chronological sense, the day on
which the moon completes its cycle, the day of the full moon.”[6] Shabbat means completeness. Lacking nothing. Full.
We
hear echoes of this in Genesis 2:2, “On the seventh day God finished his
work.” On the seventh day. Why didn’t God finish working or complete the
creation on the sixth day and then have a proper break on the seventh, taking
the whole day off? So, then, what was
finished or completed on the seventh day, what was created on the seventh day? Something special was reserved for the last day. “Just as heaven and earth were created in six
days, menuha was created on the
Sabbath.” What is menuha? It’s often
translated as “rest,” but it “means more than withdrawal from labor and
exertion, more than freedom from toil, strain or activity of any kind.” Rest is not a “negative concept,” but
something valuable, requiring a special act of creation. What was created on the seventh day? Menuha, meaning, “tranquility, serenity,
peace and repose.” This so-called “rest,”
can be translated as happiness, stillness, harmony. When David affirms God as his shepherd, who
brings him beside “still waters” (Psalm 23:2), God leads him to the waters of menuhot, of stillness.[7]
Shabbat,
completeness, is the goal or end or purpose of creation. It’s a day for feasting, for delighting in
creation. Because it’s the day when we
share in the completeness and eternal presence of God, feasting in God’s glory,
it’s also the day of redemption, it's the day of renewal, the day of new beginnings.[8]
Heschel
reminds us that while an emphasis on excessive observance of the sabbath could
have led to the “deification of the law,” for the most part, it didn’t. “The ancient rabbis knew,” he writes, “that
excessive piety may endanger the fulfillment of the essence of the law.” “There is nothing more important, according
to Torah, than to preserve human life… Even when there is the slightest
possibility that a life may be at stake one may disregard every prohibition of
the law.” One must sacrifice [the
command or] mitzvoth for the sake of
man rather than sacrifice man “for the sake of mitzvoth.”[9] The purpose of the Torah, he says, is “to
bring life to Israel, in this world and in the world to come.” To bring to life. Heschel extolls us to, “Call the Sabbath a
delight: a delight to the soul and a delight to the body.”[10]
We’ve
been exploring expressions of compassion throughout the summer. There’s no mention of the word in this
story. The healing, though, was an act
of compassion. The
giving of sabbath itself is the gift of a compassionate God. As Jesus showed throughout his ministry, the
sabbath is a day to experience God’s goodness, to rest in the joy and grace and
love of God. It’s a time that is
life-giving, calling us to true life. It’s
a time of stillness, peace, and harmony, which can yield healing and
wholeness. It’s time to experience the
compassion of God toward us. It's time to
rest and to be restored. It’s time set
apart for renewal. It’s time to feast,
to celebrate, to taste and see that God is good–every good.
Image: David Roberts (1796-1864), Pool of Bethesda (1839).
[1] For various ways
to approach this text, see Jaime Clark-Soles, Reading John for Dear Life: A
Spiritual Walk with the Fourth Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 59ff.
[2] Kerry H. Wynn’s
reading of John 5 in Clark-Soles, 68.
[3] Warren Carter’s
reading of John 5 in Clark-Soles, 69.
[4] Clark-Soles, 69.
[5] Abraham Joshua
Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for
Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 15.
[6] Heschel, 105,
citing the work of Edward Mahler, Der
Schabbat.
[7] Heschel, 23-24.
[8] See Jürgen
Moltmann’s chapter “The Sabbath: The Feast of Creation” in God in Creation (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 276ff, esp. 287.
[9] Heschel, 17.
[10] Heschel, 18.
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