The God Who Does Not Rest

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
March 8, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Genesis 1:26-2:3
John 5:1-18

“Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is still working and I also am working.’”

The pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem called Bethesda or Bethsaida or Bethzada is now a tourist destination. I have been there. The pool was discovered next to St. Anne’s (a lovely little church with an amazing acoustic as I recall) and excavated in the last century. The five porticoes surrounding the pool correspond to the five-sided shape of many baptismal fonts (not including ours) and are thought to represent the Pentateuch. On the steps in the corners of the pool you can imagine the blind, the lame, the diseased clamoring to be healed. “In this hill area,” Raymond Brown speculates, “the water may have come from underground drainage; some of it, perhaps, from intermittent springs.”

Associated with the pool of Bethesda is a legend that is included in several translations of the Bible but is only a footnote in ours. Insert the legend at the end of the third verse of the fifth chapter and the text reads: “In these [waters] lay many invalids—blind, lame and paralyzed, waiting for the stirring of the water; for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had.” The Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, commissioned to celebrate the purifying of the city’s water supply in 1842, has been called the “crown jewel of Central Park” and is the one of the most universally loved fountains in the world. A winged female figure holds a lily in one hand to symbolize purity while her other hand stretches out to bless the water. At the end of Angels in America, the trilogy by Tony Kushner on the AIDS epidemic, the cast gathers around the fountain where Hannah, a matronly white Mormon mother who had cared for the men in the play living with AIDs, explains to the audience, “When the Millennium comes the fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told Prior I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean.” No doubt the legend has lived for two millennia because human beings still long to be healed, in body and soul…or do we?

John alone tells the story of the healing of the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath. In spite of his disability, John tells the story in such a way that we are led to a judgment of sorts: that the fellow Jesus found lying by the pool of Bethesda has chosen to be a victim. The role had become his life’s work. He had been ill for thirty-eight years and for an unknown number of those thirty-eight years he had failed to make it to the water’s edge in time to be healed. That failure and the man’s lack of initiative in relation to Jesus’ presence surely prompted Jesus to ask him a logical question: “Do you want to be made well?” I think it is a question Jesus logically asks us too, but more of that later.

Instead of a simple “Yes, Lord,” the man launches into the story of his sorry life. The fault, of course, was not his. In the first place, he had no one to put him in the pool when the waters stirred. One can only imagine why! The few who had befriended him over the decades probably could take only so much and, one by one, fled after a season or two of complaint. In the second place, he whined, someone kept cutting in line ahead of him. I hate when that happens! Clearly his fellow sufferers had it out for him. “Life is not fair!” you can hear him mutter. “I demand justice!” “If the paralytic’s malady were not so tragic,” writes Raymond Brown, “one could almost be amused by the man’s unimaginative approach to the curative waters. His crotchety grumbling about the ‘whippersnappers’ who outrace him to the water betrays a chronic inability to seize opportunity, a trait reflected again in his oblique response to Jesus’ offer of a cure.”

Not waiting for an affirmative response, Jesus calls the paralytic’s bluff: “Stand up, take your mat and walk,” he commands. Notice, by the way, the irrelevance of the water; Jesus’ word alone heals. The paralytic does as he is told and begins to walk. Period! Conspicuously lacking in John’s story is any expression of thanksgiving or praise or joy on the part of one who has been paralyzed for thirty-eight years and now walks. Can you imagine? How different he is from the royal official last week who begged Jesus to heal his son, then both marveled and believed when he received news of his son’s health. Something other than the healing of a paralytic must be the point of the story.

John tells us the point in the very next sentence: “Now that day was a sabbath.” “You shall keep my sabbaths,” declared the Lord God to Moses, “for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, given in order that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you….Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does work on the sabbath day shall be put to death.” The sabbath was a limit set by God that God’s people transgressed at their own peril. Yet rest on the sabbath was more than an empty prohibition given to assert God’s power and authority. The purpose of the sabbath according to Calvin in his Institutes, “is that, being dead to our own inclinations and works, we should meditate on the Kingdom of God….Believers,” he said, “ought to lay aside their own works to allow God to work in them.” The question John poses in this story is simply this: Which of these characters has kept the sabbath?

On the sabbath in question, it appears that neither the paralytic nor the religious community were inclined to lay aside their own works to allow God to work in them. Yet Jesus himself, working the work of God, has laid the paralytic’s work of victimization aside. The paralytic suddenly is without excuse or complaint. His way of being in the world—a way that blamed others for his misfortune—has been taken away from him by Jesus. Logically he should have been turned in praise to God as befits the sabbath. But acting out of the confounding logic of his studied victimization, we watch him instead find a way to become a victim all over again.

When the religious officials call him aside for carrying his mat (“It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat”), he blames Jesus: The man who made me well told me to carry it. The response is reminiscent of Eve in relation to the serpent and Adam in relation to Eve. Seen theologically from Calvin’s perspective, the paralytic was the one who broke the sabbath not because he carried his mat but because he was anything but dead to his own inclinations. Exploiting those inclinations, the crowd asks just who it was who did this to him. Unfortunately he had forgotten to ask after Jesus’ name so could not, at first, identify him to the authorities. “The fact that he had let his benefactor slip away without even asking his name,” notes Brown, “is another instance of real dullness.”

The story ends with Jesus again taking the initiative with the paralytic, an identity that still was apt because, in a sense, his soul was immobile, unmovable. Finding him in the temple, Jesus says, in words that must have exuded exasperation, “See [you idiot], you have been made well! Do not sin any more so that nothing more happens to you.” In other words, enough with the complaint, the blaming, the boo-hooing about your plight! You are walking, for God’s sake. You are whole. Now get on with your life.” Yet the upshot of that encounter was that now he knew Jesus’ name. “He repays his benefactor,” says Brown, “by reporting him” to the religious authorities—by telling on Jesus.

He tells them that Jesus worked on the sabbath, causing the religious community to become incensed because they believed God alone worked on the sabbath; ergo from their perspective, Jesus was making himself equal to God. Only God could give and take away life., they reasoned. Because they saw babies born and dear ones die…on the sabbath, God was working! God literally held existence in being. “Divine Providence remained active on the Sabbath,” they said, “for otherwise…all nature and life would cease to exist.” The doctrine is the doctrine of God’s providence. If God ceased to be God in relation to creation, if God were not actively upholding, directing, sustaining and governing creation, creation would not be at all. Put in terms that have something to do with the lives we really live, God’s work is to be God in relation to you and to me, to redeem this relationship we have chosen to turn our backs upon. The work begun by God in the beginning is now being taken up on earth, says John, in the fullness of time, by a human being who is as close to God as to be God’s Son. He is making himself equal to God, the Jews said, “working his Father’s work. The point says John, over and over in his gospel, is not equality but love, the love of God revealed in him who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself.

My friends on the sabbath which is, for Christians, the eighth day of creation, the time when God is creating a new heaven and a new earth where the lame will walk, the blind will seek, the prisoners will lose their chains, Jesus asks you what he asked the paralytic: Do you want to be well? In the hour we allot to have dealings with God, we would rather rehearse the story of our sorry lives, of how right we are or how wronged we have been, how good we are or how comparatively bad the one cutting in line in front of us is, how moral we are and how depraved the rest of the lame lot of humanity must be. Yet the deeper truth is that we long to give up the work we do in our minds to perpetuate the broken persons we have become in order to give God a go at us.

Ironically, we have to work at this and this work is called worship on the first day of the week. In adoration and praise, we relinquish ourselves…in confessing our sin, we turn our vulnerable, naked, lonely lives toward God’s mercy…in silence we listen, simply listen, for God’s address before daring the speech that is called prayer. And finally we offer our relinquished selves, our souls stripped bare, to the God who does not rest…to the God whose Son has offered himself completely to us at the font and around the table.

May God in Christ seek you in this temple where you have come to quit the hard work of being your broken self. For by his grace and before you ask, he comes to you saying, “See…you have been made well!” Thanks be to God.

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