APRIL 28 MBC

John 5:1-18

The healing miracle by Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda, may well have taken place in the most impressive public baths in Jerusalem. Because the waters in the pool were famous for their curative powers many invalids, the blind, lame and paralyzed congregated near the pool, hoping to be first into the pool when the waters churned. Jesus entered into the life of one unsuspecting man when he visited the pool of Bethesda or Bethzatha as it is called in the Hebrew language. He turned the man’s life upside down by performing a miracle of healing in front of a multitude of onlookers. A creative way to interpret Scripture is to try to put ourselves into the story, to try to imagine we are one or another of the characters involved. Try to imagine the scene from the perspective of the crippled man. Here he lies in public Roman baths lined with hopeful people lying or kneeling near the edge, all sick in one way or another, wanting to be ready for when, as they believed, the waters would grow choppy suggesting they possessed healing powers. So as he had done for nearly four decades, alongside these bedraggled people in a similar condition of expectancy and despair, he waits. Then a man with a retinue of disciples, a magnetic personality appears among the milling crowd. The crippled man’s interest is quickened but he expects nothing from him so turns away to continue his helpless, hopeless wait. Suddenly the crippled man finds he is being addressed by this man with a commanding presence and a Galilean accent. It is as though he and the man are alone. This stranger’s eyes bore into his. He feels vulnerable, exposed, vaguely excited, an emotion he had not known for years. They have a brief conversation and immediately he feels strength coursing through his body, wholeness enlivening his legs, his chest expanding. 1

The stranger tells him to get up and lift his mat and walk. Despite years of atrophy, he finds he can do it. A hush has descended on the crowd. They are torn between gawking at the man who has occupied the same corner for 38 years and now stands tall - and the remarkable miracle worker who without fuss has raised up a cripple and enabled him to walk. Jesus had stepped into this melee of people and surely had a purpose in the act of healing. But one wonders why that particular man, why did Jesus choose to heal a man so undistinguished that no-one bothered to get his name? Why JUST that man? Many other were no doubt desperate for healing too. We wonder why Jesus chose this man? Did He go to the pool specifically to search him out to heal him? Was His purpose just a single act of compassion or was it to further His oft stated aim to bring glory to God? This sort of question could well be asked as we trace Christ’s ministry throughout His three years of journeying throughout Israel. Sometimes we wonder today why, after prayer, some are healed, others are not? Like Job in the Old Testament we trust God, we trust God, shall not the judge of all the earth do right? but still wonder. It seems such a long time ago, but in the 1970s I served as Overseas Secretary of the Australian Baptist Missionary Society and as such, was on one of my annual visits to South Asia. I spent time at a small Baptist mission hospital in Bangladesh at a place called Joyramkura. There, the young Mission doctor spoke to me with real anguish at his inability to provide medical help to the teeming thousands of dispossessed people who lived in this remote part of the world. The only advice I could give him was that God had placed in his care those who he encountered in his work, he could not expect to heal the whole nation by himself. He had to be selective. Perhaps Jesus did too, because He could hardly wander around with a magic wand healing every sick person He met. And if He had healed 2

every sick person, imagine the chaos, the mayhem His actions would have produced. It seems for reasons beyond our ability to comprehend, Jesus was being selective in who he healed, and we see this time and time again throughout the Gospels. The crowds brought their sick and infirm and Jesus heals many of them (but not all), before drawing away to be by himself. We remember when Jesus healed the woman who touched His garment, ‘power departed from Him.’ Even for Jesus, the act of healing just one person, seems to have been accompanied by great spiritual, emotional or physical stress – maybe all three. In John 5: 2-5, it is recorded that Jesus healed just this one man. But look who Jesus healed. To us the choice seems puzzling. True, the man may have been there a lot longer than anyone else and it is clear he had no one to help him, no friends, no relatives. Perhaps Christ’s compassion was because of this man’s loneliness and persistence. Jesus said to him, Get up, pick up your mat and walk. And at once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. But the man’s responses to Jesus are hardly enthusiastic, hardly revealing a grateful spirit. He did not give Jesus a straight answer. When Jesus asked him if he wanted to get well, instead of responding with a resounding YES, he began talking about his sorry circumstance. “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get down there and get in, someone always beats me to it.” When the Jewish leaders asked the man who had healed him, it would seem he may have been trying to put the responsibility back onto Jesus. He replied to their questions, The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ We do not know his motivation but it would seem that he was not keen to take any possible blame himself. John’s account reveals him as something of an ingraite.

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There is no indication that he appreciated Jesus changing his life for the better, no suggestion that he came to be a follower of the one who healed him – he did not even trouble to get the name of this amazing person who had brought deliverance to him. And yet Jesus selected him. There is a name for this. It is GRACE. Do you ever feel you are unworthy to be called of God, to be a child of the living God? Do you ever wonder why Jesus should die on a Cross for you? For me? Later we will sing . ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…” We hardly enjoy being termed ‘wretch’ – some will possibly cringe at the word and be reluctant to accept such opprobrium. But knowing the people we can be, knowing the hurt we can do to others, knowing the extent of past wrong-doing, knowing we too often fail God and others, we are loathe to excuse ourselves from such a description. The phrase comes out of the hymn entitled ‘Amazing Grace’ and that is no accident. John Newton, the hymns author had led a cruel life as a slave-ship captain and burdened with shame at the memory of his past villainous deeds, knew that only God’s amazing grace could save him. Perhaps the extent and realization of past failures heightens one’s sense of extreme thankfulness for grace, freely given though undeserved. Perhaps the choice of this man with seemingly few redeeming qualities as the recipient of grace is a good lesson for us (especially if we do not rate ourselves very highly). Not one of us is beyond the extent of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. ***** Let us look again at the text and contrast the compassion of our Lord Jesus with the attitude of the Jewish leaders. Read verse 9-11 4

The Jews here means the religous leaders, the suspicious interrogators, not the common people. These wanted to know why the man was carrying his bed on the Sabbath. We would probably say mat because so many people around the world have no bed except a thin mat. He was violating the Jewish Law and that was intolerable. When this poor fellow, intimidated by the verbal harassment tried to explain, the religious leaders responded, Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk? No thanks to God for the miracle. No word of encouragement for the man who at last could walk. All they were interested in was ensuring this man, indeed the whole nation, kept to the rules, obeyed the letter of the Law. There is a movie called, Dangerous Minds. Michelle Pheiffer plays a former marine who takes a job teaching English in a tough inner-city school district. Her unconventional methods cause her to clash with the administration. At one point, one of her students is being chased by a gang member who wants to kill her student. She convinced her student to lay aside his tough street code of honor and go and talk to the principal to explain his predicament. When she later goes to the principal’s office to ask how it went, the principal said he sent the boy away. Flabbergasted, she asked why. “Because he barged in here without knocking. We are trying to teach these young people manners.” He sent the boy away for not knocking and never heard about the danger the boy was in. He was more concerned about the rules than about the reality that was before him. He was blind to human need, blind to a cry for help, consumed by the law, determined to follow the rules.

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In verse 14, we read that Jesus found the man he had healed in the Temple. The name and identity of Jesus became known to the healed man who reported this to the Jewish leaders. This resulted in a verbal exchange between Jesus and the leaders. Because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jews we are told, began to persecute Him. Again, the miracle of healing mattered little compared with what to them was outrageous that Jesus would heal on the Sabbath (even though it surely was a miracle and a great act of kindness). This action of Jesus challenged the conventional order. It challenged their understanding of what was right and proper – of how we had always done it! Concern over a Sabbath violation quickly escalates into a plot against the life of Jesus. When Jesus called God His Father, this was to them the ultimate blasphemy so they conspired to kill Him. The best contemporary analogy is to be found within the Church Sometimes in contemporary church life the knowledge of God, introduced by Jesus, is rejected because it is too challenging to existing religious systems and structures. Does that resonate with us? Can any of our religious systems and structures here at MBC obscure our life in Christ? Do we allow the Law to transcend the Spirit within and among us? Are we being imprisoned by our refusal to entertain and appreciate any changes to church life? Are some ingrained attitudes impossible to change? This is a delicate interpretive situation because who is competent to put the “right” understanding of the Good News in Jesus Christ? So much damage can be done in a church, and to a church, by both clergy and laity in defense of the “right” view-point. We need to hasten slowly in trying to determine for others, or worse for the entire body, what may to us seem to be unquestionably right. Gail O’Day has a fine quotation on this matter, She writes, The reality of the incarnation of God’s availability and presence in Jesus is the 6

defining mark of the believing community … not the defense of a particular practice. Jesus healed a crippled man. God’s grace was seen in this, but perhaps not to the one whose physical life was renewed. We need to identify and celebrate those moments of grace in our lives – to see the grace of Jesus Christ in our brothers and sisters and in the beautiful world all about us. The religious leaders when confronted with this miracle saw it not as grace, but as an offence to their cherished laws. They were prepared to go to all lengths to ignore grace and mercy and eradicate the challenge to their beliefs and practices. Both as a congregation and as individuals, we need to decide whether we will live by law or by grace. May God give us the grace to choose correctly.

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