John 5.1-18                                                                                                    27 April 2008

“WHAT WE GET, WHAT WE DESERVE”

 

Jesus was at the edge of Jerusalem. He gazed on the waters of a pool.  This was not a country club pool or fitness studio pool. The disabled thronged these pools waiting for the angel of the Lord to stir those waters. In that moment of angelic stirring, called “living waters”, the broken quickly immersed themselves, hoping for healing. So this was more a whirlpool of crushed hopes than some personal lifestyle spa. Among those disabled was a fellow who had not walked in 38 years. 

 

“Do you want to be healed?” Jesus brazenly and tantalizingly asked him.  Do you know how sometimes a dozen thoughts can flit through your mind in an instant?  It must have been like that for this man.  “Of course, I want to be healed.  What an insult in asking me such a question…Then again, being healed, I cannot sit around anymore and complain about what a raw deal life is. Things will be different… But who is this doing the asking?  And by what right does he ask me?”

The man claimed he couldn’t access the waters because he had no help getting there. And when he did get there, others elbowed him out of the way. So in this marginal crowd, he was at the back of the pack, on the B Team of the disabled. Jesus invited him to take up his roll and stroll. And he did it! By God’s extrava-gant grace, cast wherever without measure, his life was forever changed. Jesus became the man’s living waters; he was free. So there was much rejoicing, right?

Wrong. A technicality intruded. Why does it seem like a catch occurs whenever a gift of grace, too good to be true, happens? John notes this healing happened on the sabbath.  So the temple muckety-mucks got their noses bent out of shape.  “Healing is fine,” they say. “We are in favor of it.  Of course, so long as it is done through our officially sanctioned channels, properly credentialed, duly approved.”

A few weeks ago I stood at these pools of Bethzatha.  The ruins were remarkably complete.  The scene was impressive, even evocative of Jesus’ famous healing. The porticoes still stand.  It is an elaborate series of pools, some 35 feet deep.  Back in Jesus’ day, our guide explained, the pools would have been just outside the walls of the Holy City. They were the repository for the broken and discarded.
And the healing cults centered there were likely foreign, and not of Jewish origin. Perhaps you have heard of the classical Greek cult of Aesclepius, for example?

All of this matters because as the temple leaders complain about Jesus’ healing because it didn’t conform to their standards, consider their standards.  First, the disabled were generally regarded as riff-raff who had somehow sinned and de-served their low estate. Let’s call it the Insult Added to Injury clause of theology. The disabled were outcasts and those objecting to Jesus’ healing had zero interest in such marginal people. Second, we know that the Jewish temple was high and lifted up so that, even if they were welcomed as more than subhuman, they likely couldn’t manage the steep ascent to reach it. They were 2,000 years too early to benefit from the disability access laws governing us now as we build.

Third, even if they felt welcomed and even if they could have ascended the temple steps, there was no real office of healing in the their worship life. Instead you were expected to make ritual obeisance, buying a dove if you were poor or a spotless lamb if you were rich, and making sacrifice to get right with the Lord.
In effect, there were no officially sanctioned channels of healing for the broken.
So by going to the pools of Bethzatha, Jesus was personally reaching out to the riff-raff of dubious religious origin, and extending his Jewish faith to new frontiers.

That gets us back to our story. As the temple functionaries in charge of regulating grace approached the healed man for details, he didn’t even know Jesus’ name.  Only later, as Jesus saw the man in the temple, and spoke to him following-up his makeover, did the man realize it was Jesus who had healed him. Then the guy returned to the religious bureaucrats and squealed on Jesus. That is Jesus’ thanks for healing him. The authorities say, “Oh, it’s Jesus again. He has a long record.” They sharpened their pencils and gave Jesus one more spiritual demerit.

 

This story sends us careening in different directions.  My first thought is how we exalt God’s grace and unconditional love in theory. The church makes a big deal over how we are saved by grace, how free and wonderful grace is.  This means that what God does for us in Jesus is done not because we have merit, but be-cause of who God is.  Often we talk a wide and expansive game here, but then become reluctant to live this as we encounter actual people in need of real grace. In official, monied, and powerful decision-making circles, grace is not so popular.

 

Cindy Fiscus told me about our attempt to get rollaway beds for our overnights with the homeless at our renewed DUC. She wrote a variety of Cape service clubs, asking for help.  We heard from one larger, more influential service club.  They referred us to a sub-committee, asked for our tax-exempt number, copies of everything in triplicate, and a rationale of why this ministry is important. That last bit, explaining why the church should help the homeless, got to Cindy. As you know, she has a sense of humor. She was tempted to write our rationale upon a sticky note and send it: DUH!?  But she didn’t.  We were refused because our church is not “in their jurisdiction”.  Like jurisdiction means much to the homeless. Still, good news elsewhere brought tears to her eyes, another small, poor service club, with very little budget, stated their desire to participate and sent us $500.00.  

 

In recent years we’ve heard a lot of public policy about helping the impoverished and the needy. Increasingly, this talk focuses on helping the deserving poor. Isn’t that a tough call? I mean, I see my own life, just my adolescence alone: torment-ing my teachers, goading my youth leaders, challenging my parents, and teasing my little brother.  All I can say is, if I got what I deserved, I wouldn’t live on this beautiful Cape, have a comfy home, and be allowed to serve this lovely church. As the powers ponder gracing the needy, they insist they must live with their bad choices. They’re disqualified from grace. But who here hasn’t made bad choices?

We have no indication the man Jesus healed was deserving.  While it is true that in many cases great faith occasions such healings in the Gospels, that is clearly not what happened here.  The man didn’t know even who Jesus was.  He was obviously not Jesus’ follower. When the authorities leaned on him for the sabbath offender, he gladly provided Jesus’ name, likely trying to suck up to the powerful.

Why did the temple authorities interrogate the man rather than celebrate his healing?  Why did they persecute Jesus rather than revel in the wondrous mira-cle? I have no idea.  It was likely a mixture of guilt and resentment.  Guilt that their own officially credentialed, properly channeled grace had nothing to offer the guy.  Resentment that Jesus sought him out and helped when they wouldn’t.

The fine preacher, Fred Craddock asks of this text, “Do you know anybody who has forsaken the church and gone to the pool?”  When he says ‘pool’, he’s not talking waters of the country club or health club. Craddock is describing where real people go to cope as they feel the officially sanctioned, respectable church distances itself and ignores them. Today the pool is a flight into native-American spirituality.  Or sitting at Border’s on Sunday morning and reading the kabbalah. Or yearning after a deeper connectedness within a support group. Where are the contemporary pools of Bethzatha where refugees huddle from official religion?

So there is grace in this story, but also judgment. This healing is really a parable for the church. Do we care about maintaining our respectable, accredited chan-nels of religion more than about reaching the people gathered at the outlying areas of the pool?  The story is an indictment of how proceduralistic we are just as God wants spontaneity. Moreover, as we do care, as we reach out to the bro-ken, do we insist on a photo I D that verifies, “truly needy” and “deserving poor?”

The gospel says as we share with strangers the grace of God, as freely as God has shared this same grace with us, it sets the Spirit free to do miraculous things. And if you think that only sounds nice, but you can’t really believe it, I close with this story.  It also addresses our compunctions about helping only the truly needy or the deserving, as though we are capable of deciding who those folks truly are.

 I served a downtown Columbus, Ohio church where street people were front and center. Just as you generously support our Pastor’s Discretionary Fund locally, the First Congregational Church, Columbus had a Good Samaritan Fund. We used the interest and dividends off the principal of $80000 to assist street people.  

Originally, the sum was a gift of $53,000.  That gift came to us in an unusual way.  One day a Chicago lawyer called First Congregational and told us the money was ours.  He gave us the donor’s name. It was embarrassing, nobody knew the donor. Then it was explained. The man who donated the tidy sum to our church was a street person we had once helped. He had inherited money he never spent. He left three equal portions: $53,000 to our church, a church in Michigan, and a church in Chicago who had paused to offer a bowl of soup or a tank of gas.

The point here isn’t like the fable of the mouse extracting the thorn from the lion’s paw. Not that if you help the weak and lowly, they may eventually benefit you.

The point is that Jesus Christ did not exercise control in gracing others—ever screening for merit, ever limited by the whims of arbitrary human approval—and neither should we. The point is to grace others as freely as God has graced us. Why is this grace so central?  This irksome, footloose, uncontrollable, sometimes even unfair grace?   Because it frees up miracles that will transform God’s world.

In this, Jesus takes us to a deeper and holier place than condescending to the poor as objects of curiosity and pity, as sad people with bad choices. The point is Jesus is free in his giving.  He is not jerked around according to his temple’s or any temple’s definition of timing and legitimacy. Giving follows not from the validity of our need but because by nature God gives in all directions. God freely showers his grace on the undeserving. We can but follow him. For Jesus is Lord. Amen. 

 

  

O Christ, you come to us as the bearer of mercy.  And you raise us from troubled depths to the sweet mysteries of wholeness restored.  Daily we need this resurrection.  Cleanse us in the pools of your grace, and raise us up again, strengthened, affirmed, empowered, to walk with you and declare your authority.

O Christ, you are the Lord of the waters, the waters of our sinking and our rising.  By your words hope crests within our hearts, and by the springs of your mercy we are remade, until reality presents itself to us as your most cherished dreams.  We thank you that you come to us, making us new, rekindling hope.  Lord of the waters, we pray for all afflicted by despair, mired by passivity and by dead habits. O Jesus, Lord of the healing waters, draw close to all of faint hope and bring re-birth to individuals, to communities, to the nations, and to this world you judge.