The lectionary, as you know, is a cycle
of appointed scripture readings followed by much of the Christian world. It is a wonderful thing. No … really!
It offers four passages a week over a three-year cycle, and helps keep
preachers honest. It helps keep us from
choosing our own little favorite corner of the scriptures and staying there Sunday
after Sunday, world without end, amen.
It makes us preach passages we may not want to preach, that make us—or
others—uncomfortable, or are just downright boring. But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,
and sometimes the lectionary does us a little bit wrong, and this is such a
time. The lectionary passage was verses
one through nine, and if you read only that, we see just another miracle
account, of a kind that’s repeated over and over in the gospels. Ok, ok, we know Jesus performed miracles, I’m
always tempted to say, so what else is new?
It’s only when we go beyond the bounds
of the lectionary, on either side of verses one through nine, that we begin to
see the larger picture, where this fits in with what John—and God!—are trying
to teach us. So I read verses nine through
eighteen, but in the interests of not reading all day skipped the passage before, as it is equally important.
That’s because there are actually two back-to-back healings, this one and the one in the passage just
before it, and as you know, it’s common for the gospels to place stories
back-to-back, that create new meaning by their placement. Thus, we should ask the question: what does
the preceding healing story tell us about this
one?
Well . . . the first one is about the
royal official who, when he heard Jesus was in the vicinity, goes and begs him to heal his son. Jesus, who especially in John is leery about
belief based on viewing miracles—says to him: “Unless you see signs and wonders
you will not believe." But the man
persists: “Sir,” he says, “come down before my little boy dies.” So Jesus says: “Go; your son will live.” And when the man’s slaves meet him on the way
home, they tell him that the boy recovered, just at the hour Jesus said it. And as a result, he believes, along with his
whole family, thus making what Jesus predicted come true. He saw signs and wonders, and believed.
Contrast that with the present
story: Jesus comes up to Jerusalem at
festival time, and for some reason comes to the Sheep Gate, where there’s this
pool, surrounded by porticoes, full of invalids. John says they were blind, lame and
paralyzed. Now, you might notice that
verse four is missing; most scholars think it was a later inclusion, added by
some helpful scribe. The best Greek
manuscripts don’t have it, but it does provide more information: seems that an angel would come down and stir
up the water. Whoever first stepped into
the pool would thus be healed. And this
guy had been there 38 years—just two short of a long time—because every time
the waters were stirred, he’d been beaten to the punch.
And note that unlike the royal official,
this guy doesn’t beg, or even ask. As a matter of fact, he seems downright
diffident about it. When Jesus asks him
“do you want to be healed,” he doesn’t say yes, he just launches into the story
of how he has no one to put him in the pool and how someone else gets there
first. But even so, even if the man
doesn’t say he wants it, he heals him anyway.
“Get up,” he says, “pick up your sleeping-mat and walk around.” And he does, and John makes sure we know it
is on the Sabbath.
And so we have two contrasting miracle
stories, two tales of grace being dispensed by Jesus in the name of God. In one, the recipient begs for the healing,
begs for the grace, and in the other, the recipient doesn’t ask for it, doesn’t
beg, but is healed anyway. And to
further the distinction, John tells us that the healing made the first guy—and
his whole family—believe. But he doesn’t
say that about the second guy, just that the healing occurred. And that it was on the Sabbath.
So here we have two examples of grace
being bestowed: one after being asked, and another where the recipient doesn’t
ask for it. Not only doesn’t he ask for it, he gives no indication he
knows know who Jesus is. What's more, he doesn’t even show any gratitude. Just the opposite, in fact: when the Jewish
authorities accuse him of working on the Sabbath by carrying his pallet, the
man blames Jesus, saying “the man who did this said I could do it, he said I could walk around, carrying my
mat.” He passes the buck, just like
Adam, who when God asked who it was who disobeyed, passed the buck to Eve, who
did it again, saying “the serpent made me do it.”
And what’s worse, after he runs into Jesus again, and finds out who it was who
healed him, he goes running back to the religious authorities, telling them who
it was. And because of that, because of
this little ingrate telling on Jesus, the authorities begin to persecute Jesus,
because he had healed on the Sabbath.
And so we have another tale of
undeserved favor, of un-asked for grace.
Nobody deserves forgiveness, nobody can work for God’s grace. In fact, the guy by the pool not only doesn’t
ask for it, but is profoundly ungrateful about it, the little weasel. He behaves rather poorly, and yet still gets the goodies. Kind of reminds me of some of those Old
Testament guys, who do all kinds of rotten things, and are still blessed. Like
Abraham, who gives up his own wife to another man—twice!—save his own skin. And he still
gets to be the father of a great people.
Or Jacob the trickster, who scams his
poor blind father into giving him his blessing, even though it belonged to his
older brother Esau. Who he’d already
taken advantage of by making him give up his birthright for a measly bowl of
stew. And yet, God gives him wives and slaves and flocks and twelve sons, who
go on to found a great nation. God does
indeed give grace to the strangest people, people whom the world would lock up
in jail rather than award one, thin dime.
And of course, that’s the nature of God’s grace, the scandal of it: none
of us deserve it, none of us are worthy of it, we don’t even have to ask for
it. It is God’s gift to us,
unconditional, un-looked for, undeserved.
And yet … just preceding today’s story
is the one about the royal official, who begged him, pleaded with him, traveled
to meet him, and when it works, when Jesus heals his little boy, is so grateful
as to believe, taking his whole household with him. And how inconsiderate can one god be?
How whimsical, how out-of-left-field, how unpredictable that is. It should be one way or another, don’t you
think? Reliable, steady, decently, even,
and in good order. How can we tell
what’s what? How can we rely on things
to be the same? How can we put God in
our little theological boxes if God insists on doing things one way one time,
and another way the next. How
inconsiderate of God, how downright inconsistent.
But you know what they say: consistency
is the hobgoblin of small minds, and in comparison to God’s, if God can be said
to have a mind, ours are pretty
small. But we persist in trying to pin
God down, trying to tame the divine, trying to make it conform to our ideas of what’s fair and what is
not, our ideas of what is just and what is not.
It’s what Paul might label a stumbling block—in Greek a scandal—about the gospel. He might call it, in fact, a stumbling block
to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.
Esther de Waal, in Living with Contradiction, her marvelous little book on Benedictine
spirituality, sees our lives as full of paradoxes like the one that informs our
scriptures. God’s grace, God’s largesse,
comes both to those who ask for it, and those who do not. It comes to those who work for it as well as
those who do not. It comes to those who
are grateful for it, but in the end, to those who are not. And for de Waal, it is our faith that enables
us to live with these contradictions, these tensions, in ourselves, the world
around us, and of course in our relationship with the divine. She quotes a passage from Colossians we sometimes
use as an affirmation of faith: “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth
were created . . . all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Christ is the glue in the middle, the
paste that holds us together, in all our messiness, all our brokenness, all our
contradictions. Christ is the ground of
our being, the solid middle of our hollow shell. Christ holds the universe together, and only
in him is paradox stable. Only through
him do we have life. Amen.
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