Easter 6 13
The three readings we heard
from the Bible today might seem to have very little to do with each other. The
first was an encounter between St Paul and Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, a
Jewish woman living in Philippi who becomes his first convert there. The second
was a glorious picture of the new heaven and the new earth from the book of
Revelation. The third was the miraculous healing of a paralysed man by the pool
of Bethzatha in Jerusalem. Each one is full of possibilities to preach from,
but they don’t sound as if they have any obvious connection to each other.
But there are two things
which feature in all three readings if you look closely enough. The first is
water. Paul meets Lydia by a river, where he and his companions “supposed there
would be a place of prayer” according to the reading. It was common to find
synagogues by rivers because worshippers had to ritually wash before prayer.
The Gospel story too has a watery setting, beside a healing pool in Jerusalem.
And the heavenly city in the book of Revelation has a river running right
through it, of course, coming out from the throne of God and watering the land.
So all three readings feature water.
The other thing that connects
these readings is the Sabbath. Paul meets Lydia on the Sabbath day, and the
healing of the paralysed man happens on the Sabbath too. We are told this right
at the end of the reading, and I’ll come back to it later. But where’s the
Sabbath in the Revelation reading? It’s not obvious so don’t think you missed
something. It seems to me, though, that the images John uses here reflect what
a person of the time might have thought of as the perfect Sabbath, the eternal
Sabbath for which all other Sabbaths were meant to be a preparation.
The idea of the Sabbath was
rooted in the Jewish Creation myth from the book of Genesis. God makes the
world in six days, it says, and on the seventh he rests, not because he’s
tired, but because it’s finished. It’s perfect. It’s complete. There’s nothing
left to do but enjoy it. And God looked at everything he had made, says
the Bible, and behold, it was very good.
It didn’t stay that way, of
course, but just for a moment there, right at the beginning, the Jewish
Scriptures taught that everything had been exactly as it should be. In a way
the rest of the story of the Bible is the story of how they tried to reclaim
that original perfection. Perhaps it is
the story of all human history – every culture has its dreams of a golden age, back
in the past or far in the future . The ancient Israelites had a word for this
longed-for state - Shalom – which meant peace or wholeness or
completion. It wasn’t just the absence of conflict, but a state in which
everything was right, in balance and harmony, reconciled and healed.
In Jewish thought to this day
every Sabbath is meant to give a glimpse of that perfect peace, that Shalom. It
is supposed to be a time of rejoicing, a time when people can stop their
anxious striving, their worry, their busyness and just enjoy what is – their
family and friends, their world with its gifts, and most of all the God who has
given it all to them.
The new heaven and the new
earth of the book of Revelation seem to me to echo this vision too. The final triumph
of God, it says, is a world at peace, a place where there will be “no more
night”, where people live in the close relationship with God he had always
intended, a place of healing and joy and abundant life.
It is no accident that water
is at the heart of John’s image of the perfect Sabbath. There can be no life at
all without it. Everyone in the hot dry climate of the Middle East knew that.
But water was also something which was mysterious. It welled up from the ground
or fell from the sky and they had no idea why or how. It was pure gift. No
wonder it became so important in religious ritual, and still is in the
sacrament of baptism. We can’t live without it, but it can never be fully under
our own control.
So, water and the Sabbath are
the two things which I think connect these three readings. But so what? Why
does it matter?
Let’s go back to the Gospel
story, to the man lying by that healing pool at Bethzatha. People evidently came
from far and wide to try to bathe in it, but they only thought it worked when
the water was stirred up – perhaps it was a thermal spring where water
periodically bubbled to the surface – and that meant that this man never made
it into the pool in time because of the very disability that had brought him
there. Presumably he is one of those described in our translation as paralysed,
but actually the word John uses doesn’t quite say that. He doesn’t use the
normal Greek word for paralysed– paraluticos – it uses the word “xeros”
which literally means “dried up.” This man is dried up, withered by his illness
according to John. No wonder he longs to get into this healing water. And there
it is, right beside him. But it might as well be a million miles away. And as
he lies there thirsty for its healing powers we sense that his hope is drying
up too. After 38 years of illness that’s hardly surprising. Who could sustain
their hope that long? Every failed attempt at finding healing makes the desert of
despair inside him grow a little larger. Jesus asks if he wants to be made
well, and of course he does, but perhaps they both know he is close to the
moment when he will stop caring, stop trying.
The irony is that in the end
he is healed without getting wet at all. It’s not the water in the pool which
heals him; it is Jesus who makes him whole. In the chapter before this Jesus
has met with another thirsty person, a Samaritan woman coming to draw water at
her local well in the heat of the day. He has told her that he has living water
to give her, water that is like a spring gushing up to eternal life. This “dried
up” man discovers the truth of that for himself as he finally rises to his
feet, and to a whole new life.
“Now that day was a Sabbath”,
ends this reading. Indeed it was, in the truest sense of all for his man. It
was the day on which he found the Shalom of God – the wholeness he had
thirsted for, the new creation he really needed. If every Sabbath was meant to
be a day of rejoicing, surely this Sabbath should have been the best of all,
not just for him, but for all who witnessed his healing too. Who could fail to
be glad for him?
But that’s not how it worked
out. There is a sting in the tail of this story. The reason John tells us that
this was the Sabbath wasn’t to signal the outbreak of joy in this community,
but to warn us that a world of trouble was about to erupt. Jesus had told this
man to take up his mat and carry it home, and he had done so. But carrying
things was regarded as work according to Jewish Law, and work was forbidden on
the Sabbath day. The religious authorities are incensed, both with him and with
Jesus. Never mind the miracle of his
healing. Never mind all the good things he can now look forward to. Never mind
giving thanks to God for this great gift of life he has been given. All they
can see is that this man has broken the rules; it would be better for him, they
think, still to be lying paralysed on the ground than that. It is the start in
John’s Gospel of the opposition which will eventually lead to Jesus’
crucifixion.
How can it be that such a
moment of joy turns so sour so quickly? It might seem incomprehensible to us
that anyone would nit-pick like this when this man has just been given his life
back, but it is surprisingly easy for us to look good news in the face and fail
to recognise it. We often prefer to focus on rules and traditions rather than
seeing the real lives of real people. It is simpler and neater. We don’t have
the bother of thinking things through, or the challenge of having to change our
minds.
Often it is only when real
life situations, close to home, challenge the rulebook we’ve inherited or
developed that we start to see things differently. What seemed obvious to us in
the abstract becomes far more complicated when it affects us or someone we know.
We might pontificate about “strivers and skivers” but when someone close to us
is struggling to find a job and having to rely on benefits, we suddenly see why
that language is so damaging. When divorce touches us or our own families we
realise that our often rather smug pronouncements on the secrets of happy
family life can harm rather than helping. And carefully worked out theologies
condemning homosexuality often crumble to dust when it is our son or daughter,
brother or sister who comes out as gay. This is about real people, people we
care about.
“In the beginning, was the
Word.” says John earlier. But what sort of word? Again and again, in stories
like this one, we discover that it’s not the kind of word you find in a book of
rules; it’s the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus, a real person meeting
with real people, in real and often messy encounters that challenge and
sometimes offend those around him. He honours love where he finds it. He meets
need where he finds it, and as a result people are healed and blessed and
changed. And he calls us to do the same, so that every day can be a Sabbath day,
when God’s Shalom - his perfect peace - breaks into the world, bringing the water of life to all who are dried up and
thirsting for it.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment