John 5:10-18

02/22/09
John 5:10-18
Hudson UMC

Last week, the title of the sermon was “The Miracle.” You might have been wondering to yourself, “The Miracle? Why should we call this one the miracle when there are many others?” Well, the reason I named it “The Miracle” is because this week’s sermon is called “The Aftermath.” The miracle is interesting, to be sure, but it really explodes when the leading Jews get involved.

The story does not really make sense unless we spend a bit of time understanding why they would be mad at this man for carrying his mat on the Sabbath. Don’t forget, the fourth commandment that God gave the Israelites was to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” In fact, these Jews were not entirely wrong in their persecution, or at least, they could come up with Biblical justification. We read in the book of Numbers that a man was convicted for breaking the Sabbath by simply by gathering wood. It is sometimes hard for us to understand how seriously the Jews took the Sabbath because our culture today does not take it seriously at all. Yes, we set it aside as a day for worship, but many other people use it as a day to catch up on last week’s work before next week begins or as a time to do projects around the house. Even those of us who set Sundays aside as a day to worship God, myself included, then use the afternoon to go shopping and go about our business, things that were not only forbidden in the Old Testament, but were forbidden even in early American culture.

Now, we read that the leading Jews find the man who had been healed and accost him, saying, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” The man does not argue with them, saying, “I can do what I want” or “Who are you to tell me what to do” or anything like that. In fact, I’ll bet that he was inclined to say, “You are absolutely right.” However, he was acting under orders. “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” He basically blamed Jesus for his breaking of the commandment. It is in our nature to blame other people to get ourselves out of trouble. Adam did it, Eve did it, Saul did it, all kinds of people do it. I do it, and you probably do it, too, or at least used to do it. In nearly every situation, blaming someone else for the thing that got us in trouble is not the right thing to do. However, if Jesus tells us to do something that the rest of the world does not like, it is perfectly appropriate to “blame” Him for it. The authority of Jesus is much higher than the authority of our culture. If we are reaching out to people, showing kindness to those rejected by society, people are going to think that it is really weird; and yet, we have full permission to “blame” Jesus for it. After all, He told us to do it in the first place and who are we to go against what Jesus tells us to do?

At this point, the Jews want to know who is responsible, but the man never got Jesus’ name because He had left right away. The two men reunite later in the Temple. The first thing that the man does after encountering God, after being healed by Jesus, is go to worship God. Up until this moment, he was crippled and was unable to walk. Even if he could walk, though, as a sick person, he would not have been allowed into the Temple. Jesus has not only restored him to health, He has enabled him to get closer to God than ever before. This man is so overjoyed, so excited that God has done a mighty work in his life that he cannot help but go to the Temple to give his praises to God. He owes God everything and so he gives what he can, his praise and offering, not because he is trying to repay God, but because his joy needed to find a way out and so he could tell others about what God had done in his life. It is in this context that he meets Jesus again.

So, Jesus had snuck out through the crowds, presumably so He would not be the subject of attention. He did not heal the man because He wanted attention, He healed him because of His tremendous love for him. The man, after finding out who Jesus was, goes back to the Jews and tells them! So much for doing the good deed unnoticed. And yet, think about it. The man might have realized that the Jews were not happy with what Jesus did, but what he really knew was that, if this man had the power to heal him, everyone else, especially the leaders, needed to know about Him, too. If Jesus could heal him, imagine what else He could do. He could transform the world! He might even be the Messiah that had been promised. We want to say, “What were you thinking?” to the man. “Why would you turn in the man who healed you?” And yet, does he not show us precisely what it means to be healed by God? Would that we were as willing to tell everyone we meet about what Jesus has done for us and be unashamed to say that it was indeed Jesus, God in flesh, that has changed our lives. If we do it, persecution will come, but let us take encouragement from this man who was so fearless and share the good news with boldness.

At this point in the passage, we read some critical words. “Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath.” Now, I don’t think that the Jews were really mad that Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath. I have no doubt that they thought that this was the reason that they were upset, but I think that, deep down inside, they were far more upset that Jesus was becoming a far more popular religious leader than they were. Could they make a case that what Jesus was doing could be construed as a violation of Mosaic Law? Yeah, they could do that. They could probably convince people that Jesus was doing something wrong by healing someone on the Sabbath, especially because these leaders were the main people who told everyone else what is right and what is wrong. However, I think that this is more like how the government finally busted Al Capone. They wanted to catch him because he was a notorious gangster and was responsible for bootlegging, loan sharking, and countless murders. What did they finally charge him with? Tax evasion. Was that what they were really mad about? Of course not, but that was the charge they could make stick. There was no way that the leaders would win the fight to convict Jesus for being more popular than they were, but they might be able to convict Him as a Sabbath-breaker.

When we look at the Gospel accounts as a whole, Jesus gets in trouble a lot for breaking the Sabbath. In other places, He says things like, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” implying that Sabbath rest is a gift from God but doing good must supercede our Sabbatarian concerns. He also says things like, “Is it lawful to good or to do harm on the Sabbath,” implying that good deeds are not covered by the fourth commandment. Here, Jesus gives an answer that was much more likely to make the Jews mad. “My Father is still working, and I also am working.”

Now, it is possible that you do not grasp the seriousness of the statement that Jesus has just made. We have gotten so used to calling God “Father” that it is easy for us to forget how much of a radical act it was. We think that it is simply natural to call God “Father”, in fact, many people think that the reason we call God “Father” is because He is somehow like human fathers and this has become a stumbling block for many people. However, this is not the case. The idea that God is somehow our Father is not drawn from what we know about our own fathers, whether they were bad or good, but drawn directly from Jesus’ relationship with God. Though it is so common for Christians to call God “Father,” and other people have picked up on this practice, we need to realize that it is something that we can only do because of what Jesus has done. Before Jesus came, people simply did not refer to God as their Father. He was their Lord, their God, their Master. They would call Him all kinds of things, but never Father. To call God Father was to presume far too much familiarity with the divine. It was blasphemy.

Some critics of Christianity, who think it is ridiculous for us to call Jesus God, point to the fact that Jesus never comes out and explicitly states, “Hello everyone. I just wanted you to know that I am God.” How well would that go over? Do you really think that people would just say, “Oh! He just said that he is God. Why not believe him?” They would have called Him a megalomaniac and had Him locked up. As it is, though Jesus never comes out and says, in so many words, “I am God,” he calls God His Father. In this statement, He has declared His divinity. After all, what do we read? “For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.” The Jews heard what Jesus said and came to the conclusion that Jesus had made Himself equal to God by saying this.

So, now that we have established that Jesus does indeed consider Himself to be God in flesh, we can consider how the healed man reacted, how the Jewish leaders reacted, and how we will react. The healed man, after being healed by God, goes straight to the Temple, goes immediately to worship God and give Him praise. He is very much aware of the fact that he did not heal himself. He is aware of his dependence on the healing power of God and he knows that he is indebted to Jesus. Indeed, he has experienced Jesus as the very incarnation of God. Human beings do not heal with a word; only God can do that. I am certain that he did not think it out theologically, but I think he knew, deep down inside, that Jesus was truly God. In any case, he knew he owed Jesus everything. If Jesus had not come along, where would he be? He would still be lying by the side of the pool, waiting for a miracle.

Jesus sees him in the Temple and says, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” Jesus is not saying that the man was sick for thirty-eight years because he was a particularly bad sinner. What He was saying is that, as bad as his condition was, if he goes out and forsakes the mercy of God, he will be worse off. This man, in so many ways, has gained the entire world. Now he can walk, he has opportunities that he could only have dreamed of. The question is, will he, now that he has been blessed, turn away from God? We do not know what the man does; it is not recorded. However, we have hope that he did indeed continue his life praising God and giving Him the glory for the blessing and mercy that had been shown to him.

The Jewish leaders, on the other hand, were not so happy with Jesus’ claim to be God in flesh. “For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.” They could not believe, or at least, they did not want to believe, that God had really come to earth as one of them. If they denied that Jesus was really the Son of God, their lives could go on like they always have, they would be in charge. If they admitted, though, that this man who worked mighty miracles, who taught with such dramatic authority, who was clearly very powerful, beyond anything they had ever seen or heard before, could possibly be God’s definitive act, indeed, God engaging the human condition on its own terms, everything changes. They can no longer claim to be the depositories of all human knowledge about God. If God has come as a person, all their speculation gets held up next to that person and is exposed as inadequate. If Jesus is really the Son of God, they cannot claim authority or power or anything like that. So, this Jesus fellow is a major thorn in their side; and they do what people in power have almost always done when that power is threatened: They try to kill Him.

Today, regardless of how much we identify with either the healed man or the Jewish leaders, we are invited to respond to Jesus, the very Son of God who stands before us in His glory. We need to think very carefully about what we will do and who we will be in response to it. What do you think of Christ? Karl Barth, quite possibly the most important theologian of the twentieth century, was famous for saying, “Tell me how you understand Christ, and I shall tell you who you are.” What we think about Christ and how we live in response to that is more important than anything else. It is more important than where you live, what your job is, who your friends are, or how much money you have. Our text presented us with two different views of Christ. One was that of a mighty healer, one who can transform the world with just a word from His mouth and one who can deliver us from bondage. The other view was that of a crazy man, someone who thought entirely too highly of Himself and was just going to get Himself into all kinds of problems. Today, it is popular to think of Jesus as a great moral teacher and nothing more, but it is sobering to think that not a single person in the New Testament had this kind of view of Him.

We have these two views, but I do not want to ask you to try to find out which one is how you see Christ. To do that would be to force a choice between only two of a multitude of options. What is important is to not only think about what you think about Christ, but also how you should live in response. You might see Jesus as fully God, but this might make you fearful of Him and not respond to His call because you feel unworthy. You might see Jesus as fully human, making Him relatable, but perhaps stripped of His glory; you might see Him as nothing more than an example to follow. You might risk to see Jesus as the church has historically confessed Him to be, as both fully divine and fully human. However, this demands a kind of life that reflects the fact that God breaks into our daily life, that God is willing to enter into our broken condition in order to heal it. To see Jesus this way is to live in such a way that shows that you believe that the Son of God suffered and died for you, that, though He did not have to, God suffered so that you might live. To see God this way means that you live a life of joy, of freedom. It also means to live a life of sacrifice, following your Lord and Savior. What you think about Christ tells more about who you are than anything else.

The Father is still working and the Son is also working. When we live the Christian life, the life obedient to the will of God through the atoning work of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, we are not earning our acceptance. We are simply participating in the work that God is already doing. When we reach out to our community, we are simply participating in the missionary work that God is already doing all around us. When we give our lives to God, we are participating in the eternal life of Christ. Today is the Sabbath as celebrated by Christians. Stand up, take up your mat and walk! God has made you strong; walk in that strength. Let us pray.

AMEN