Scripture: Revelation 21:10-22:5; John 5:1-18

“My Father goes on working and so do I But that only made the Jews even more intent on killing him, because, not content with breaking the Sabbath, he spoke of God as his own Father, and so made himself God’s equal.”

-- John 5:17-18

When I read this text I recall the proposition C.S. Lewis was fond of posing, “Either Jesus is who he claims to be or he is a madman.” It is not clear that the historical Jesus claimed to be equal with God in so many words, but it is clear that he spoke of God as his Father, and prayed to God as his Father, in such pungent and convincing terms that those who heard him deduced that his relationship with God was, in their experience, absolutely extraordinary, in fact, unique. He was the Son, not just a son of God. The other gospels are reticent and indirect in identifying Jesus as equal with God but John has no compunction about stating this explicitly. “… he spoke of God as his own Father, and so made himself God’s equal.”

The relationship between the other three (Synoptic) gospels and John in this regard is well stated in a much quoted passage from a poem by the Victorian poet Robert Browning, entitled “A Death in the Desert.” The poet imagines the dying author of this Gospel, who says as he departs, “What first were guessed as points I now knew stars, / and named them in the Gospel I have writ.” What the Synoptic Gospels merely hinted at the Fourth Gospel states outright, that Jesus is equal with God. This took time to see, and Browning’s old dying disciple, John the beloved, had lived long enough to see the hints become clear and the sparks become stars. So, once again we are dealing with one of the signs, precisely the third of the signs, that John has described for us to read so that we might believe and believing have life.

This sign is the second miracle of healing to be narrated as a sign. The first is the healing of the official from Capernaum’s son. There are seven signs in all and three of them are healings, one a resurrection from the dead. What is being signified in these four? Surely that Jesus is the source of life and that those who believe in him have eternal life - precisely the reason for the writing of the Gospel as a whole (20:30-31). It is, however, not enough simply to state that fact. If it were enough, John would not have written the Gospel, he would merely have given us that summary; but he wrote a Gospel and gave us the signs in the form of stories so that we could see them narrated and learn from their multifaceted communication how to understand and appropriate them.

 The building named Bethzatha was by the Sheep Pool, near one of the gates in the east wall, near the temple. The Roman fortress Antonia, which housed the garrison keeping watch over the temple precinct, was also in the vicinity.  The house had five colonnades, called in Greek Stoas, and along the length and across the breadth of these arcades lay  “…crowds of sick people - blind, lame, paralyzed - waiting for the water to move.” Among them was a man who had been sick for thirty-eight years. Jesus walked among the afflicted and stopped at the lame man. He asked, ”Do you wish to be healed,” and instead of saying, “Yes” the man complained that he did not have anyone who cared enough to help him into the water at the time of its miraculous power. From this we conclude at least three things, that the man enjoyed being sick, that he blamed others for his plight, and that he was superstitious, in the sense that he wanted the benefit of healing without any personal commitment on his part. He wanted magic not grace.

There were several such healing shrines in the Greco-Roman world dedicated especially to Asclepios the Greek healer God and Serapis the Egyptian equivalent. People would go and stay in buildings like Bethzatha, beside streams and pools dedicated to one of these gods, and immerse themselves periodically in the healing waters. To this day people do just that; it used to be called “taking the waters.” Bath in England was famous in the 18th century for this, and a major cure destination even in Roman times. There is evidence that this shrine, Bethzatha by the Sheep Pool in Jerusalem, was in the second century AD a shrine of Serapis. At the time of Jesus we do not know what its orientation was, but the fact that it was near the Antonia might have meant that it was used by the Roman soldiers and thus was not a strictly Jewish shrine.

So Jesus goes striding among the sick at a semi-pagan shrine, and heals a man who does not want to be healed, who does not even bother to learn the name of the one who had healed him. When the Pharisees stopped him because he was carrying his sleeping mat on the Sabbath, he excused himself by blaming the one who had healed him, but he could not say who that was. After Jesus met him and warned him to sin no more, the man went to the authorities and reported Jesus. They found Jesus and engaged him in an altercation about Sabbath observance, in the course of which Jesus says that he works on the Sabbath because, according to later Jewish interpretation, God works on the Sabbath. This causes his hostile interlocutors to up the ante from Sabbath breaking to blasphemy.

One need only read the story to get the point that the world is full of people like us who would do anything to avoid a real relationship with Jesus. The healed man instead of becoming Jesus’ disciple goes and informs on Jesus to the authorities, and the authorities, instead of taking note of the healing miracle and all that it meant, chose to focus on the breaking of the Sabbath law, a line of thought that Jesus elsewhere called “straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel (Matthew 23:24),” getting one’s priorities totally mixed up. We get the point all the more clearly when we compare this reaction with the reaction of the official from Capernaum. “He asked them when the boy had begun to recover. ‘The fever left him yesterday,’ they said, ‘at the seventh hour.’ The father realized that this was exactly the time when Jesus had said, ‘Your son will live’; and he and all his household believed (4:52-53).” By contrast the once lame man rather than believing betrays Jesus to the authorities.

With whom do we identify in this story? Try the lame man. Do you actually enjoy your present infirmities of soul and body? The besetting habits, the aches and pains, both spiritual and physical that give you something to talk about, make you interesting, the complaints against your fellow Christians that you enjoy so much? What if Jesus insists on healing you? Do you ever blame others for your comfortable indispositions? “Do you want to be healed?” Jesus asks, “It’s not my fault that I am not healed! No one cares enough to help me get well!” say we in reply.  “It’s not my fault, it’s theirs! “ Recognize yourself in that exchange? 

And then the Pharisees, “He healed a lame man, so what? That’s beside the point. The point is that he disobeyed the Sabbath law, and without law and order we cannot survive. I don’t care if he finds the cure for cancer and Aids, he cannot disobey the law. We must have law and order!” “Lock him up, kill him if necessary!” Does this sound plausible? Alas, all too plausible! And when Jesus justifies his lawbreaking by claiming he is doing God’s work, that is grounds for execution. He is co-opting not only the law but the lawgiver as well!

The sign of the lame man healed thus illuminates several pitfalls on the way to faith: self pity that keeps us from accepting responsibility, pusillanimity that makes us dutifully betray our healer to the legal authorities, because we love security more than life, evasiveness that makes us focus on the fine print of the law rather than on the bold print of life. All of this amounts to the refusal of faith in Jesus, the turning away from discipleship. Of the Capernaum official John can report that he, and all his household, believed, of the lame man the last we hear is that, “The man went back and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had cured him (5:15)” and then he disappears. So we have a sign of warning here, warning that it is possible to receive great benefits at Jesus’ hand and still miss the one important thing, to accept the gift and reject the giver, when the gift is intended to be only a sign pointing to the giver.

Who is this giver? He is Jesus the Lord and Giver of life, the one who works the works of God and for that reason does not cease giving life just because it happens to be the Sabbath day. Read this sign, and especially the discourse that it provokes (5:19-47). The purpose of the story is not only to warn us as I have suggested, but also to provoke the long discourse of Jesus on his oneness with God, a discourse that reveals all the once lame man would eventually have come to know himself had he become and persevered as a disciple of Jesus.

Amen.