Paralyzed Religion

Isaiah 43:9-13                            John 5:16-47

Paralyzed Religion

Most folks are well acquainted with the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. For those of you who are not, here’s a quick summary:  Once upon a time, an Emperor decided that he wanted, not just new clothes, but the very best clothes money could buy for his annual public appearance. Tailors throughout the land were summoned and each applicant was interviewed by the Emperor himself. But he seemed dissatisfied with every possible candidate. This material was not the correct shade…that material was not the right texture. 

Then one day, two brothers walked in, apparently carrying nothing. They explained to the emperor that their cloth was so fine and so excellent that it could only be seen and appreciated by the truly enlightened and the truly refined. Not wanting to appear unenlightened or unrefined, the Emperor praised the beauty of the cloth and put the tailors to work. They measured him and began their task in one of the castle chambers.

Every day the Emperor would look in on them working hard at something he still could not see, but he was assured that the task was well on track as scheduled. The brothers praised him for his ability to distinguish between true beauty and false beauty and they hailed him as the most advanced and civilised of all rulers. Everyone in the palace agreed…the minstrels composed songs about the beautiful garments…the poets wrote odes about the weave and the stitching…the playwrights wrote and performed dramas…the philosophers composed proverbs. 

Even though the Emperor and the members of his court saw nothing, his pride and their compliance prevented them from admitting that something was wrong, and so the day dawned when he was to appear in public. The tailors dressed him with great pomp and circumstance and, as trumpets blasted and people cheered, the Emperor stepped out into the bright light of day as naked as the day he was born. A hush fell over the crowd. The Emperor thought it was because they were all amazed at his beautiful new clothes. Yet no one had the courage to tell him that he was quite nude…no one except one little boy whose voice broke the silence. “Mommy, why isn’t the Emperor wearing any clothes?”

Why, indeed. As E. L. Cammaerts once said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”

Now, if you recall, the last talk was about the Jewish man healed at the pagan pool of Bethesda. We examined the evidence and concluded that something was very wrong here…this was a healing totally unlike any other healing recorded in the Gospels. The man did not know who Jesus was, there was no faith nor repentance nor gratitude expressed at any point throughout this event, and his testimony before the Jewish leaders appears to have been vindictive.  So, why did Jesus heal him? I believe that what we have here is an acted parable in which the drama and the players are a mirror image of the people of God at that time. 

Not only were some of the leaders weaving together elaborate new laws and traditions, but their peers were praising them for it, dropping names of famous rabbis in defence of human rituals and regulations, while the people remained largely silent. Until the voice of Jesus revealed that, like the lame man at the pool, their faith was misplaced and, unless they stopped to re-evaluate and repent of their dead-end religion, something far worse than their present oppression would happen to them. Perhaps a suitable warning for the modern day revisionists…

In the discourse that followed on the heels of this healing, Jesus first spoke about the reality of God in verses 19-30. He had come to reveal the Father, and what they heard in his words and witnessed in his deeds was what could be called a divine symmetry. There was a balanced and proportionate similarity between God the Father and God the Son. Their words and works were the same. A simple knowledge of the revelation of God in the Scriptures is sufficient information to come to this conclusion. So, Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath ought to have been evaluated in the light of all his works as they mirrored the works of the Father. If the unbelieving Jews had done their homework, as it were, they would have seen that it was their understanding of Sabbath keeping that was faulty, not Jesus. 

You see, we do not live on a globe randomly revolving around in a vast expanse of nothingness. God did not create the earth and then abandon it. No, Jesus said that the Father has always been working and that the Sabbath did not negate that fact. Clearly, God’s “resting” on the seventh day did not mean that he stopped all activity. God had to cease "working", the universe would implode as He upholds all things by the word of his power. 

So, clearly, their elevation of Sabbath observance as something other than simple faith and trust in God’s goodness and kindness was misguided. Indeed, the Sabbath teaches us that God continues to "work" even when we don’t. But what is this work of God? Well, ever since the Fall, the primary "work" of the Father was seeking to fulfil the promise he made in Genesis 3:15 – to set the world right side up once more by defeating Satan, the supplanter. He was and He is making all things new…

In short, he wanted to heal the world, but he would heal it his way, not man’s way. We only need to read the Old Testament to see that the way of man always fails because man is essentially flawed. All have sinned. All fall short of the glory of God. So, we could say that adding rule upon rule, ritual upon ritual, tradition upon tradition, and spiritual high jump after spiritual high jump, in an attempt to be healed from sin, was like the man lying at the pool of pagan superstition.

Now, in discussing his relationship with the Father, Jesus revealed the kind of relationship believers ought to have with God. “I do not seek my own will,” Jesus said, “but the will of the one who sent me.” Indeed, his whole life displayed an all-encompassing desire to do only the will of God, and therein lies the essence of the relationship. Life can only issue from an obedient love. Reconciliation and resurrection and restoration can only come through repentance. 

This is not a judgement to question or to challenge, as it is a just judgment pronounced by a just judge. Jesus told the man healed at the pool of Bethesda to stop living in sin or else something worse would happen to him. In the same way, those who wish to have life, must cease to live in death. Only those who hear and believe, and love as defined by Jesus, pass from death to life. Seeking life elsewhere is like lying at a pool of magic or like clothing your body with nothing.

In the second half of this discourse, verses 31-47, Jesus addressed the error of the unbelievers in the light of the truth he had just revealed about God and the way humans are to relate to him. By comparing and contrasting himself with them, Jesus revealed that they were a compromised people, a complacent people, and if they refused to repent, a condemned people. 

They were compromised as they sought to validate their religion amongst themselves…in other words, they bore witness to each other and therefore their witness was invalid. By rejecting the true testimony of John the Baptist…by rejecting the works of Jesus that perfectly matched the works of the Father (indicating that the two were one)…as well as by rejecting the Scriptures that testified about him, they deliberately dismissed the way to life to follow the way to death. Instead of seeking spirituality in divinity, they sought it in humanity, but ultimately only the author of life can give life. The Scriptures clearly state that humanity is dead in trespasses and sins. Life begets life…death begets death. You cannot find spiritual healing by following the ideologies of fallen humanity. 

But in their prideful arrogance, they became complacent. Like the man at the pool had resigned himself to his condition, so the people of God made no effort to change. Again, it is worth asking ourselves why this Jewish man was lying at a pool steeped in pagan superstition. Clearly, he had at some point abandoned his faith in the one true God and embraced a faith in something that was, in truth, nothing. You might ask how this was even possible given that the whole of life for a Jew revolved around the Scriptures. Well, this happened because the religion of the people was founded not upon the Scriptures, but upon an interpretation of the Scriptures. True, Jesus said, they diligently searched the Scriptures, but they did not find God because they were blinded by their own predetermined decisions and therefore, they were unwilling to accept and apply the clear teaching of his Word. As Jesus said in Matthew 15:3-9, they nullified the Word of God by their tradition…they gave up the wisdom and witness of God for the folly and foolishness of so-called learned men. Does this sound familiar?

At this point I would issue a word of caution not to point fingers here. How often have we not defended our doctrines without properly subjecting them to the scrutiny of Scripture, bolstering our position with more emotional bluster than fact, while quoting copiously from random texts taken completely out of their original context? We do not see the wood for the trees because we have already declared ourselves right and we surround ourselves with those who praise us and congratulate ourselves for demolishing the strawmen we build of the positions of our opponents. And so, we muddy the clear waters of God’s Word in our pride and our arrogance…declaring ourselves more moral than God. Do not be fooled, dearest beloved brethren. We cannot have the love of God in our hearts if we do not accept and apply his truth in our lives.

As such, those who refuse to abandon the ways of the world to embrace the way and the truth and the life of God, remain under the penalty of death. In short, they remain condemned.  There can be no release or pardon for people who refuse to repent and believe. There is only one truth and that is God’s truth because God alone is the creator and sustainer of all that exists. Like the Emperor, we too might fool ourselves into believing there is something when there is, in reality, nothing, and we might languish beside the pool of untruth forever without ever experiencing the healing offered freely to all who truly desire it. 

“Do you want to get well?” Jesus asked the man at the pool of Bethesda. The reply to this question ought to have been yes, please, and thank you. But those who do not wish to believe will always offer up excuses and rationalisations…anything other than to repent and believe the truth as revealed in the Scriptures. 

Dearest beloved brethren, if the one to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden had to walk into your life at this very moment, what would he see? A heart clothed with the love of God? 

Or if he were to stand at the door of our particular denomination, would he ask us why we have left our first love? Would he declare us wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and as naked as the foolish Emperor in our opening story? 

And if he were to ask us if we truly wanted to be healed, what would we say in reply? 

Shall we pray? 

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2023

The Cost of Love

Genesis 12.1-9               Psalm 33.1-12             Romans 4.13-end               Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

The Cost of Love

I think if I were to ask you to define how we relate to God by using only one word, most of you would say “love”…and you would be perfectly correct. We are commanded in both Testaments to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength and, of course, to love our neighbours as ourselves. 

But, if I were to ask you to tell me what it means to love God by using only one word, what would you say? What does love for God look like? How is it demonstrated? 

Three times in John 14 Jesus says that if we love Him, we will obey Him…If you love me, you will obey what I command…Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me…If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. And then finally he says that his love for the Father could be observed in that he always did exactly what the Father had commanded him. In other words, Jesus obeyed the Father because he loved him.

The stories of Abraham, Matthew the tax collector, the woman with the flow of blood, and Jairus, the synagogue ruler, are often used to commend faith and trust in God, as Paul does in our Epistle lesson for today regarding Abraham. But faith is not a nebulous entity. Faith is made manifest through obedience. As James reminds us: Abraham’s “faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did.” (James 2:22)

Abraham’s faith in God is shown time and again through his obedience to what God commanded him to do. In our Old Testament lesson, he was told to leave his country, his people, and his father’s household to go to an as yet undetermined land. Just as an aside, it is interesting to note in Genesis 11:31 we are told that “Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there.” Clearly the whole family was meant to go to Canaan, but while the text does not say this explicitly, I believe it is possible that Terah compromised for some or other reason and stayed in Haran instead. So, Abraham then continued with the journey Terah did not complete. 

Nevertheless, the point is that Abraham’s faith in God was demonstrated by his act of obedience. Louise and I know first-hand what it takes to immigrate…as do many of you…we’ve done that more than once. It isn’t easy, is it? There is a price to be paid…a leaving behind of what is known for what is unknown. 

But in Abraham’s case, he immigrated because God had told him to do so. Thus he demonstrated his faith in God and his love for God through his obedience to God. 

Matthew’s faith in Jesus was demonstrated by his leaving behind his tax booth. This was a very lucrative business at that time. Jesus’ call for Matthew to follow him could be compared to asking a CEO of some multinational multimillion euro company to leave that all behind to become a missionary. But Matthew did leave, didn’t he? And he never went back. The same can be said of Zacchaeus…his irreversible actions of giving away his ill-gotten gain proved his faith in and love for Jesus. 

I think this is also true of the woman with the flow of blood as well as Jairus. In both cases, their actions could have led to rejection from their fellow Jews…the woman because, according to the Law, her presence would have rendered unclean everyone who touched her …and Jairus because he was a ruler of a synagogue thus possibly exposing himself to the sneers of his peers. 

And we could say the same of everyone who followed Jesus…they all relinquished something…dropped their nets…walked away from their businesses…gave up climbing the proverbial corporate ladder…and all of them did these things because they loved Jesus more… only one renounced Jesus and subsequently lost everything, including his life.

While James tells us that an undefined faith is not faith at all, the same can be said about love. An undefined love is not love. 

So, how do we know what love is, you may ask. John answers that question in his first Epistle: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” (1 John 3:16). You see, love must be defined by the one who is love (1 John 4:16). For Jesus it meant saying “not my will, but your will be done.” It meant being obedient even unto death on the cross (Philippians 2:8). Biblical love is costly…it is freely offered…and it is freely given…but it comes at a priceless price. 

Loving God means something…it is not a vague emotion…it is a well-informed irreversible decision to obey without compromise, even if that means relinquishing everything you once held dear…even if that means leaving behind that which you once cherished…even if that means giving up life itself. 

The only way we can walk as Jesus walked and love as Jesus loved, is if we obey him in everything. Those who obey his commands live in him and he in them. We simply cannot call him Lord and not do what he tells us to do. To love him is to obey him. 

Abraham and Matthew left all. The woman with the flow of blood and Jairus the synagogue ruler risked all. Paul considered all things loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus (Philippians 3:8). 

So, as you come to partake of that which illustrates most clearly the full and true meaning of love, know that to participate in his life you must participate in his death…death to self and death to the world…there must be a putting off if there is to be a putting on…because love for self and love for the world are in opposition to the love of God (1 John 2:15-17). Love is made manifest through obedience. If you love me, Jesus said, obey my Word.

Shall we pray?

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2023

Paralysed Religion

Psalm 107:17-22                  Ezekiel 33:1-11                   John 5:1-18

Paralysed Religion

The easiest way for me to explain what is happening in our Gospel text for today is to compare it with Disney’s multiplane camera. The multiplane camera (made obsolete after the filming of the Little Mermaid by the implementation of the "digital multiplane camera") was a motion-picture camera used in the traditional animation process that would move up to seven layers of artwork (painted in oils on glass) past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another, creating a sense of parallax or depth. Various parts of the artwork layers were left transparent to allow other layers to be seen behind them. The movements were calculated and photographed frame by frame, with the result being an illusion of depth by having several layers of artwork moving at different speeds: the further away from the camera, the slower the speed. 

As you have no doubt noticed before, John often has several layers to his stories in his Gospel that he assumed we, the readers, would be able to identify despite some being far in the background. Thankfully, recent archaeological findings and ancient cultural studies have helped bring some of these backgrounds into clearer or crisper focus for us living in the 21st Century. For instance, there was a time in the not so distant past when this story about the healing of the man at the Pool of Bethesda was thought to be fictional because no one had ever seen such a pool. But that all changed when several archaeological digs beginning in the early 19th century uncovered a structure exactly like the one described by John. 

These 13 metre deep pools, situated outside the city walls, seem to have been used initially as reservoirs for rainwater. But sometime during the Roman occupation, these baths were linked either to the goddess of fortune (as implied by the Mishna)  or to Asclepius, the god of healing, and were believed to possess magical healing powers. As such, the place would have been considered out of bounds for religious Jews.

All of this raises two very interesting questions. First, why was a Jewish man lying at a pool steeped in pagan superstition waiting to be healed? And two, why did Jesus go there looking specifically for him? As we have seen before, Jesus was very deliberate in what he did when he did and to whom he did whatever he did. He only did what he saw the Father doing (John 5:19). So why this man? John tells us that there were a great number of disabled people lying there on any given day. But Jesus zeroed in on this one man who had been lying there for thirty-eight years. Why him?

Then, to add another level to the multi-layered drama unfolding in the text, John recorded a strange exchange between Jesus and the man. “Do you want to get well?” Jesus asked. One would assume that a man who had been lying at a pool of healing for thirty-eight years had every hope of getting well. So why a question that would appear to have an obvious answer? Well, because the answer was not all that obvious, was it? 

Place yourself flat on your back on this man’s mat for a moment, if you will. You’ve been there for thirty-eight years with some debilitating sickness. Every time the water mysteriously bubbles (which by the way could have been nothing more than decomposing matter at the bottom of the pool periodically releasing carbon dioxide in the water giving an appearance of supernatural activity to the superstitious onlookers), someone gets in before you, taking all the “magic” for himself. Then, one day, this total stranger walks up to your mat and asks: “Do you want to be healed?” What would you say? A few very sarcastic replies come to mind, don’t they?

But the man does not really answer Jesus’ question, does he? No, rather he tells Jesus an improbable story as an excuse for his being there for so long. At some point, he had convinced himself that he was a victim of circumstance…and it seems from Jesus’ question as to whether he actually wanted to be healed, that whatever the circumstance may have been, he had accepted it as permanent. 

People will often try to excuse their behaviour by referencing something that had been done to them in the past. But, while it is true that traumatic events leave deep wounds and scars, those wounds and scars are not prison bars. While we might struggle in many different ways for the rest of our lives, with some professional help, we can learn to live in freedom again, if we so choose. 

Now, John does not tell us what this man’s condition was, but the warning spoken by Jesus in verse 14, “stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you”,  seems to indicate that his condition was a result of a personal sinful act or a personal sinful lifestyle. Perhaps even his reluctance to be an able-bodied productive member of society was the sin itself. (Just a quick disclaimer here: Jesus does not link all sickness to personal sin, so please do not take this very particular comment out of its context.)

Another interesting feature in this story is that there does not seem to have been any positive response from this man. We are told that he did not know who Jesus was until later. John also never tells us that he expressed any kind of faith in Jesus. And the fact that Jesus told him to literally “continue no longer in sin” (2nd person present imperative) indicates that there was no true repentance either. Of course, Jesus never needed a response to do his work…he never needed anyone to validate his decisions. Faith often only came after an incident. But it does make you wonder why he healed this man in the first place. 

This is a very different encounter to the encounters with Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, and the nobleman. No one believes in Jesus because of this healing…there is no positive result, in fact, quite the opposite.

This is where the importance of seeing the different layers in this story becomes helpful. John never wasted words. So, when he tells us that it was a feast of the Jews, that the event took place near the Gate through which the sheep were led to be sacrificed, that an unrepentant and reluctant sinful man was healed at a pagan pool on the Sabbath, that the Jews plotted to kill Jesus, we should be ready for some form of theological connection to be made. All these things serve as the lower background layers for the main scene in verses 19-47 where Jesus exposed the spiritual paralysis of the apostate people of God. “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you have eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

The different feasts and Sabbaths of Israel were designed to showcase the greatness of their God. The function of the Scriptures was to reveal the Person of God. But somehow the people of God had exchanged the Reality for the illustrations, the Author for the book. They were paralysed by their rituals, their rabbinic rules and regulations, their misinterpretations of the Scriptures, and their extra-biblical traditions, rendering them incapable of recognising the God they so diligently sought after even when he stood right in front of them…and, tragically, even after being repeatedly charged by Jesus to repent and to turn to him, they refused the healing he freely offered and plotted to murder him.

To the man at the pool of Bethesda Jesus said, “Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.” Later, Jesus said to Jerusalem, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate.”

I believe that what we have in this passage is an acted parable designed to be the catalyst for teaching…just like the cursing of the fig tree. We will look closer at the theological teaching in the talk for next week, but for now, let it suffice to say that the healing of the man at the pool of Bethesda served as a mirror and as a warning. 

On another feast day of the Jews, the Son of God was led out like a sheep to the slaughter to offer up his life as a sacrifice for the healing of the world. Following his vindication by resurrection and his ascension into heaven, for 40 years, the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem asked the question: “Do you want to get well?” For 40 years, they repeated the warning: “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” They were persecuted, imprisoned, and killed. 

About AD 68, as Vespasian's legions encircled Jerusalem, the followers of Jesus who were still residing in the city were reminded of the words of Jesus as recorded in Luke 21:20: "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains". Church historian Eusebius recorded that the Christians did indeed leave the city at this time, "Christ having instructed them to leave Jerusalem and retire from it on account of the impending siege to reside for a while at Pella”, a village situated near the Jordan River, about 15 miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee. In AD 70, Emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem and for the next half century, Jerusalem remained unpopulated…their house was left desolate.

Interestingly, when Emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem, renaming the city Aelia Capitolina, he expanded the site of the pool of Bethesda into a large temple to Asclepius and Serapis and much later, a Byzantine Church was built over the area, making it difficult to locate until excavations in the 19th Century.

Nice history lesson…but I wonder. Does the question as well as the warning echo down through the ages, addressing both the world and the Church? No one is perfect, to be sure, but do we really want to be healed or is it easier to simply go with the flow, blaming others in our past or in our present for our blemished behaviour? 

It is always a good practice to stop to take stock of our lives…to allow the one to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden to take our spiritual temperature, if you will, and ask us the question: “Do you want to get well?”

Shall we pray?

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2023