« The Burden of Freedom | Main | What about the Sabbath? »
July 09, 2006
The Cost of Good Health
II Kings 5: 1-14
John 5: 1-9
July 9th, 2006
Many of Jesus’ great acts of kindness were to heal sick people. In those days there was no health insurance. It cost a lot then too for health care. The gospels tell us of a woman Jesus healed who’d spent all she had in hopes of getting well, to no avail. Being well has to do with a lot more than our bodies, but we all admit these silly bodies of ours are pretty important to us.
We moderns look back at ancient times—that we know only a little about—and sometimes think people back then were ignorant by comparison with what we know today.
But then we get on a plane and travel to some of the ancient sites and we start to get a different impression. What we see often amazes us. Some of you recently came back from Greece and were amazed when you saw the size and grandeur of the Parthenon in Athens. Those of us who went to Jerusalem and saw the huge granite blocks left from the western wall marveled at how ancient peoples moved those huge rocks into place with exact precision. As there were great architects then, there were brilliant doctors too. We know the names of a few of them.
Hippocrates practiced medicine on the little Greek island of Cos in the 5th century before Christ. Doctors today promise to follow the ethics of this great physician even though health-science has progressed, using Hippocrates’ method of exact observation of how the body works. Galen in the second century AD is still talked about for his hospital in Pergamum in Turkey.
But the finest of doctors cannot heal anyone. All they can do is help to orchestrate the conditions under which God’s ways at work in our body can bring healing.
Elisha was a special man of God to whom God lent some of His own power to actually overwhelm Naaman’s leprosy with Divine power. But Elisha’s purpose and God’s purpose in healing Naaman was much more than to cure him of leprosy. Why? Because eventually old age or another disease, or perhaps a wound in battle would end Naaman’s life. Naaman came away from his bath in the Jordan River aware not only that his leprosy was gone but also why it was gone. He realized that the God of Israel healed him. The God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth, far greater than the local deity he worshipped in Damascus.
If we read on a bit in II Kings 5 we read that Naaman said, “I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.” So he took away as much earth from Israel as he could pack on two mules. He put this earth in the temple of the Syrian God Rimmon. When he went into the temple of his people in Damascus, instead of worshiping Rimmon he would worship toward the God of Israel represented in that earth he brought back home.
Naaman caught on to what Jesus intended when He did His miraculous deeds. See beyond the deed to the God who makes it possible.
This morning we read briefly in John’s Gospel of Jesus’ third “sign,” healing a man who had been sick thirty-eight years. He had been lying in a place in Jerusalem where the hope of healing drew a lot of other sick people. It was at a special pool at Bethesda—a name well known to Navy people today because a great Naval hospital in Maryland has adopted this name.
Bethesda is a Hebrew name that means “House of Mercy,” from bet, meaning house, and hesed meaning mercy. If we look for this pool today in Jerusalem we won’t find it. But it once was near the St. Stephen’s Gate. Pilgrims have obliterated the pool by building a succession of churches on this spot.
Why did John select this story to tell among the many events in Jesus’ life that would have interested us? Though it is not immediately obvious to us, there was important symbolism in this place that the Jews of Jesus’ day recognized. At the pool of Bethesda, this House of Mercy, there was a colonnade with five pillars. Why five colonnades? It had to do with the five books of Moses, the Torah, in which the Jewish people read of the ways of God.
Jesus said a few verses later in John 5, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” Those five columns stood massively for the gift of life found in the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, the most important first section of the Hebrew Bible. But this poor fellow lay for thirty-eight years under the shadow of these five pillars and remained ill.
Then we see it was a pool of water by which he lay. Water too was important to the story of Jesus’ fellow Jews. Water destroyed sin, thus bringing wholeness. God delivered Noah and his family from the waters in which God destroyed the otherwise sinful world. God delivered Israel from the Egyptian bondage by bringing them through the Red Sea safely, after which the waters came rushing in to destroy the Egyptian army that pursued them.
And now this water at the House of Mercy, Bethesda, had special healing properties. Get into it at the right time and your illness is destroyed. How so?
Maybe you notice that in our reading there is a verse three and a verse five, but no verse four. Why? Some of you who grew up on the King James Version of the Bible remember the story included this verse: “An angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” This verse was found only in some questionable manuscripts so all more recent translations of this Gospel don’t include it.
But from what this man said to Jesus explaining why in thirty-eight years he’d not been able to take advantage of the healing properties of this pool it makes better sense when we read this verse left out of our version of the Gospel. If the pool always was able to heal anyone who got into it, surely at some moment in the long wait of thirty-eight years someone would have kindly helped him to the healing waters. But apparently only at special times, unannounced, was it able to heal. It had very limited usefulness. It helped a tiny percentage of those who needed healing. Only the first one who got into it after the angel touched it. It was a bit of a cruel joke for many to be so near and yet so far from the healing they needed.
But then Jesus came. Jesus asked a simple question, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man didn’t exactly say, “Yes.” Maybe he had given up on ever being healed so he forgot why he was there. He was there because that’s where sick people came. It became a place where the barest hope of healing lingered—unfulfilled for most. So instead of replying to Jesus, “Yes, I want to be healed,” the man told the sad reason why he had never been healed. “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I’m trying to get into the water someone always beats me to it.” So its power was spent on some other desperate soul.
Jesus spoke a simple sentence in reply. “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And the man was healed instantly. But his healing was evident only when he took up his bed and walked away—and on into the Temple where some people recognized him. It was the Sabbath Day. “How did he get here, walking on his own two feet?” they wondered.
The story has more details than we can explore. But one significant detail we must notice this morning. Jesus replied to those who faulted Him for healing on the Sabbath, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” By this Jesus meant that God continued working seven days a week after the first Sabbath Day of creation-week.
If you look at our baptismal font you see it has eight sides. There were seven days of creation, on the seventh of which God rested. But then came the eighth day and God got back to work. We are living in that eighth day of God’s on-going work.
And Jesus too lived in that eighth day when God continued to work. It was part of God’s on-going work that happened to take place on this Sabbath Day as Jesus healed a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years of Sabbaths. Never in the vicinity of those five columns of Moses’ Law had he found healing. Never when he lay right beside the waters of the pool at Bethesda for all those years had it ever done him any good.
But when Jesus spoke one sentence, extending God’s on-going work still on the Sabbath Day, the poor fellow’s miserable body was healed. Jesus’ enemies saw things so wrong when all they could think of was that He’d violated their Sabbath rule and their definition of work. The tradition of the elders defined work on the Sabbath with good intentions, but their good intentions missed the boat. Whereas God only intended that people get rest at regular intervals, they forgot that the Sabbath was made for the benefit of people.
Rest heals us. How often have doctors said to us who think the world won’t make it unless we work 24/7, “You must rest.” Why rest? Because rest brings restoration to body and soul. Had Jesus’ adversaries thought a bit beyond their rules they would have seen that Jesus fulfilled the purpose of the Sabbath rest with one three-word sentence—in Aramaic. “Take up your bed and walk.”
For many years, ever since that March day in 1961 when I gave my life to Jesus Christ and claimed Him as my Lord, I cannot remember ever working on Sunday. As a student I didn’t study on Sunday. I never do yard work. For me anyway, it has been an important principle to keep the Christian Sabbath as a day of rest from work.
For many of you in the helping professions it is not possible to keep from working. Hospitals stay open on Sunday because people don’t take a Sabbath from their illness every seven days. Police and firefighters are needed every day. But I believe it is a principle still of the Christian life that God ordained that we should rest.
So it would seem that I’m siding with the Pharisees that Jesus found fault with in doing a work of healing on the Sabbath—that He might have waited till the next day to do. I don’t think so.
Part of what’s going on in the story is not only what Jesus did, but what the man did in response to Jesus. He obeyed Jesus. He took up his bed and walked. Later in the story we read that Jesus said to him, “Sin no more so that nothing worse happens to you.” In other words, more than physical healing came to this man when Jesus spoke the healing command, which the man obeyed.
You and I place great stock in what helps the body get well. Look at your medicine cabinet and count the cost of what you find there! But by far the greater need in all of us has to do with the inner person. We may have the best of physical health while clinging to our sins. And it is these sins to which we cling that far worse than poor physical health happens to us. Indeed, our physical condition is affected by our spiritual condition.
For me the discipline of keeping Sunday as a day of worship and rest has been an important discipline of the heart to remember that my life belongs to God. Remembering my life belongs to God has other implications that have to do with my relationship to people. When we talk about obedience to Jesus but do not obey at the very points that matter most to us, what’s the point of it all?
In a few moments we will gather around this Communion Table. Here, Jesus rests at the center and we who belong to Him gather around. We say we are one in Christ. Folks, let us be at one with one another if we are one in Christ. Let us pray: O Lord God, grant us to find the healing of Your Son, Jesus. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at July 9, 2006 09:30 AM