Tag: Jesus

Red Letter Year: 10/14

John 5.1-13

1 Afterward Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days. 2 Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches. 3 Crowds of sick people — blind, lame, or paralyzed — lay on the porches. 5 One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?”

7 “I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.”

8 Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!”

9 Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking! But this miracle happened on the Sabbath, 10 so the Jewish leaders objected. They said to the man who was cured, “You can’t work on the Sabbath! The law doesn’t allow you to carry that sleeping mat!”

11 But he replied, “The man who healed me told me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’”

12 “Who said such a thing as that?” they demanded.

13 The man didn’t know, for Jesus had disappeared into the crowd.

Comments

This story is going to take a couple of days to read through and I want to make sure we’re reading ourselves into this story properly. Reading in? Isn’t that a bad thing? Well, it can be, when we read in things or meanings that aren’t in the text. But when we try to see ourselves as different characters in the story, or see how each has traits similar to our own, that is the way to good interpretation. We don’t read things in – we read ourselves in. This is especially helpful in cases where we might tend to dismiss characters or see them as somehow other than us, that is, sharing no traits with us.

The Pharisees are the people we are most prone to otherize in the Gospels because they seem to always stand in opposition to Jesus and we like to think that Jesus is on our side. But Jesus doesn’t join our side, we are always invited to leave our side behind and follow Jesus, which always moves us from our starting point. We oppose Jesus a good deal more than we want to think about, so working to see ourselves in the Pharisees is a good way to engage in spiritual reflection. 

And let’s be honest, we do a lot of what we see here from them, a lot of saying, “You can’t do that. Stop it. Don’t do it like that.” Quite often, we are saying that sort of thing to people who have been healed by Jesus and are doing what Jesus told them to do. It doesn’t look like what Jesus told us to do and Jesus didn’t run these other approaches by us first, so we assume the other person is wrong and needs to be stopped. Then we appoint ourselves to be the stopper. But Jesus is quite open in the Gospels about issuing different commands to different people (even some that violate standing religious law and cultural convention), he doesn’t have to get our permission for what he tells people to do, and the vast majority of the time Jesus is not going to appoint us to a stopper position. 

If we’re not careful, we can wind up working against the healing power and commands of Jesus. The Pharisees can help us with that if we can see in them a reflection of ourselves. This will lead to a more gracious reading of them and a more critical reading of ourselves. 

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Red Letter Year: 10/11

John 4.39-54

39 Many Samaritans from the village trusted Jesus because the woman had said, “He told me everything I ever did!” 40 When they came out to see him, they begged him to stay in their village. So he stayed for two days, 41 long enough for many more to hear his message and believe. 42 Then they said to the woman, “Now we trust, not just because of what you told us, but because we have heard him ourselves. Now we know that he is indeed the Savior of the world.”

43 At the end of the two days, Jesus went on to Galilee. 44 He himself had said that a prophet is not honored in his own hometown. 45 Yet the Galileans welcomed him, for they had been in Jerusalem at the Passover celebration and had seen everything he did there.

46 As he traveled through Galilee, he came to Cana, where he had turned the water into wine. There was a government official in nearby Capernaum whose son was very sick. 47 When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged Jesus to come to Capernaum to heal his son, who was about to die.

48 Jesus asked, “Will you never trust me unless you see miraculous signs and wonders?”

49 The official pleaded, “Lord, please come now before my little boy dies.”

50 Then Jesus told him, “Go back home. Your son will live!” And the man trusted what Jesus said and started home.

51 While the man was on his way, some of his servants met him with the news that his son was alive and well. 52 He asked them when the boy had begun to get better, and they replied, “Yesterday afternoon at one o’clock his fever suddenly disappeared!” 53 Then the father realized that that was the very time Jesus had told him, “Your son will live.” And he and his entire household trusted Jesus. 54 This was the second miraculous sign Jesus did in Galilee after coming from Judea.

Comments

The first thing to note today is that the work of the first Gospel preacher, the Samaritan woman, finds completion because it brings people to Jesus himself and their initial trust in what she was telling them transformed into direct trust of Jesus. This is always the way it works. People come to faith because they trust someone who leads them and then that trust is transferred to the source of the message , the Word Himself, where trust properly belongs. Every good preacher of the Gospel works toward getting out of the way (those who never get out of the way aren’t preaching the Gospel, instead they are eliciting dangerous pastor-worship).

Next, John points out that while Jesus was rejected both in Galilee and Jerusalem (as the other three Gospels point out), this was by no means a wholesale rejection. We should know this from the crowds that followed Jesus around, but John saw the need to make this explicit. Luke had already worked to paint the crowd in a better light than in Mark and Matthew. John goes one step further in stating it directly. He will bring this theme back toward the rejection Mark and Matthew focus on later in the Gospel.

Then we have the story of Jesus healing a boy, what John calls the “second sign” Jesus gave, even though John alludes to more miraculous activity happening in Jerusalem. We should not think of “second” meaning only the second miracle to happen, rather this is the second one John wants us to focus on (much like how I wrap up a 75 minute lecture by recapping the “big ideas” – that doesn’t mean the rest was unimportant – i.e., it’s all testable – but here are the handful of points to organize your thought around). We will need to keep a mental collection of these signs as we go, since John wants us to organize our thought around them, (and yes, the number of things we’re carrying through John is getting large).

So why is this an organizing thought for John? What is Jesus affirming here? I think one relates to the father’s position – he is a government official. After reading Luke, we might expect Jesus to be so about kingdom reversal that secular power brokers like this guy get shut out from benefiting from kingdom works like healing power. That is not the case because God does not have enmity toward the world (not even its power brokers), it is they who hate God. Never the other way around. Never. The love and compassion of God are for all who will receive, all who will ask for it.

At the same time, the kingdom power is not for folks hung up on signs and wonders. In both signs so far (the wine to water was the first), Jesus expressed a reticence to perform the miracle and a distrust of signs for the sake of signs. Jesus doesn’t trust those who run after signs, wonders, and feel good experiences for their own sake because such quests have little to do with trusting Jesus.

But when the man asks a second time and focuses on the need (not the sign), Jesus responds. And note how he responds. Jesus doesn’t go to the boy, doesn’t touch the body, no fancy show. Jesus speaks and his word brings life. This exemplifies the first thing John told us – Jesus is the Word of God – the One who brings us to life.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.