“Stand up, take your mat, and walk,” Jesus says to the man who has had his heart set on reaching the healing waters for years. For nearly 40 years this man has been ill, and perhaps the sense of frustration is noticeable in his benumbed response to the Christ who approaches him. If for some of you the story of the healing of this man at the Pool of Bethesda is not as familiar, here is a bit of background. The earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John don’t explain why the people who were blind, lame, and paralyzed were gathered there, but later writings explained that the people here believed that an angel of God would come down and stir the waters, and whoever was the first to reach the pool would be healed of their suffering. Each moment of sacred stirring was a scramble for one lucky person.
It’s at this pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem that Jesus encounters this man, among the many there who are desperate for relief, comfort, and miracles. “Do you want to be made well?” he asks. The man responds to Jesus not with his wish, not with the affirmative, but with words of pessimism, and a frustrated ranting recollection of past failed attempts: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus understands. And asks him to stand, take up his mat, and walk. And while we may be quick to judge the man’s tone, we notice here that he follows Jesus’s invitation without additional words of hesitation or disbelief.
In this excerpt of our reading, we only read that he does indeed walk with his mat, and that it was a sabbath.
While the cutoff of this story may seem anticlimactic and abrupt, there are at least two things that are worth some wonder in our imagination. First, what was it like for this man, if we were him, to have your tunnel-vision determination set on that one source of healing, that pool that would fix everything, and then suddenly in a moment, you trust a passerby, lift yourself up, and you can walk – without a single drop from the stirring waters. Second, what was he thinking as he got up to walk and carry his mat on a sabbath – a day where something as simple as carrying a mat was considered work and thus prohibited on this holy day of rest. Did he know the stakes of his actions in the eyes of the religious leaders? Was his desperation for healing so great that it no longer mattered? Was he aware of the eyes of the crowd on him as he did what he did?
There is so much in each of our readings for today, so forgive me as we hop around a bit. Before we dive into our gospel text further, our Revelation text is worth highlighting as well – we encounter rich images of vivid trees that bear fruits of many variety, the description of the glory of God so bright that the sun and moon have no place or need in the great unveiling, and rivers are as bright as crystal. And, in this description of the holy city, there is no temple. This might feel insignificant to our time when places of worship are scattered across most of our cities quite randomly, yet in this context the temple functioned at the center, as a mediator between God and God’s people – and in this description in Revelation, that service is no longer necessary. Perhaps it mirrors what we witness in Jesus in our gospel text – healing the man without the mediation of angels and stirred up water. Perhaps through each of these texts we can be reminded of the nature of God among us, one of intimacy and closeness, one where the Spirit of God in her fullness is not restricted by the confines of human theologies, but desires expression with us in grace – even if sometimes we find ourselves putting up mediators or barriers among ourselves to “qualify” and “check” access for others.
And let us not forget the reading in Acts about Lydia. Not only is today’s reading one of the painfully few accounts of women in the story of the early church and its women in ministry, but Lydia is also the first documented convert to Christianity in Europe. Perhaps as we notice the Apostle Paul’s actions in this written account, we notice again how the love of God and God’s call to all people to ministry is present regardless of our human-made barriers, as we see in these brief few words: “We sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us… Jesus opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul… [then] she urged us, saying, ‘If you have judged me to be a believer in Christ, come and stay at my home.’ And she persuaded us.” On this Sabbath day, in this time and context where we meet Lydia, Typically, a quorum of ten adult Jewish men was needed in Jewish communal prayer for certain components of the regular Shabbat services. And yet, despite these societal expectations and institutional rules, Lydia had gathered these women together, engaging with the presence of the Spirit, and then invited Paul to her home – a detail which notes for us that Lydia was a successful business owner, and had a rather rare status of property ownership, as she persuaded Paul to stay for hospitality and communion in the presence of God. This story, too, does not fit neatly into the expectations and regulations of the culture and religious institutions of that time. But it might not be a surprise that in the years of the early church after the liberating and disruptive ministry of Jesus in the world, the Holy Spirit would not be working “neatly” within our human expectations. Yet again here, communion with God happens here outside of our institutional guardrails that limit our perceptions of how God works in the world.
So, this is one takeaway we may notice from our texts today: the Holy shows up elsewhere when we might be focused on reaching the pools of stirring waters, or following the gender expectations of leadership and access to the sacred; we may look to a temple at the center of our world when in fact there is no need for that temple. God surprises us in Acts, Revelation, and the gospel of John, connecting with Lydia, revealing a vision of a radically accessible Divinity, and healing a man past his expectations. The surprises of access and inclusion in these texts reminds me of Pam Shellberg’s reflections in her homily about a month ago, where she points out how “in every single post-resurrection appearance in the gospels, the resurrected Jesus is not recognized by those who were closest to him. It is actually quite easy for us to miss resurrections in our own lives if we expect them to look like something we’ve known, something familiar.” In today’s texts, it’s easy to miss the moving presence of God before us, if our eyes stay focused on the pools of stirring waters for healing. What might be our healing pools that we are so fixated on? Where is God elsewhere, if we just look at the passersby?
Lastly, I invite us to notice the wisdom in the example of Christ in his act of healing at the Pools of Bethesda. In his love Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath, regardless of the target it puts on him in the eyes of the authorities, despite breaking holy law, despite the tone of pessimism in the ill man’s voice, despite a possibility of ungratefulness, despite the fact that this man would then go on and tell the religious leaders that “this man” was the one who violated the sabbath laws by healing him. The loving Spirit of God does not operate within the neat confines of fear, laws, oppression, and appeasement of earthly authority. Jesus heals, despite us. The temple is gone. All are called to the story of life and love. During this overwhelming season in our collective lives, as our hearts break and burn with the grief and rage of the pain we witness among our human and more-than-human kin – climate, war, human rights, a desecration of so much that is sacred – what does it mean for us to love in the unconditional example of Jesus, despite the world? As Valarie Kaur writes that “anger is the force that protects that which is loved,” friends, as we rage against injustice after injustice, what does our divine loving call us each to do?
There is wisdom in Jesus’s example here at the pools. And for all of us who love the land around us and its wisdom, there is much to learn about this kind of love through our teachers who are trees. As we close, hear these words from the poetry of Drew Jackson:
The trees tell more
about the love of God
than most of us, made
in image and likeness,
the way they give breath
indiscriminately.
The way they cast a cool canopy
on whoever wills to come and sit
under their branches.
The way we cut them down
to make space for things
more fleeting.
The way they still sprout
despite us.