Something for Bastille day

Belated ANZAC day posting

Stirring the waters: a reflection on John 5.1-16

This is the background notes for a reflection on the gospel reading at the communion services at the Brotherhood of St Laurence today. The reflection had to be given at three services, so it had tweaks and adjustments for each group of listeners.

Over the last few weeks we've been hearing from the Gospel of Matthew, but today and for the next couple of weeks we'll be tuning in to the Gospel of John. The message is essentially the same. Last week's gospel reading told of a slave who'd been forgiven a debt of 10,000 talents, who then tried to claim a much smaller debt of 100 denarii from another slave (the equivalent of being excused for defaulting on a multi-million dollar mortgage, keeping the house, and then demanding repayment of fifty dollars from a friend). There is a sharp point here: the slave being forgiven a large debt should have been willing to forgive the much smaller debt owed to him. The message we took from that was how forgiveness needs to be catching – contagious even! – we forgive others because our sins have been forgiven by God. Our prime need is forgiveness and bread, both essential to community.

And so we come to today. The man at the centre of today's reading is a bundle of human contradictions. He sits by the healing waters of Bethesda for 38 years – that's my lifetime! – and never once managed to enter the pool. What it must be like to sit with the expectation of healing but never actually make the leap? I can imagine there would come a point where resignation sets in – you become so occupied with being sick that you loose hope of being healed. You might even begin to wonder if God has forgotten you, because the people around you seem to have stopped noticing your being there.

In the world of the gospel reading to be sick is to be more dead than alive. To be healed means returning to life, to community, and this is what Jesus asks the man sitting by the pool – do you want to be made well? How would you answer that question? Would you say what the man says: 'I have no one to put me in the pool'?

The exchanges in this reading are very strange. What are we to make of Jesus ordering the man to get up, take up his mat, and walk? But after the man has been noticed by the authorities and questioned for carrying his mat on the sabbath (they don't appear to have noticed his being healed!), Jesus then reappears and tells the man to accept his healing, and sin no more so that nothing worse befall him. The man then goes to the authorities and tells them about Jesus.

The key to this is in Jesus' very odd demand of the man – “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.” This is a call to live in a new way, effectively inviting the man to a new reality where he won't be lying on a mat, resigned to being ignored. What he does is a bit overshadowed by John's commentary on events – that his reporting Jesus to the authorities leads them to persecute Jesus for breaking the sabbath – and this is where our Bible translations let us down. John tells us the man told the authorities that he had been healed by Jesus. But the greek word here is a version of evangelising. He doesn't simply tell the authorities he was healed by Jesus, he proclaims it. He is following through on Jesus' words by spreading the good word.

I think we need to remember that this all happens around water. The pool of Bethesda is at the centre of this story. Whenever I meet water in the gospel there are two things that come to my mind. One is the way John's Gospel in particular is announcing the great cosmic re-set: at the beginning of Genesis the symbol of chaos is the unformed quality of the waters over which the Spirit of God moves. There is a tradition with this reading we're sharing today that the waters in the pool of Bethesda took on their healing property when the angel of the Lord stirred up the water -- this is stated in the verse now edited out of modern translations. So the water in the pool is living water, and if we're speaking of living water, then we're talking about waters through which we have all passed. When we meet water in the gospels we should immediately think of baptism, about how this makes me and you part of the body of Christ. Baptism propels us to live in a transformed and transforming way. We become the presence of Jesus in the world, and this is embodied for us in our gathering here at the table. In our baptism and in our gathering here for Eucharist we are still a bundle of human contradictions, but in our own way we are like the man transformed by his relating to Jesus. Like him, we can suddenly catch a glimpse of new and exciting ways of living.

The man by the pool is like the slave forgiven the large debt, but with very a different outcome. Both men are figures of human contradiction, but the offer to both of them is the same – to be given their lives. Forgiving and being forgiven, receiving a message and proclaiming it to the people around you, these are calls to transformation, to living in a reality much closer to God. Every step we take in that direction brings us more and more into that reality, which Jesus calls the kingdom of God.

Olivier Latry and the organ at Notre Dame de Paris