Our message for today comes from John’s Gospel, chapter five, verses 1-18. This is a very long reading so rather than reading it all at once, I’m going to incorporate it directly into the message as we go along.
It begins this way: There was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went from Galilee up to Jerusalem.
Now this phrase has always puzzled me because Galilee is clearly up in the north and Jerusalem down to the south. This has nothing to do with our story, per se, by the way, but it is an interesting side note. Maybe the language has puzzled you as it has me. I finally got around to looking it up and found that “Going up to Jerusalem” means “ascending to a place of spiritual significance” and has nothing to do with geography. It makes perfect sense when looked at from the right direction. We’re going up to Jerusalem … But back to our reading:
Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew, Bethesda (or Bethsaida in some translations) which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The ill man answered him, “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.” (The belief was that every so often an angel would come down and stir the waters of the pool and the first one into the water would receive healing. This poor man, being crippled, and having no one to help him could never make it in time.)
Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
Now, what we’ve heard so far is a fairly standard healing story but from this point it takes a nasty turn.
Now that day was a Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin again, so that nothing worse happens to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore, the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.”
For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
In John’s gospel we will often hear a phrase that has caused a lot of pain. Every time John writes about the Jewish authorities it is written as “the Jews” and even when it is just in print on a page, it manages to sound accusing. It is the writer of Matthew’s gospel who most often seems to get the blame for giving Christians down through the centuries a misguided justification for persecuting “the Jews” as “Christ killers,” leading to centuries of brutal abuse, even to the point of having his writings used to ultimately excuse the horrors of the holocaust.
While Matthew’s writer is indeed awful in his writings, the truth is that John’s author is worse. Jesus’s opponents are called “the Jews” with no distinction made among them. They are from below (8:23); they are children of the devil – the father of lies (8:44) – all manner of name calling. This is dangerous language in any context but most especially when we today ignore the historical context.
Jesus and his disciples were Jewish. The writer of John was Jewish. Most of the people he was writing for were Jewish – so surely he never meant to say that all Jews are evil.
We established early in this series that John’s gospel was most likely written between 90 and 110 AD. The Jewish world would have been in disarray at this time after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, close to 40 years after Jesus’ death, and 20 to 30+ years after the Temple was destroyed. Add in the ever-growing numbers of non-Jewish Christians as the belief in the risen Jesus spread outward from Jerusalem and began to include people with no tribal ties to Jerusalem or other Jews and there were multiple opportunities for discord.
Scholars have for a long time now recognized that when John and Matthew wrote of “the Jews” they were referring to the traditionalist Temple authorities – the ones who arranged Jesus’ death and persecuted his followers, rather than Jews in general. These were followed by later ones who were Jesus followers themselves, but insisted that any non-Jewish converts had to be circumcised in accordance with Jewish law.
There was much understandable hurt and anger in those days and hurt and anger generally do not lead to temperance in our language. We know better today about John’s meaning when he rails against “the Jews” – we know and we still need to be better. There is still hatred in our world today – hatred against Jews and LGBTQ+ folk, and anyone else someone names as "different." Hatred in part engendered by and excused with hateful language still found unexplained in our scriptures. We have work to do -- unding the damage done by the past and making our future better.
Next week we’re going to be dealing with this same story. This week we’ve seen some of the practical results of this particular healing. Next week we will be looking at the theological reasoning for this story and going deeper into John’s explanation of just who Jesus is in this gospel account and what we are intended to learn about him.
It begins this way: There was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went from Galilee up to Jerusalem.
Now this phrase has always puzzled me because Galilee is clearly up in the north and Jerusalem down to the south. This has nothing to do with our story, per se, by the way, but it is an interesting side note. Maybe the language has puzzled you as it has me. I finally got around to looking it up and found that “Going up to Jerusalem” means “ascending to a place of spiritual significance” and has nothing to do with geography. It makes perfect sense when looked at from the right direction. We’re going up to Jerusalem … But back to our reading:
Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew, Bethesda (or Bethsaida in some translations) which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The ill man answered him, “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.” (The belief was that every so often an angel would come down and stir the waters of the pool and the first one into the water would receive healing. This poor man, being crippled, and having no one to help him could never make it in time.)
Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
Now, what we’ve heard so far is a fairly standard healing story but from this point it takes a nasty turn.
Now that day was a Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin again, so that nothing worse happens to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore, the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.”
For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
In John’s gospel we will often hear a phrase that has caused a lot of pain. Every time John writes about the Jewish authorities it is written as “the Jews” and even when it is just in print on a page, it manages to sound accusing. It is the writer of Matthew’s gospel who most often seems to get the blame for giving Christians down through the centuries a misguided justification for persecuting “the Jews” as “Christ killers,” leading to centuries of brutal abuse, even to the point of having his writings used to ultimately excuse the horrors of the holocaust.
While Matthew’s writer is indeed awful in his writings, the truth is that John’s author is worse. Jesus’s opponents are called “the Jews” with no distinction made among them. They are from below (8:23); they are children of the devil – the father of lies (8:44) – all manner of name calling. This is dangerous language in any context but most especially when we today ignore the historical context.
Jesus and his disciples were Jewish. The writer of John was Jewish. Most of the people he was writing for were Jewish – so surely he never meant to say that all Jews are evil.
We established early in this series that John’s gospel was most likely written between 90 and 110 AD. The Jewish world would have been in disarray at this time after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, close to 40 years after Jesus’ death, and 20 to 30+ years after the Temple was destroyed. Add in the ever-growing numbers of non-Jewish Christians as the belief in the risen Jesus spread outward from Jerusalem and began to include people with no tribal ties to Jerusalem or other Jews and there were multiple opportunities for discord.
Scholars have for a long time now recognized that when John and Matthew wrote of “the Jews” they were referring to the traditionalist Temple authorities – the ones who arranged Jesus’ death and persecuted his followers, rather than Jews in general. These were followed by later ones who were Jesus followers themselves, but insisted that any non-Jewish converts had to be circumcised in accordance with Jewish law.
There was much understandable hurt and anger in those days and hurt and anger generally do not lead to temperance in our language. We know better today about John’s meaning when he rails against “the Jews” – we know and we still need to be better. There is still hatred in our world today – hatred against Jews and LGBTQ+ folk, and anyone else someone names as "different." Hatred in part engendered by and excused with hateful language still found unexplained in our scriptures. We have work to do -- unding the damage done by the past and making our future better.
Next week we’re going to be dealing with this same story. This week we’ve seen some of the practical results of this particular healing. Next week we will be looking at the theological reasoning for this story and going deeper into John’s explanation of just who Jesus is in this gospel account and what we are intended to learn about him.
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