ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

God’s Entry into Our Lives: the Healing of the Paralysed Man

Sermon preached by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis at the church of the Holy Trinity and the Annunciation, Oxford, 10 May 2009

John 5: 1-13

Christ is risen!

In this story from St John’s Gospel of the healing of the man by the pool of Bethesda, which we have heard this morning, we see Jesus sharing wholly in the life of his people. He comes up from Galilee, joining the crowds going up to Jerusalem for the festival, and makes his life part of theirs.

The scene of this miracle is a sheep market. I would not like you to imagine that this is a market selling sheep to eat. This is a market selling sheep for sacrifice in the Temple, and archeologically we can see that it was only a few hundred yards away from the Temple itself. If we can put ourselves back into that world, this must have been an extraordinary situation. So many animals were slaughtered and sacrificed that there were special ditches for the blood to run down from the altar. I do not know what it was like in the winter time, but in summer the smell must have been quite extraordinary. Philo describes the priests working at an altar that was actually taller than they were, so it took two men to lift these sacrificed animals on top of the fire on the altar. This was done in complete silence: there was just the fire and the smell. It is quite an extraordinary picture, of which we have no reflection in the modern world

Then, a little bit further from the Temple was the pool with its five porches, porches being colonnades with a roof over them. Have you ever wondered what this looked like? In classical architecture there is no such thing as a pentagonal building with five sides, so what you have to imagine is a pool with four colonnades around it and another colonnade going through the middle, which would give easy access from both sides. In other words, it is designed to make it easy to get into that pool. The pool has a particular quality, and that is that from time to time the water is moved by an angel.

 Again it is very important for us to realise the world in which Christ lived. That angel is a messenger of God, a representation, an aspect of God’s presence in the world. In  Jerusalem and throughout the land there is a sense that God is close. Sometimes there would be a movement in this water. The Gospel says that an angel came down and moved the water, but we know that underground Jerusalem is penetrated by canals carrying water to various places. If something went wrong water came back into this pool. I am just imagining that the lifting of the water comes from a movement below and there is nothing above the water that would indicate why this was taking place. It is at this point that the sick people try to get into the water, because this is new water coming into the pool from some unseen source.

What is interesting here – and we have to read the Gospel of John in this light throughout – is that Jesus is also an angel of God, a messenger of God come down to stir the water. And just as those waters seem to move gratuitously – there is no obvious cause – Christ also, in this healing, acts gratuitously. He does not ask for faith from the man who is lying by the pool, He simply says, ‘Do you want to be healed? Do you want to be made whole?’ The man’s reply does not even tell us whether he wants to be healed or not, only that he had been unable to get down into the pool, but this was enough: Jesus heals him anyway. After all, the man has been there for thirty-eight years and he is still hoping against all hope. He knows he is obviously too weak to move quickly himself.

When we look at it, what we see in this man is an image of the condition of the Jewish people of the time, oppressed by the Romans for many more than thirty-eight years – since the middle of the third century B.C. – and unable to do anything about it. God comes to them: he comes to them and heals them. Again John remarks, ‘That day was a Sabbath day’. What this tells us is that God is no longer resting on the Sabbath day; He is working himself on the Sabbath. It also shows the way Jesus is both completely integrated into the life of the people and at the same time somehow stands at a distance from them.

Of course, when the man takes up his bed and starts to walk, he is immediately challenged: ‘Why are you working on the Sabbath, carrying that bed mat?’ And his only answer is, ‘I was told to do this by the man who healed me.’ Jesus has disappeared and he finds the man later in the Temple. Most interesting! You go to the Temple to give thanks, so this man, having been healed, moved a few hundred yards to the Temple and there Christ finds him. And what does he tell him? He tells him, ‘Sin no more.’  Again, most interesting! We have here what is, in effect, a connection to the change that takes place in every Christian at Baptism. God enters our lives, and we are told, ‘Sin no more. Pay attention to your life. Keep track of what you do. Make sure that you live in accordance with the Commandments.’

What, then, do we see in this story as a whole? There is a healing, a miracle, but John presents it in a very special way. He presents it in such a way that it is connected with the Christian life as a whole. We see here that God can intervene in our lives in unexpected ways. The angel disturbs the waters. Christ heals, gratuitously and apparently without cause. We too need to recognise that this kind of thing happens to us: that without action on our part, God nonetheless approaches us. The crucial thing is to be able to recognise it, to take it on board. It is crucial also to be able to do what the man in this story does, to go to the Temple to give thanks. And we also need to listen to Christ’s word to go and sin no more. We need to think of God’s entry into our lives as a sign that we are being encouraged to change: to watch what we do, to watch how we behave; to ask ourselves, is this what God wants? And finally, at the very heart of this story is the fact that God does not want us to be ill. He wants us to be whole, to be on our feet and to be active. It may be the Sabbath day but God does not sleep and he does not want us to sleep.

Christ is risen!