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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!)
If not the coronavirus pandemic, then perhaps the more-recent cases of unexplained pediatric hepatitis, or the unusual spreading of the rare monkeypox virus, or some other health issue afflicts or concerns someone you love or you yourself. Maybe you have your heart and mind fixed on a single solution that may not be helping. To you, as to the man in the Gospel Reading option that we heard this morning, Jesus asks the question, “Do you want to be healed?”
In St. John’s Divinely-inspired Gospel account as we have it, after Jesus in Cana had healed the ill son of an official from Capernaum (John 4:46-53), there was a feast of the Jews, perhaps most-often thought to be the Feast of Tabernacles, which recalled the Israelites’ wandering in the desert for 38 years (Deuteronomy 2:14), and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, as He did for most of the feasts for which the law required the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, by the Sheep Gate, a small opening in the north wall of the Temple, evidence suggests there were two pools, one pool was used to wash sacrificial sheep before they went into the Temple area, and the other pool was called “Bethesda”, which means “House of Mercy”, where a multitude of invalids lay under its roofed colonnades, like in a ward of a hospital. As a later addition to the Biblical text explains, the people then apparently thought that an angel of the Lord would stir up the water, and the first person into the pool would be healed of his or her disease, not all that unlike people today’s seeking out hot springs and other special waters. (And, we might note that Jerusalem’s gates are associated with angels in today’s Second Reading [Revelation 21:9-14, 21-27].)
At this Bethesda, Jesus saw a sick man who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years, which one commentator says was longer than the average lifespan then. When Jesus saw him and knew that he had been lying there at Bethesda a long time, Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered both that he did not have anyone to put him into the pool and that, while he was trying himself to get in, another would step down before him. The sick man’s answer may have been an implicit “yes” to Jesus’s question whether he wanted to be healed, and the sick man’s answer may also have been an implicit request to Jesus, if the time came, for Jesus to put him in the water. Regardless, the man seemed to be so single-mindedly focused on that water as the assumed source of the healing that Jesus mentioned that he in a sense missed Jesus altogether.
You and I similarly can be so single-mindedly focused on a solution that may or may not be solving a health issue or another problem that also we in a sense miss Jesus altogether. We may blame others and excuse ourselves. We may focus so much on this life that we miss the next life. No matter how serious and hopeless our situation might seem to us, the reality is probably worse than we imagine. Blindness, lameness, paralysis, or whatever our health issue or issues might be, including the general debilitation that comes with age, all are the results of sin’s presence in the world and all are some of the ways that sin pays its wages of death (Romans 6:23). Because of our sinful nature and all of our actual sin, we all deserve both death here and now and torment in hell for eternity.
But, demonstrating deep love and compassion for us as for the man in the Gospel Reading, Jesus in effect stands before us asking, “Do you want to be healed?” Are you presently wishing or wanting not only physical healing but also spiritual healing? Are you wanting to be made completely whole? Jesus calls and enables us to turn from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin, and to want to stop sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives us; God forgives our sinful nature and all our actual sin, whatever our sin might be. God forgives us for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
In the Gospel Reading, Jesus told the man to get up, take up his bed, and walk. And, at once the man was healed, took up his bed, and walked. This miraculous healing is the third “sign” in St. John’s Gospel account, and it and the other six signs show forth Jesus’s glory, and they are at least intended for people, including us, to put faith in Jesus (John 2:11; confer John 20:30‑31). Jesus worked this particular “sign” on a Sabbath, which aspect of the sign put Jesus at odds with the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem for the first time in St. John’s account, and, coupled with Jesus’s claim to be God, this healing on a Sabbath made the Jewish leadership want to kill Jesus (John 5:16, 18), which, of course, they eventually did. Yet, true God in human flesh, Jesus died on the cross as the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29, 36), including your sins and my sins. Jesus died in our place, the death that we should have died. And, Jesus did not stay dead but rose on the third day—arguably the eighth day, the day of re‑creation and restoration. As every Jewish Sabbath and festival, so every Christian Sunday and festival—including the Ascension of Our Lord this Thursday—both recalls God’s past creation and redemption and hopes and prays for the blessings of His continued presence and favor. Those hopes and prayers are answered in Jesus, the door (or, “gate”) of the sheep, for those who enter by Him are saved (John 10:7, 9).
The man in the Gospel Reading in a sense was right to look for a curative water, but in that regard he had the wrong water! The water and the Word of Holy Baptism work forgiveness of sins, rescue from death and the devil, and give eternal salvation to those who believe the words and promises of God. And, not an angel of the Lord gives the water of Holy Baptism its ability but the Lord Himself, namely, the Holy Spirit. Even if, as some think, the pool of Bethesda was later used for Christian baptisms (confer Scaer, CLD XI:96), Baptism was by no means limited to Bethesda, nor does Baptism need water specifically from Bethesda or from any other particular place.
For example, in toady’s First Reading, Saints Paul and Luke on the Sabbath went to the riverside outside of Philippi and there baptized Lydia and her household, which likely included children. They went to her house, but the true “Bethesda” or “house of mercy” was not limited to that place, nor was it limited to a now‑defunct charitable organization out of Watertown, Wisconsin, but the true “Bethesda” is God’s house, any place that the Church, pastors and people, gather around God’s Word and Sacraments. The Son of Man used miraculous healings to show that the Father had given Him authority on earth to forgive sins (for example, Matthew 9:6, 8), and that authority, to forgive or retain sins, the Son of Man gave to His apostles, and He still gives that authority to forgive or retain sins to the apostles’ successors, pastors today. Through them, God heals and sanctifies us on our “Sabbath” (Exodus 31:13), applying the Gospel to us individually with water in Holy Baptism, with touch in Holy Absolution, and with the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar that are the Body of Christ given for you and the Blood of Christ shed for you and so give you forgiveness, life, and salvation.
Forgiveness, life, and salvation in Christ ultimately are all that we truly need, and yet, along with Christ, God graciously gives us all things (Romans 8:32), all that we need to support this body and life. “Do you want to be healed?” Repent and believe. In this life, we and our loved ones may or may not get physical healing for which we pray, but, in the next life, we most certainly will get full and permanent physical healing with the resurrection, if necessary, and the glorification of the body. Even the man in the Gospel Reading waited a lifetime for his immediate physical healing, and even it was only temporary, as he still had to die. Whether the coronavirus, pediatric hepatitis, monkeypox, or some other health issue, Jesus knows our afflictions, and He heals us in His time and way.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +