Thirty Eight Years
John 5:1-9
May 9, 2010
Numbers are treacherous for readers of the Bible. Too often we read them, reaching for our calculators, considering them as accurate as the figures on our income tax returns. Think about that analogy! Many of the great dead ends of Biblical interpretation in Christian history have come from counting the numbers too precisely. In the Bible, numbers are usually symbolic of a certain idea, not an exact count or duration of time on the clock.
You don’t quite believe me? This may be incomprehensible to the younger bunch of you, but if someone asks you your age and you reply coquettishly - 39 - you do know what that means? Shades of Jack Benny and Rochester, but 39 years old means you are no longer really young, but since you are not yet 40, you are not really old! If I have misinterpreted that, I am sure you will tell me. Jack Benny celebrated quietly 41 anniversaries of his 39th birthday, appropriately on Valentine’s Day.
Forty is perhaps the most famous of Biblical numbers - 40 days and 40 nights it rained during the great Flood, the Israelites spent 40 years in the wilderness of Sinai before reaching Canaan, the Promised Land. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness preparing himself for his ministry, a barely possible period for a human being.
There was an annual feast in Jerusalem and Jesus went up to the city to take part. Entering through what was anciently called the Sheep Gate on the northwest side of the city, Jesus quickly ran into the pool of Bethesda, only recently rediscovered by archaeologists. A periodic subterranean current would rush through the waters and create a pulsating ripple that people labeled as angels stirring up the waters. Surely, such angelic and divine actions must carry with it a holy power, so the common belief was that if you were in the waters when the angelic wave came through you could be healed of all manner of ailments. The pool was thick with despair.
The first person Jesus saw was a man whom he somehow knew had been ill for 38 years, lying there now in a heap of despair. The man has no one to help him into the waters when they are unexpectedly stirred up and in the crush of crippled humanity he never gets there in time. People are not nice in situations like that. Jesus asks him first, “Do you want to be healed?” Not so obvious a question, for after nearly four decades he was there out of routine, no longer out of hope or even initiative. We might think as well, “no ripple of water is going to heal what ails him; it’s a superstition, not a scientific reality.”
A common principle of interpreting the Bible is to pay attention to those details that grab your attention, that do not make sense or simply are hard to believe. How did Jesus know he had been there 38 years, and why would the Evangelist John bother recording such an arcane fact?
Nevertheless, thirty-eight did have an honoured place in Biblical history. As I mentioned, the standard length of Israel’s time in the wilderness after the Exodus is 40 years. Yet, Deuteronomy 2:14 records that from the beginning of the Exodus until the Israelites entered Canaan 38 years had elapsed. Not a proud number, one of survival and of amazement and exasperation - it took us 38 whole years! What’s more, at the end of the verse a note observes that none of the men who had originally left Egypt had made it to Canaan.
They had wandered aimlessly, did they even know where they were supposed to be heading? Yet God had brought them home in spite of themselves. For 38 years this crippled man had been shuffling aimlessly about the pool, giving the pretense that he wanted to be healed, but never getting any closer. This odd number of 38 came to signify a people who were free, but had become lost along the way. “Do you want to be healed?” is a real question. Do you want to keep up looking like you want to get somewhere, but always satisfied with staying put? Or are you satisfied? Get up and take your bed with you and walk out of here. Jesus didn’t touch him, the man didn’t answer. For once in 38 years he got up at once, and walked away with his bed under his arm. Israel had arrived again in the Promised Land.
Now that day was the sabbath. Most of you can remember the blue laws in effect on Sunday, our sabbath, going back to our Puritan roots. The only places open were dairy stores for milk and bread, and Jewish delicatessens - an interfaith object lesson every Sunday we picked up a loaf of rye. But on that sabbath, this newly arrived pilgrim in the Promised Land was beset by the authorities, “Whoa, this is the sabbath, fellow, it’s illegal for you to be carrying your bed today.” I am not even used to walking, but the man who healed me told me to get up, walk and carry my bed. Who was that? I don’t know, he’s disappeared into the crowd.
Jesus had not disappeared, however, and later ran into this man and told him to stop sinning and he would stay out of trouble. I think you and I have been told that before. Now he had a name, so the healed man without a name walked right over to the authorities and told them it was Jesus. That gave them a cause against Jesus from that point on because once you start working on the sabbath, where do you stop? Maybe the whole story was a setup for Jesus’ retort to these sabbath-minders: “My Father is working still, and I am working.” God hasn’t finished creating and recreating and Jesus creates new life along with the Father. The authorities were outraged because they heard him calling God his Father and making himself equal with God. They were bent on killing him from that point on. No good deed goes unpunished.
Meanwhile, the man lying beside the pool is walking and has left his bed in his house after 38 years of shuffling around and now he has been given the grace of walking on purpose. Thirty eight years was not meant as a penal sentence, but the inhumane, yet terribly human time it takes you and I to accept the grace of God. The Israelites kept complaining, wanting to organize their Exodus according to their standards and never could agree to simply go forward on purpose to the Promised Land. The man lying beside the pool is no great sinner, he is always going to get around to being cured and become healthy once again, but after a while he just follows the routine that looks like he is behaving correctly, though he all he is doing is nothing but playing at being healed.
It’s just like what we do on the sabbath, the day in which we rest and praise God, the Creator of heaven and earth. Is obeying the sabbath injunction not to work fulfilled in doing absolutely nothing, not even carrying a dose of medicine or a bowl of soup to an ailing friend? God is still working on the sabbath, the world doesn’t stop spinning for 24 hours once every seven days. Today we are downtown, working on purpose, by the grace of God.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan