John 5:1-15 "The Man Went Away" Scott Hoezee

We've all heard the stories. Too often we hear about how the noble efforts of a given person, church, or charity were exploited by unscrupulous receivers of the assistance. After the 9/11 tragedy now nearly two years ago, millions of Americans donated hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit the families who lost loved ones in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. And although most of that money has gone to the right people and been put to good use, inevitably you also hear stories of people who tried to grab more than their fair share, who squandered and wasted the money they got, and even of a few who claimed to have lost a loved one at the World Trade Center only to be unmasked as frauds out to cop some charitable donations which they have no right to receive at all.

On the local scene, we have any number of agencies in the city, many of them supported by Calvin Church, which provide clothing, furniture, and housing to people in need. These are wonderful instruments of Christ-like outreach and are also efforts that are welcomed gladly by most who receive these various goods and services. But I have also had people tell me stories about how those who received a new home from Habitat for Humanity trashed that home, knocked holes in walls, left it a mess. I've been told stories that at times, after tenants have been evicted from their apartment, the landlord has gone in only to discover whole boxes of donated clothing that the family had not only never worn but then also abandoned when fleeing the apartment in the face of eviction.

Again, these are the kind of stories we've all heard before. In 1980 while running for President, one of Ronald Reagan's standard stump speeches included a lengthy section about a Chicago woman whom Reagan dubbed a "welfare queen" in that she allegedly sucked up as much government assistance as she could only to spend this money in buying a fancy car, fine clothing, the most expensive cable TV package available, and so on.

This is the kind of scenario that saddens us but that can also all-too-quickly cause our goodness to curdle. Taken to an extreme, such misuse of charitable efforts can cause a person's compassion to dry right up. Even some people who were once generous in trying to do some good in the world have been known to grow stingy, so suspicious of how their work could be exploited that they seldom venture such charity anymore at all.

Most of the time, though, we quietly assume that although such disappointments and discouragements are common to our experience, such things never happened to Jesus in his work (and, therefore, we assume should not happen with church work today, either). In our mind's eye we have a fairly set picture of what happened whenever Jesus performed miracles. Whether you are old enough to remember the good old days of Sunday school flannelgraphs or are young enough to have been raised in a Worship Center environment where Bible stories were told in a wondering fashion, either way, probably the impression you took away from Sunday school was that whenever Jesus came across people in need, he tried to do something . He made the blind to see, the lame to walk. He raised the dead and cured diseases of all kinds. He fed the hungry and gave hope to the despairing.

And in every case, Jesus was either responding to someone's great faith or his work resulted in someone's coming to great faith. In any event, when Jesus performed ministry, there were faith-inspired smiles all around. Jesus smiled as he received the healed person's heartfelt thanks. The disciples smiled as they watched the restored person dance away, singing loud praises to God and proclaiming the name of Jesus to all. Sure there were a few folks who were frowning: you do need to leave room for the Pharisees, after all. They were the bad guys in the background who didn't know a good thing when they saw it. But everyone else was filled with faith, gratitude, and rejoicing.

Because we envision Jesus' work this way, we assume that something a lot like this should be typical of also our work in Jesus' church. So we aim to make our programs big successes, the kind of thing that might catch the attention of the media. We assume that ministry efforts that warrant a Press article by Charley Honey or a News8 television segment with Jerry Barnaby is worth more (and so is being blessed by Jesus more) than programs that are only so-so in terms of outcomes, that do not attract much attention, and that garner only minimal gratitude from even the very people we are most trying to help out.

John 5 gives us a good reason to question that kind of attitude. Because this rather odd story provides us with an example of how even Jesus' work did not always fit the model of smiles-all-around rejoicing. To see why that is, let's examine these verses more closely.

John 5 contains several textual hiccups that have long provoked a lot of consternation (and not a few Ph.D. dissertations!) among scholars. First of all you can see plainly in your pew Bibles that all of verse 4 has been dropped out and reduced to a footnote. The verse about the ostensible stirring up of the waters by an angel was almost certainly not written by John himself and so was not part of the original version of the story. However, although this verse has been ruled inauthentic on textual grounds, it nevertheless does apparently reflect the legend that surrounded this particular pool back at that time.

Another source of scholarly puzzlement has been the precise name of the place. The best evidence, based on documents found at Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls, is indeed Bethesda as the NIV now has it. But for a long time there were multiple possibilities on the true name as well as a passel of theories on the precise location of this pool. Then there is the question of what really did stir up that pool's waters. Some have theorized that it was fed by a natural spring that would bubble up now and then. But archaeological evidence suggests this pool was fed by underground pipes that would likewise cause the waters to be disturbed whenever someone at the Jerusalem Waterworks opened the valve to divert a bit more water toward Bethesda. As we just noted, the people back then believed it was an angel, but John does not tell us that he believed that nor does John claim that anyone ever actually had been healed in the pool. For all we know, this could have been just a widely held myth that had no more validity than all those contemporary quacks who promise you eternal youth through herbal aroma therapy or some such fadish thing.

So there are a bevy of unanswered questions that surround these verses. What is not in dispute is that Jesus wandered through this pool area one day, but of all the many sick people who spent all their time there, we know of only one man whom Jesus approached and healed. That fact alone, by the way, should give one pause. Because there are times when listening to the more sunny promises made by some preachers on the radio or TV when you get the impression that miracles of various kinds are quite simply to be expected as a typical part of the Christian person's life. Sometimes the sick are even made to feel guilty, as though it is the weakness of their own faith that is building a dam against the power of God just waiting to flood into them if only they will believe.

But the fact is that even when Jesus himself walked through an entire ward of diseased people, not every single one of them got healed. For all the miracles Jesus did perform, we must not forget that the true meaning of Jesus and of his ministry was deeper than that. In John 5 Jesus did not clap his hands together to clear out the Bethesda pool by instantly curing every last person there. He came to just one man. And as in our own lives when we do not receive the healing we prayed for, so for the diseased people at Bethesda that day long ago: it is simply a mystery why healing comes to some but not others.

In the case of John 5, however, that mystery is compounded mightily once you take a good look at the man Jesus did in fact heal. As the commentator Leon Morris put it, this particular man seems to have been a rather "unpleasant creature"! So let's note a few things about this man--we don't actually know much about him, but reading between the lines we can perhaps make some educated guesses. The most specific thing we know is that he is incapacitated sufficiently that he could not move quickly. The NIV calls him an "invalid," but the original Greek uses just the generic word asthenia or "weakness" when describing the man. He was weak in some way. Something was wrong with him but we do not know just what. However, whatever his precise malady, it had been going on for a whopping 38 years. That fact alone is enough to generate compassion for the poor fellow.

It's a bit downhill from there, however. We are tipped off a bit that this man may not be the nicest person you'd ever meet when Jesus asks him, "Do you even want to be healed?" Because this is such a "duh" question, you have to assume that there was something else behind it. Based on Jesus' later words in verse 14, you have the feeling that this man may have contributed to his own difficulties. He complains to Jesus that no one would help him into the pool but maybe that was not quite the whole story. And anyway, why didn't he have any family or friends to help him? Why had no one in the course of nearly four decades taken any pity on him? Could it be because this man had the kind of personality that could curdle milk? Did he have a chip on his shoulder the size of a boulder?

We don't know, but subsequent events following Jesus' gracious healing could be seen as lending credence to the notion that this was not a man skilled at winning friends and influencing people. But before we get to that, note the complete absence of any faith-talk in this story. The man is not said to attract Jesus' attention because of the strength of his piety and faith. Nor does the man appear to have a whiff of religion or faith even after Jesus does this stunning thing. Unlike many other recipients of Jesus' healing power, this man does not walk away as a loud and joyful witness to Jesus. In fact, he initially neither knows who healed him nor does he bother to inquire. And once he does find out who did it, he goes forth and tells people all right, but not in a grateful way but, instead, he rats Jesus out to the Pharisees!

Nice guy! Ironically this story comes right on the heels of two other stories from John 4: the incident with the Samaritan woman at the well and the story about the royal (presumably Roman) official whose son Jesus heals at the end of John 4. In both cases Jesus received a kind reception from the Samaritans and from this Roman official. But now that he is smack back in the middle of Jerusalem (that is to say, back at "home" with his own people), Jesus gets treated like dirt!

But the main point for this morning is that John 5 stands as a highly curious biblical example of how sometimes the best God has to offer gets lavished on people who do not deserve it and who also do not respond to this grace in any way we would deem to be appropriate. When Jesus catches back up with the man, his tone is a bit brusque: "Stop sinning before something worse happens to you!" Again, that seems to indicate that this man may have deserved what he got in terms of his earlier condition. But just to prove that he did not deserve what he got in terms of Jesus' healing, the man turns right around and, far from worshiping Jesus, thanking him, or praising God in the highest, he makes a beeline for the Pharisees and gets Jesus in trouble for yet another Sabbath infraction.

So what do we take away from this story? Well, perhaps this is a situation where we can draw good insights from a bad example. As we prepare here at Calvin Church to launch into a new church season, there may be some comfort to draw from the fact that even our best, most Jesus-like efforts will not necessarily succeed or be received the way that we think they should. We will now and then house homeless people, welcome folks into various programs, provide food or clothing to people in difficult circumstances and yet not only fail to receive bubbly words of gratitude from them, we may actually feel like we've been spit upon. (And by the way, this happens not just with outsiders to the church but at times with members of the church, too!) In a Flannery O'Connor story, there is a scene in which a pious and well-meaning older lady pleads in a heartfelt way with a street-toughened, cynical young man. At one point she says to the youth, "Son, Jesus died for your sins!" to which he sneeringly replies, "I never ast him to!"

We may be floored by that kind of ingratitude and cynicism, but based on John 5, here are a few other conclusions that we should not draw. First, we should not chalk up a difficult or even a failed ministry as something that was not a Christ-like thing to do in the first place. Jesus never said that the more we became like him, the more success we'd experience. And anyway, since Jesus was always Christ-like (!), the fact that he performed a grand miracle for a rather unlovely person in John 5 tells us that this kind of thing can and does happen, even when (maybe especially when) we really are being Christ-like.

Second, we should not think that because of how it turned out, Jesus should have left this man alone in favor of choosing a more "worthy" candidate at Bethesda that day. And so the contemporary corollary to that is that neither should we think that our own ministry efforts should be very selectively aimed at only those with whom we have the best shot at grateful success. Even if something doesn't turn out the way we had hoped, that does not mean it was a mistake to begin with nor does it mean that the good deed we performed has transformed into something bad after all. Love remains love, goodness remains goodness, grace remains grace even if some other person snatches it up and walks away without giving it (or us) a second thought.

Third, we should never underestimate the possibility that we are planting gospel seeds, the further growth of which (and the final flowering of which) we may never see but that God may well take care of anyway. We don't need to know what the longterm result of our being Christ-like turns out to be. We have no clue what becomes of this man in John 5, and that is actually true of far more of the people Jesus healed than we usually realize. So also in our interactions with the community, with coworkers and neighbors, even with one another as fellow members of this church: we don't know what, if anything, may result from our having done some loving act of service. But maybe it's not our business to know and anyway, if our main reason for performing ministry is feathers in our own caps, maybe we are ill-motivated to begin with. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, faithfulness needs to be its own reward. Oftentimes the knowledge that we acted with Christ-like integrity needs to be enough for us to be at peace with our place in God's kingdom.

In verse 15, following Jesus' stern warning to the man, we are told simply, "the man went away." That line could serve as a summary of this entire incident: Jesus did a great deed redolent of God's coming kingdom and all its power to heal and restore us all. But the one who received that miracle just went away, not apparently having come to faith, not being outwardly grateful, and even turning right around and getting Jesus into trouble. If this snub had happened to any ordinary person, we might look at it and snort, "Typical!" even as we get a little more cynical ourselves. But because this did happen to Jesus, maybe we can look at this story and gently say, "Typical" in a way that actually encourages us to keep plugging away in service to our Lord and just because it's the kingdom thing to do. Amen.