Title Only Your Will / John 5:1-13
Contents
Only Your Will / John 5:1-13
Among the places in the New Testament, ‘Bethesda’ is a place that feels very mysterious to us and at the same time raises religious questions. Bethesda means ‘House of Grace’ or ‘House of Olives’, and this is the name of the ‘Pond’ that was next to the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem. This is a lake with a legend that angels come down from time to time to stir the water, and whoever enters first will be healed of any disease. So many sick people from all over the world came here to stay and wait for that time.
Jesus came up to Jerusalem on the Passover, a Jewish festival, and visited this place. Among the many sick there, Jesus healed only one man who was 38 years old and left. There were so many sick people waiting for an angel, why did Jesus heal only one? Was that also the way the Jews strictly observed the Sabbath? That is the question we have.
The Sabbath is an institution established as a symbol of God's covenant with His people. All Jews were obliged to strictly observe this system because God set aside one day to reflect on the six-day life while resting on the seventh day after the work of creation. But the question of how to keep the Sabbath was always a problem for them. The way to keep the Sabbath as stipulated in the Mosaic law was to do nothing on that day.
However, with the passage of time, numerous interpretations have emerged, and the original meaning of this commandment has faded. Jewish rabbis classified the types of work into as many as thirty-nine categories, and taught that any one of them would be punishable by death. Each item was further subdivided so that every act of the people was bound by the Sabbath rule.
To give one example, one item on the harvest had detailed rules for small things related to the harvest, such as slicing a ear of wheat or pulling a hair. Women were not even to look in the mirror on the Sabbath, since all of these regulations restrain human behavior. Because if you look in the mirror and see any white hair, you will be tempted to pull it out, and you may break the law against the harvest.
This Sabbath ritual would begin at sundown on Friday and last until sundown on Saturday. Food for the Sabbath had to be prepared in advance. On the Sabbath it was not allowed to cook or even make fires. Don't even wash the dishes. Do not sweep the floor. I wasn't supposed to do anything of any kind.
The healing event of Bethesda took place on this very Sabbath. When Jesus healed a 38-year-old man on the Sabbath, the Jews, bound by the too complex restrictions that defined the Sabbath, saw the man's bag of luggage, but not the work of life that God did. This is by no means surprising. Legalism always leads to a narrow view. Legalism focuses on the outward appearances, but fails to see the other true things.
Because of this closed thinking and vision, the Jews could not even dream of a God working outside the rhythms of established religious rituals. But the life of Jesus Christ followed a different kind of rhythm.
There are several kinds of rhythms in this universe that surround us and affect us all. One of them is to listen to the heartbeat of the mother in the mother's womb during the first process of being formed as a human being. The baby hears the blood circulating through the mother's veins, the air moving through the mother's lungs, and the lingering sound of her voice through her body. Then, after birth, you experience a different kind of rhythm. The rising and setting of the sun, the coming and going of the tides, the coming and going of the seasons, the rhythms of life, from the cycle of ephemeral life to the cycle of rising and falling of the moon, regulate our lives and the world.
But there is another kind of rhythm from this. It is a spiritual rhythm. It is a rhythm that comes from the heart of our Father in Heaven. Jesus lived according to that rhythm. Jesus sensed the movement of the Father, just as a tide could detect the movement of the moon. Those movements moved Jesus. Regarding this fact, Jesus said:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord except to see what the Father is doing; for what the Father does, the Son also does.”
There is a difference between living according to the rhythm of our Heavenly Father, living according to the rhythm of the law, and living according to the rhythm of nature. Living according to Heavenly Father's rhythm has an 'abundant life'. But there is no life in a life that follows the rhythm of the law. And there is no freedom. There is only void. And in a life that follows the rhythm of nature, there is harmony in the human body, but there is no experience of eternal life.
The rhythm of the life Jesus lived was not the law or nature, but the rhythm of God. Therefore, it was difficult for the Jews to see the glory of the living God in his work. Jesus was merely seen as a heretic destroying the Jewish religion.
Chapters 4 and 5 of John's Gospel show us well what it means to control the rhythm of Jesus' life. In John 4, we see Jesus dragged almost by gravity to a well located outside the town of Sychar in Samaria. There he meets a Samaritan woman. And because of her, many people in that town come to believe in Jesus. In chapter 5 recorded in the text, Jesus comes up to Jerusalem and comes to a pool with five patios where all kinds of sick people are gathered. Strangely, Jesus did not heal all the sick there, but only one.
This contrasting scene raises a question. Why did Jesus not heal those who had waited so long for the angel to appear at the pool of Venice and prayed so earnestly for a miraculous healing?
The answer to this question in this article is very simple. It's not because Jesus didn't want to heal, or because their prayers weren't enough, or because they didn't have enough money to give. Because Heavenly Father did not do that that day. God is not driven by people's tastes or religious zeal. His will is always shrouded in mystery to us. So, the evangelist said this about the mystery of God.
“As you do not know what the wind is like, and how the bones grow in the womb of a child, so you do not know the things of God who fulfill all things” (Ecclesiastes 11:5).
In our faith, where God is with us or the Holy Spirit is working, a large number of people must gather, and there must be success that other people in the world envy, and also fame must follow. From that point of view, Jesus' ministry in Bethesda is a failure. The Holy Spirit departed from him. But for Jesus, it was not worldly success or fame that mattered. He was obeying his father's will. Jesus said:
“My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to complete his work.” (John 4:34)
Jesus' life flowed out of fellowship with Heavenly Father. He lived by listening to his father and submitting to his guidance. As his father led him into the wilderness, he went into the wilderness, and when he led him to a well in Samaria or by the pool of Bethesda, he went there. He went in pain when he wanted his Father to send him to the shameful cross of rough Calvary. This was the rhythm of Jesus' life and his food.
We believe that if we believe in God well, we will always have the good fortune of living in a place of peace, not in the wilderness, and always prosper. We try to hear the word of God through our worldly windows. We expect God to come and light the religious rituals we have created.
But the God Jesus showed through his life was not like that. Our Heavenly Father in heaven does not act according to our expectations. He is the one who moves at his will. For the past two weeks, we have been training to listen to God's word through the 'various windows' through which the living God comes and speaks to us through the 'window of the soul' rather than drawing God into our windows.
We didn't learn how to fulfill our wishes through that window, but we learned how to live according to the rhythm of God's will. You can't say you've mastered it all in two weeks. But we were able to see to some extent our compulsion, our mind, our perversion. From now on, we must continue to train ourselves to live in harmony with God's rhythm as a very diversified 'window of the soul'. You can experience life, meaning, and hope in such a life.
So far our lives have been filled with my life, my needs, my desires, my plans, my hopes, my dreams, my job, my ministry, my rest. We've been living to the rhythm of our ego. There is no life in living according to the rhythm of the ego. A life without life is a dead life. A life of fellowship with the living God takes place when our lives change to a confession of 'Only as you do' rather than 'I'.
God's will begins with opening our closed windows anew. We meet the living God anew through a newly opened window. The incident where Jesus healed a 38-year-old man at the pool of Bethesda was an event that showed the Jews what God they believed in through a new window of soul. The God who revealed Himself through that event was not a God who did nothing on the Sabbath. That God was a God who did anything to save lives, even on the Sabbath. The Jews did not see that God. Jesus wanted to show them that God. So he wanted them to participate in God's work of life.
As a living being, God is not bound by any norm or frame of our thinking, but always goes beyond those categories. God is life.