HOMILY WEEK 04 02 – Year I
On Being Open to the Newness of Faith
(Ezk 47:1-12; Ps 46; Jn 5:1-16)
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In the busyness of preparing for giving presentations at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress one year, I neglected to water the plants before leaving. Upon my return, I was shocked to see our pepper plant languishing and drooping, almost screaming out for water. I rushed to water it and was amazed that in a few hours, the leaves were beginning to lift themselves up. That water was literally life for that plant.
The liturgy today invites us to turn to Jesus as the one true source of living water for us, and to put our faith in him, more so than in devotions, rituals or regulations; to be open to divine action in our lives, to renewal, healing, change, the unknown.
Both the first reading and the psalm focus on life-giving water. Ezekiel describes a stream of water flowing from the sanctuary of the temple that makes everything fresh and provides healing wherever it flows. The psalm proclaims that God is our refuge and strength, and that there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.
Ruins of the pool
The gospel takes us to the pool of Beth-za-tha near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, where healing takes place when the angel of the Lord stirs up the water and those in need of healing enter the water. Actually, excavations near the church of St. Anne have uncovered a healing sanctuary and pool with five porticoes that pilgrims can visit today. Here Jesus comes across a man who for thirty-eight years was hoping for a cure, but unable to enter the water.
What takes place then, in that encounter, is not only dramatic, but also very significant for the church today. First, Jesus asks the man if he wants to be made well. That underlines the risk that healing can involve – letting go of our dependence on others, taking responsibility for our own wellbeing once healed, and finding much needed support for those struggling with addictions in particular. Some people are actually afraid of healing and the change that might bring.
Once the man explains why he has been there so long, Jesus does not send him into the water. He simply speaks words of new life to him: “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” The man was instantly healed, took up his mat, and walked.
There was more going on here than simply a physical healing. First, Jesus replaces the water by simply speaking words of healing – he is that stream of living water flowing from the sanctuary of the temple that makes all things fresh. Second, Jesus heals on the Sabbath, breaking the Sabbath law, a strong sign that he is Lord of the Sabbath, and that the law of love is more important than the laws of institutional religion.
But why would he command the man to take up his mat? In doing so, Jesus was actually asking this man to break the Sabbath law – so now there were two guilty persons in that incident, Jesus and the man who was healed. Is not this scandalous? It certainly was for the Jewish leaders, who asked the man why he was carrying his mat, and when told it was Jesus, began to persecute Jesus, to do violence against him, which of course they justified in the name of the law.
We can speculate on why Jesus made that request. Perhaps it was an indication that there would always be a danger of relapse into old ways of thinking and acting, so carrying his mat would be a reminder to always be vigilant and faithful to prayer. Or perhaps it would give the person healed an opportunity to witness to the healing that he received from Jesus, which is what he did when the leaders asked him why he was carrying his mat.
Perhaps the best answer is Jesus wanted to underline a lesson we have to learn over and over again – that the law of love is more important than rules and regulations; that he is the one who heals and saves, and not us by our own efforts of keeping the law, even if that law is as simple as fastidiously measuring the minutes that we have fasted before receiving communion.
In one gathering, a few persons did not partake of hospitality offered by their hosts, out of fear that they might not be totally faithful to the prescription to fast for one hour before communion. The person in charge of the event tried to assure them that there would be at least an hour, but their fear of breaking the rule kept them from enjoying that hospitality.
Could it be this mentality that Jesus was trying to move us from by ordering the man to pick up his mat and break the Sabbath law? Was he trying to teach us that it is Jesus who saves us, and not we who save ourselves by slavishly keeping rules and regulations? That our liturgies are rituals and not recipes? There had to be a good reason why Jesus would deliberately ask the man to pick up his mat and break the Sabbath laws.
This passage is the first example of overt rejection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. Concern over violation of the Sabbath escalates almost immediately into a resolve to kill Jesus. The Jews make Jesus their enemy because he threatens their power, authority and perception of reality. He would bring change into their carefully ordered lives, symbolized especially by healing on the Sabbath.
Their defence of the Sabbath law is a defence of an entire system of ordering life and religious practice to which they have become not only accustomed, but also addicted. It is the defence of a particular understanding of God and how God belongs in human experience, and of membership in a religious community.
If Jesus would be allowed to redefine God’s presence in the world, they would have too much to lose, so they choose to eliminate Jesus as a threat. The Jewish religious leaders close ranks rather than admit the possibility of a new way. The rejection of Jesus then is the rejection of the possibility of new and unprecedented ways of knowing God and ordering of faith.
It is no accident that Jesus uses a healing miracle as a catalyst for the rejection, as a healing miracle both challenges conventional understanding of how the world is ordered and gives embodiment to new possibilities. The Jews focus on the security of the conventional order, whereas the healed man and Jesus focus on the new possibilities for the man’s new life.
In many ways, Pope Francis is like Jesus in this gospel. He is constantly urging us to go out to the peripheries, to reach out to the marginalized, to go where we would rather not go, to take on the smell of the sheep, and to put the law of love and mercy above the rules and regulations of the Church. Is that not what Jesus did when he was among us?
The most basic human defect of character is insecurity, flowing out of a lack of love in our lives due to being born into a flawed and wounded world. That creates a pervasive fear in many people, and a resistance to change. We become comfortable with the status quo, and uncomfortable with change.
That attitude, although very understandable, can create problems with our faith and hold back the reign of God that Jesus came to establish among us. Can we be open to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit within us? To newness? To change?
The Eucharist is itself a new reality – a transformation of the original Passover meal into a celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the true Lamb of God who alone can take away the sins of the world.
Let us place our complete trust and faith in him as the living water, the stream that makes all things fresh, and follow him into a new life of forgiveness, healing and openness to the Spirit who blows where the Spirit wills.
