Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Lenten Devotional 3-11-09

www.HopeandHelpCenter.org
March 11John 5:1-18

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids-blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, 'Do you want to be made well?' The sick man answered him, 'Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.' Jesus said to him, 'Stand up, take your mat and walk.' At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, 'It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.' But he answered them, 'The man who made me well said to me, "Take up your mat and walk." ' They asked him, 'Who is the man who said to you, "Take it up and walk"?' Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there. Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, 'See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.' The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.
Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath. But Jesus answered them, 'My Father is still working, and I also am working.' For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.

Judaism during the time of Jesus was a system of ordering life and religious practice with laws, either written or unwritten. So when Jesus broke Jewish law by doing things like healing a paralyzed man on the Sabbath, he threatened the power of those who possessed the authority to enforce the Jewish way of life as they perceived it. Jesus was a Jew, too, but he taught a new way of redefining God's presence in the world. The Jews in this story felt like they had too much to lose from this new way and, therefore, felt the need to defend their way of life, even if that meant that Jesus had to die.

The rejection of Jesus in this story is a rejection of both the possibility of new ways of knowing God and ordering a life of faith within a religious community. A fundamental difference existed between Jesus views and those of the Jewish leaders with respect to the purpose of a religious community. The Jewish leaders believed that their interpretation of Torah lead them to the task of segregating their religious community from the world, using the laws it proscribed for Israel as a means of social control. They used their sacred texts to that end. Whereas the Jews believed the Torah should be administered externally upon people's lives, Jesus believed that each person should examine their life in the light of Torah...that being faithful should be a matter of the heart, not something externally imposed...that the purpose of a religious community was to facilitate a new birth for its people based on experience of God's unconditional love

How then shall we live in the light of this new perception that Jesus brought to the world? The modern church - and you and me in it - also struggle with a wide range of hot issues. A whole host of self-appointed authorities would gladly interpret these issues on our behalf...if we will only let them. Which is easier for you: to let them or to take that large responsibility yourself? Some of these divisive issues are: who can or can't be ordained? Should a church be governed from the bottom up or the top down? What is the meaning of baptism and the Eucharist and how should they be practiced? Is it acceptable for a church (or the Christians in it) to use the Bible to reject someone on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation?
In my own life, I have chosen to wrestle with these issues for myself, to seek to hear God's voice in answer to my prayers or in the scriptures as I search them or in the voices of people like you and the clergy in the church, both ancient and modern. In some cases where I don't feel qualified to make a decision at this time, I choose not to decide. To answer the question about how we should live now, Jesus is telling us that it is God's availability and presence in Jesus that is the defining mark of a believing community, not the defense of any particular practice. So as not to make the mistake of the Pharisees, I must guard against the tendency to rigidly press my system of beliefs upon others, judging them according to the standards that I create. If I do that, I am rejecting the underlying principle which the words of Jesus continue to teach me after two millennia. The only valid question is: do I love Jesus, God and each person unconditionally? Nothing less will do. cw

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