Jesus Was an Outlaw

Hands up if you've heard of the movie character Miracle Max.

He's the slightly wacky wizard played by Billy Crystal in the movie The Princess Bride. One of his most memorable lines is, "You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles."

This is a wise saying. But it does not apply to Jesus. Let me explain.

When we hear Bible passages read in church, we often hear them out of context, and thus we don't really get the whole story. I think this is so you'll come back next week for the rest of the story.

This is the case with today's gospel from the fifth chapter of John. The chapter consists of a miracle, its aftermath, and a long discourse by Jesus that explains what has happened. In today's reading, we only get the miracle and nothing else. So I guess I'll have to earn my pay and fill in the rest for you.

The key phrases that give you a hint of what this chapter is going to be about are:

and

In between these two statements, we have the healing of the sick man. And the phrase, "Now that day was a sabbath," alerts us to the fact that this is not just a miracle story, it's a conflict story.

To understand the conflict, we need to remember that for first century Jews after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans (when the gospel of John was written), community identity was a very big deal. For the Jews of that time, strict observance of the Sabbath was a way of maintaining your identity as a Jew and as a member of the Jewish community.

To see why this is so, we must go back to the Torah - the first five books of the Bible - which was the law of the Jewish people. I'm sure you all remember this line from Deuteronomy: "Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you." A modern lawyer might call that a statute - a law that is written down. But how many of you recognize this passage from the Torah, which a lawyer might call "case law":

That's how seriously the Jews took the Sabbath in those days. No soccer games or going to the mall. No going to Home Depot and then working in the garden. No writing term papers or organizing your sock drawer. That kind of thing could get you killed.

So, to borrow a phrase from the Engineering Quad, it's a non-trivial thing for Jesus to have healed this man on the Sabbath and to have instructed him to carry his mat. Remembering Miracle Max's proverb about a rushed miracle man producing a rotten miracle, and remembering that the man had been sick for 38 years, we might well wonder what made Jesus be in such a hurry. I mean, after 38 years, another day wouldn't have mattered, would it? Jesus could have said, "I'll be back by here tomorrow, so look me up then, and we'll see about your affliction - you know, this being the Sabbath and all."

The reaction to Jesus later in this chapter is pretty close to what we read in the Book of Numbers where the man is killed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath - the authorities wanted to kill him. It is a swift and violent reaction. Surely Jesus could have anticipated this and avoided it. A truly irenic person would do that - avoid conflict, not provoke it. What is Jesus up to here? What was the rush all about?

I think what Jesus is up to here is that he is signaling that in him there are going to be new and unprecedented ways of knowing about how God works and who God is. There are going to be some new rules about things and some of those rules that were so critically important in the Torah are now less important.

The literary device of a man who has been sick for 38 years is a powerful image of things that can't be changed. A person paralyzed for that long has no expectation that anything will be different. No one else would have any hope for him either. Tough luck, but that's how things are.

But Jesus burst upon the scene with a message that says things are not going to be the same anymore. Now that the kingdom of God has broken in on the world there's no stopping it, there's no holding it back. It's like an expanding gas that quickly fills up every available space. And even the rules that could get you killed under the old law are subordinate to this new order.

In today's church, what would be the equivalent of Sabbath law to first century Jews? What law that at one time had seemed to be inviolable and basic to our understanding of what it means to be godly people would Jesus set aside in order to do what he did for the man who had been paralyzed for 38 years?

Well, we don't really know. This takes us into treacherous waters where we must adopt an attitude of humility, which is the only really appropriate attitude to adopt when we're conjecturing about the mind of God. But, having made that disclaimer, I'm prepared to offer some possibilities.

There was a time in the Episcopal Church when slavery was endorsed and supported with Bible verses. The same was true about the role of women in the church and of divorced people. It would not take you very long to find any number of Bible verses that support slavery, and the second-class status of women in the church and in society in general, and prohibitions against divorce.

But we have come to understand that the reign of God that Jesus ushers in by his teaching and by his living Spirit among us now will not allow us to continue holding other human beings in bondage nor allow us to accept anything less than the full inclusion of women in every aspect of our church and society. And we have come to see that the mercy of God requires us to offer healing to brokenhearted persons whose marriages have failed even in spite of Jesus' own unambiguous command not to divorce.

There is a sense in which the old laws of the church and society with regard to slavery and the role of women and divorce had the effect of paralyzing some classes of people in ways we now find intolerable.

There is another class of person who is paralyzed by church laws even today. I'm speaking of people who, because of how they were created by God, desire to be in a monogamous committed sexual relationship with a person of their own gender. I am not speaking of gay people who are promiscuous or who use sex as a means to exploit others in order to satisfy themselves. I'm speaking of people who take to heart Jesus' command to love God and love others as God loves us. These people are paralyzed too.

There are at least 120 verses in the Bible that mention the Sabbath and the importance of keeping it holy. Yet Jesus pointedly ignores the Sabbath law and heals the paralyzed man and commands him to carry his mat. There are only a handful of ambiguous Bible references to something that might sound like homosexual acts (one of which involves a gang rape) and none that contemplate committed, monogamous same sex relationships.

What are we to make of this in light of tonight's gospel? Is this gospel a warrant for setting aside those few biblical injunctions against same sex acts in favor of healing and making whole those who are paralyzed by their sexual orientation - an orientation which they did not choose?

The plain truth is that I am not entirely sure. Remember what I said about the necessity of humility when thinking about the mind of God. But I do believe strongly that it would be wrong for us to discount the possibility out of hand that God is working through Jesus in our world to free our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters from the paralysis of church and social traditions that forbid them from becoming complete human beings within the context of faithful, committed relationships with a person of their own gender.

If Jesus could set aside one of the Ten Commandments - a commandment whose violation once involved the death penalty - then surely there must be the possibility that other laws might have to be examined in the light of the new reign of God ushered in by the risen Christ. God continues to work in the world through Jesus and we must cooperate with and participate in that work, even when all our old ideas are challenged in painful ways.

Let us pray for God's grace to help us listen lovingly to one another and to the word of God so that we can discern what the mind of God is about this controversial issue and all the issues that challenge us and threaten our unity and be open to how God might be doing new things in the world even in our own time.