This is a linch-pin question, isn't it? The poor man has been sitting here thirty-eight years. No one will help him. It's a dog-eat-dog world. He seems to be a victim of this world. Why does Jesus say, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you"? The answer to this question appears when we consider that for thirty-eight years, he's been sitting in the temple of a pagan god. But let us set aside this question, to be returned to later, because there is a very great thing before us, and we cannot hope to understand the Advent of God until we come to terms with this very great thing.
St. John's Gospel stands out for several reasons. Yes, it is the theological norm for the Orthodox confession of faith. But the writings of St. John are extraordinary because they posit from the outset that Jesus of Nazareth is God. He is our Creator. He is our Incarnate Lord. He is the Savior of the world. And the Evangelist gets right down to business constructing a paideia which will train us in right belief.
From the first words of his Gospel, which re-writes the first chapter of Genesis, to the end of the age and Final Battle which closes the Book of Revelation, St. John sets out a history of the world which is like no other. It as if the other three Gospels are on a different subject.
But before pausing in the fifth chapter, where we meet the paralytic and the temple to Aesclepius, let us set the general context. St. John's Gospel, Letters, and the Book of Revelation are about the struggle between false religion and true. This is what John means with the word Savior: Jesus is the One who will lead us back into relationship with God. Meantime, no one has any hope of relationship with God in the first-century Levant, least of all this confused man, who doesn't know which end is up. Indeed, this is the proximate reason for the Incarnation.
Do we really believe that St. John depicts Jesus as the Lamb of God as a reference to blood painted over door lintels in Egypt? John the Baptist purified through baptism. He received many thousands of people covered in sin. What stood out when he saw Jesus was His purity. He was the Pure One, the Unblemished Lamb, the One Who was without sin (extraordinary!). He could only have come from God.
The Lamb we meet in the Book of Revelation is no passive blood sacrifice, to be set aside after it is used, but a heroic, epic Warrior Who defeats the great dragon, Babylon. And what does Babylon signify if it does not signify false religion, even apostasy, and especially in the form of idolatry.
You have heard me argue for years now that this what the Incarnate Lord faces: idolatry (especially in the Zion Temple) on the one hand and lost relationship with God on other. This is what is meant by "Lost Tribes."
The world Jesus entered at His human birth was the scene of Babylon's final triumph. Assyria (Babylon) had conquered the Kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C. imposing the cult of Marduk on the vanquished and now lost tribes. Babylon and then Persia had conquered the Kingdom of Judah in 587 B.C., carrying their elite to Babylon and then indoctrinating them for three generations. Nobody could remember anything but Babylon. When the Persians returned them to Jerusalem in 539, they functioned as agents of Persia founding a hybrid religion and including worship of Marduk, cleverly grafted into Israelite religion.
No more would it be permitted to say or write YHWH. God's Name would be outlawed in Judah, to be replaced with elohim and adonai — ambiguous Hebrew terms meaning simply "my lord." Now, this would have been amenable to the Persians, who addressed their own god Marduk as "bel" which means the same thing: "my lord." Elohim, for example, was used in the Book of Exodus to refer to Egypt's gods.
This Persian hybrid religion did not, however, exert much influence beyond the temple until the Hasmonean dynasty just before Jesus's birth. In its war against the Romans, the Hasmoneans had whipped up a fierce nationalism, and their hybrid religion called Judah-ism (named for the locale) would be a key unifying feature.
Following the war, the Romans quickly saw the value of Judah-ism: a civil religion regulating conduct of life — banning murder, robbery, adultery, atheism. All the divisive features of life are banned. And they cooperated in the construction of synagogues which promoted this Judean cult.
The religion of the Patriarchs seemed doomed. Soon no vestige of the religion of Abraham — a religion not of laws and blood-sacrifice but of relationship with God — would be seen on the earth. It was in this timeframe that God chose to enter the human story as a character in the story: Jesus of Nazareth. And it is in this perspective that John the Evangelist constructed his paideia, explaining the ways of God to men (Milton).
Let us set the context for our Gospel lesson:
Chapter 3:
Jesus divine status is attested by a member of the Sanhedrin,
Nicodemus,
saying,
"we know that You are .... come from God" (Jn 3:2).
John the Baptist also testifies to Jesus divinity.
The chapter concludes decisively:
His stay in Shechem concludes with the whole city being in one accord:
In other words,
in Shechem,
surrounded by the Patriarchs, as it were,
Jesus commissions the first evangelists
and
sets the religion of God back on its proper footing.
St. Photini says "He told me everything that I ever did" (Jn 4:29).
That is,
religion is about intimate relationship with God.
If you never go to confession,
and
you have never set out your life and all of its shames before God
and His appointed priest,
you are not in it.
Unless you have wept in humiliation
(and this is the purpose of confessing to another person),
you cannot know the joyful relief of being forgiven.
You cannot truly know the love of God,
and
the courage to admit your shames and to leave behind a life leading to eternal death.
Our religion is about intimate relationship with God.
Jesus
offers
living water flowing up unto everlasting life (Jn 4:14).
And He instills the same religion in the citizens of Israel's
ancient capital city.
"We no longer believe just because of what you said,"
St. Photini.
"Now we have heard for ourselves" (Jn 4:42).
And you can be sure that Jesus has spoken their lives into each individual person.
The chapter closes with His return to Cana
where He
reveals His divinity
a second time
showing Himself to be the Victor even over death
(Jn 4:49-54).
No minced words here.
"The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand.
He who believes in the Son has everlasting life;
and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life,
but the wrath of God abides on him."
(Jn 3:35-36)
You worship what you do not know ....
(Jn 4:22)
".... for we ourselves have heard Him, and we know that
this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world."
(Jn 4:42)
From the perspective of the Mediterranean sea, the Levant, and especially Judah, was the gateway to the East — to Arabia and thence to Asia. It thus had been continuously occupied since the sixth century B.C. by great empires in succession: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Alexander the Great and Hellenism (transforming the culture of the whole area), the ultra-nationalist Hasmoneans, and the Romans. The Israelites were imbued with their cultures and practiced their religions .... by force in the case of their Mesopotamian masters, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. As a consequence the Ten Tribes of the northern Kingdom of Israel vanished through this process of acculturation and through intermarriage. The Tribes of the Kingdom of Judah (Judah and Benjamin) were profoundly changed, especially as regards their religion.
The century before Jesus birth saw the rise of the hybrid religion, Judah-ism. For centuries its influence scarcely extended beyond the Persian-built temple, which was its birthplace. But the Hasmoneans fiercely promoted it, demanding adherence by every Israelite. The Jews led by their high priest John Hyrcanus journeyed to the North and destroyed the ancient temple on Mount Moriah. I should add, though they forced all in the Levant to come to Jerusalem to the feasts (and taxes them), it is one thing to enforce outward adherence and another thing entirely to enforce religious belief. And we should imagine the deep resentment toward them always bubbling just below the surface of the Gospels.
By the time Herod the Great was installed as Rome's client king (following the fall of the Hasmonean empire), this adherence to a religion of laws seemed like sound policy to the Roman (as I have said).
But the Romans, like the Hellenists, did not force their religion on anyone. They themselves worshipped at many altars venerating many gods. Standing on the Areopagus in Athens, St. Paul famously found an altar where Christianity could take its place among the pagans, inscribed "TO AN UNKNOWN GOD" (Acts 17:23).
In this respect, the world into which Jesus was born was culturally pluralistic with many religions living side-by-side — that is, except one. The religion of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been outlawed in Judah. Angels were not to be spoken of. Mention of the afterlife was banned, much less talk of Heaven or the Bosom of Abraham. And, as I have, God's Name, YHWH, was not to written or said. It was into this world that the Son of God, the Son of the abandoned God, stepped on a Saturday afternoon two thousand years ago.
He stepped into an Aesclepion.
The elaborate structure,
having five porticoes,
was a place where people came to be healed.
They were built throughout the Roman Empire.
A picture on one constructed on the Greek Isle of Kos
appears with this reflection.
We might think of them as spas or health clinics,
and they were,
but they were also temples to Aesclepius,
the Greek god of medicine.
As I say, the first-century was an example of syncretism, a fusion of several religions. And certainly this was the case on the afternoon Jesus visited the Asclepion. People of many backgrounds were present believing many things. I suppose they were much the same as us with our talk of karma, yoga, reincarnation, and invented Christianity. No doubt, they vaguely believed in the god Aesclepius but also that an angel was somehow involved in the mix .... as if an angel of God would stir waters in order to set into motion a frenzied and vicious dog fight.
In the midst of this, Jesus picks out a man who has vainly sought help from this imagined angel for the past thirty-eight years. He is paralyzed, we are told.
But isn't he a bit like Americans of the twenty-first century? He doesn't know what to believe. And he doesn't know who to believe. Attendence in Christian churches is famously plummeting. People are making their own rules for morality and (as I have said) inventing Christianity as they go along. The man's paralysis goes far beyond his powerless limbs. And in this isn't he an image of us as we wither and die and go to hell.
He has devoted himself to a Greek god who does not exist. He has committed his faith to an angel who is the product of local superstition. And his own Jewish temple, where he has sought the God of Abraham, is a Persian confection. The religion of the Patriarchs had emphasized personal virtue and purity as an acceptable sacrifice to God, but the paralyzed man is surrounded by the mentality of the dog pack.
Jesus presents us with another version of this in His Parable of the Good Samaritan. It is virtue which turns out to be the acceptable sacrifice offered before God. This is opposed to the Levite and the Priest who will not draw near a corpse nor to blood lest they become ritually unclean and find themselves unable to offer animal sacrifice at the altar.
He has been in this sad state for decades, invalid and abandoned — with the God Whom he seeks and needs virtually banished. My brothers and sisters, we are living in a culture that is on verge of banishing the Bible and has already in large part has banished God.
This man is the image of paralyzed Israel: hopeless, helpless, powerless, held in thrall not for decades, but for centuries. Then on a day, this everyman looks up, and standing before him, in the form of a most gracious Man, is God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This God-man will stand in the midst of the counterfeit temple, literally overturning the worship of Marduk in riotous fashion, declaring He will tear down seemingly immovable massive stones. Of course, they laugh. They did not laugh in 70 A.D. when He did so.
He stands amongst the living dead, who languish under the tyranny of a regime that has exiled God and "crie[s] with a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come forth!'" (Jn 11:43).
We do not have time to review the whole of St. John's Gospel, much less all of his writings. But the theme is established.
From the opening of his Gospel to the battle with Babylon in the Book of Revelation, the main subject is false religion and the appearance of God in a world where He has been outlawed and banished. The Evangelist depicts Him as the Warrior YHWH, bringing the whole universe into being with the Breath of His Mouth, shattering the Zion temple and all of Jerusalem with a pronounced sentence of destruction, and showing Himself to be Victor even over Death .... not once but three times.
He is no pathetic lamb born into the world to die so that our door lintels might be daubed with His blood.
I recall as an Episcopal priest (before I went to the Roman Communion) sitting in the Church of the Advent in Boston (a large Anglo-Catholic congregation), and hearing the priest say piously on the Feast of the Nativity, "Here is the babe that was born to die." I wanted to stand up and call out, "That man is liar! Jesus does not save us with His death. He save us with His life!"
Declared boldly,
soaring far above "the Passover of the Jews" (at the Evangelist John would say),
is the King,
is the Epic Warrior,
is God Incarnate,
Who sweeps aside the imagination of our hearts,
Who shows the strength of His arm,
Who overturns the mighty from their thrones,
and
Who scatters the proud and their vain beliefs.
He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and
He stands before us
in His Royal Splendor,
evincing Unimaginable Power,
and
offering to us Divine Friendship .... if we will but requite His Almighty love.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.