I mentioned in a recent post how we are often encouraged to find the main idea of a passage of scripture in order to discover its meaning for our lives. That is always good practice. But it is not the only way the Spirit works with scripture.
We are wise to slow down and pay attention to what we especially notice in a story or passage of scripture – this noticing may well be the Spirit inviting our attention. In my own experience it has often been this kind of “off-hand” noticing that speaks to the deeper recesses of my heart.
This kind of experience happened recently in conversation with a friend who mentioned the story, in John 5, of the man who was healed by the Pool of Bethesda. He had been thinking about Jesus’ question to the man, “Do you want to get well?” It seems like an odd question to ask. One explanation is that Jesus wanted the man to think about how his life would change if he was no longer trapped in a begging lifestyle. He would need to take on all kinds of responsibilities that he had not had before. Even though his life was very hard, unable to walk, too slow to get into the healing waters, a healed life would bring its own set of challenges and responsibilities. He would have to find a way to get an income, he would need to buy food and feed himself, perhaps he would need to find new lodging. Healing would bring with it all kinds of challenges, so Jesus asks him to consider the “cost” of being healed.
As my friend was thinking about how this way of hearing Jesus’ question might manifest in his own life, he noticed that his attention was drawn to the seemingly throwaway line in verse 13: “Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.” (v.13). Jesus heals the man and then disappears. The man is left, it would seem, to work out his new life by himself.
How many of us feel like that?
My friend realized that all his thinking about new challenges and responsibilities in his own life was informed by this unstated fear that he would be left alone to deal with them. Jesus had walked away.
This is the Gospel?
This has been a constant theme in my own life with God, that God often seems to have gone away somewhere. God’s absence can feel palpable. It is an all-too-common experience for many of us but it can be exacerbated by a particular understanding of the Gospel that centers completely on Jesus’ work on the cross.
I grew up hearing all about “the Gospel.” We would hear it articulated practically every Sunday. “You are a sinner who cannot save yourself. Jesus came to take the punishment for your sin by dying on the cross. By doing so he sets you free. Believe this and live!” It is not that this is completely wrong, per se, but that it is severely truncated and misses huge swaths of the message and life that Jesus came to bring.
What strikes me about this articulation of the gospel is that it comes off very transactional rather than relational and it leaves out Jesus’ life leading up to the cross entirely. Of course, the cross is central to the Gospel, but in the narration of the Gospel that I often heard, there is no real need to have any kind of relationship with Jesus. He did this thing in the past that saves you. Believe it. Full stop. Everything about his life apart from this work on the cross is filler, at best.
Is it any wonder that the whole notion of having a relationship with Jesus, even a friendship, seems extraneous to “the Gospel” in this way of thinking about it? This is overly simplistic, to be sure, and likely unfair to all the preachers and teachers I had growing up but this was the message that somehow embedded itself in my soul.
An Emmanuel Gospel
I think the same was true for my friend. What stood out in the story in John 5 was that Jesus comes, heals the man and then leaves. He must learn to get along by himself. He can be grateful for the healing, but the living, well, there, he is on his own. One cannot assume that Jesus will be sticking around. Isn’t this what many of us have heard and suspected in the depths of our hearts, that Jesus came to die on the cross, and then he leaves?
I began to realize some years ago that this version of the Gospel was rather bankrupt. Simple to articulate, and effective, I suppose, at presenting the “transaction” in very do-able terms, but it did not speak to the deepest longing of my heart; to be known and loved by God. When one begins to read scripture with a new set of lenses, ones that present God as saying in multiple ways, “I love you. I want to be with you. Let’s live this life together,” a whole new vista emerges. It is Jesus' name after all. Emmanuel. God with us.
The healed man in the story did experience Jesus “disappearing into the crowd” that day (he does speak to him once more) but perhaps he was within earshot a little while later to hear Jesus say, “I will never leave you or forsake you. The Comforter is coming. Wait for him.”
Thanks for reading. Until next Thursday.
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