Thirty-eight Years of Neglect
Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
John 5:1-16
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031726.cfm
Jesus’s interpretation of the law is not a form of legalism. Legalism comes from our need for power when it comes to the law. While God created us in God’s image, our fallen state has created our personal gods in our image. We bring our power structures to our gods. Jesus challenged these power structures.
When we see God’s law and the prophets, we interpret it through our eyes of law with all of its legalism and interpretation. For God, sin is not a traffic ticket. Sin is not understood as misdemeanors, felonies, punishments, or technicalities. God’s judgement is not going to stand in front of a judge to receive your sentence. What leads us to sin is a lack of love from others or out of ourselves. We’re accountable to the love we give others. That’s not something we can judge, that’s something that only comes from God. Our lack of love can be driven by the fact that we have not received or experienced love through others or that we’ve not chosen it for ourselves as much as it’s come to us. Sin is symptoms of a virus that can be passed between us and increased through infectious connections between us.
Sin is a symptom of lack of love. It’s the infectiousness of a sneeze. It’s not a purity code where there’s a need for moralistic interpretation of degrees and accounts. The symptoms often also need rehabilitation from the damage caused. Every time we fail to love is a sin and requires recovery. Love of neighbor and love of God is the only Law. God is ultimately the judge of this as we don’t know what’s in each other’s hearts. Plus there is so much institutional and generational sin that we must get to the root of it. Jesus was going after the root.
When you get rid of the virus via the cure, the symptoms go away. A lack of love is removed with love. It may not be instantaneous recovery as there are layers upon layers to it. In the story of the adulterous woman about to be stoned in the gospel, Jesus says that the one without sin cast the first stone. Sin is societal, institutional, and corporate. It exists because each of us contributes to it and lacks in loving one another. This is also why Jesus stresses us making amends with one another. Even the Lord’s prayer says, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We have to have skin in the game. It’s not simply praying for forgiveness, but encountering the ones we’ve wronged directly. We need to make amends. We need to open ourselves to transform through love and to transform others through love.
Today’s gospel is an example of God’s system. The ill man had been waiting by the pool for 38 years with hope for a cure. Who was there to help the man during those 38 years? No one. He was neglected. He remained there for 38 years, unloved and uncared for. He was left there to wallow in his own suffering with the hope that somehow one day someone would help him get into the pool and he would be cured. Who knows if the pool would have actually cured him, but he had hope in it, and no one helped him with it. He was abandoned by our social structures of neglect. He was left alone and needed love.
Jesus saw him and cared for him and ended his suffering. The man no longer needed to be waiting by the pool so Jesus said for him to take up his mat and walk. He no longer needed to be waiting by the pool as his suffering had ended. Jesus was showing the man love, and the people judged Jesus by a technicality of the law. For 38 years, I’m sure some of those people judging Jesus were in the position of helping the ill man by the pool. Or at least, they would have known that that as a place where the neglected sick people gathered who needed their attention and love.
Who in this story was in the position of sin? He who is without sin can cast the first stone. The people looked at the surface level of the law to condemn Jesus when there was something deeper at work with him. Jesus was beyond the technicalities of the law. He was living the spirit and the source behind it. How much of our moralism is a list of technicalities that distract us from God’s source in love? If our interpretation of the law distracts us from the love of God, what good is it? It’s going to take a lot of work for us to recover from what we’ve done and continue to do. We all need work. We need to nurture and take care of each other. Not through condemnation, but through transformative compassionate love.
In Matthew 25, Jesus summarizes God’s judgement as “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.”
Let us stop condemning the symptoms and start working on the source.
