Road Trippin With Rachael

For anyone who has ever worked a job in customer service, you know that there are always times when the rules are bent. They aren’t broken, but there is always room to exercise judgment. Sometimes said judgment is questioned, but at the end of the day (as long as you do not do anything that would be considered illegal) you are free to bend the rules. The trick is to know what rules can be bent and by whom.

Any system that is used always has backdoors for getting things accomplished. For example, while I was working in higher ed, we were supposed to have everything go through the CRM, but a select few of us (yours truly) had the ability to go into the school’s mainframe and manually enter data. Now, IT didn’t like me doing this because it might slow something down later; however, when I had a student sitting in my office waiting to enroll in classes, they had to be taken care of in that moment, not wait the 24 hours to have a the program run its course.

In John chapter 5, we see this same scenario play out with Jesus and him healing a man. The problem was not that he healed someone, it was that he healed on the Sabbath. As we work through the chapter, we will see three directives regarding our interactions with God.

Go to the Living Water

Water is special.

The human body needs it to survive even more than food. Animals need it to survive. It is the first sign scientists look for to prove that life is possible. It serves as a place where we can store food or gather food -things like fish, mussels, seaweed, and other forms of aquatic life. like shellfish.

Water is also used for medicinal purposes. People use water for exercise, giving birth, therapy, and for healing. And that is in the modern sense. If we go back in time, we will see other ways that water has been used for healing. In England there is Bath, Scotland has faerie pools, and let’s not forget the most famous form of water medicine – the Fountain of Youth.

When we look to John 5, we are introduced to a man who had been trying to get well for thirty-eight years. He had been at this place of healing, trying to take care of himself, but was never able to make it to the water.

And then Jesus….

We previously looked at John 4, where Jesus called himself the Living Water. Living water means that it is moving water. This means that there isn’t stuff like alge or other forms of nastiness growing in it – it isn’t stagnant. There can be life in living water. Instead of chasing after the pool in Bethesda, Jesus offers this man life, and he accepts. This man had the opportunity to accept the water, the life, that was being offered to him. He took it and ran with it.

Pick Up Your Mat

The next directive that we see is that Jesus tells the man to get up and walker (John 5:11). Although this man did not know the name of the man that gave him this directive, he still followed what he was told. He got up and walked.

Credit always deserves to be given where credit is due. this man didn’t have a big Gospel presentation given to him; he didn’t know the ABCs of becoming a Christian; and he didn’t have someone who was inviting him to come to all the different activities that the local church hosted – actually because he was crippled, he wasn’t able to go to the temple to worship. However, in faith, this man follows the directive that was given by the Son of God – he got up, picked up his mat, and walked.

We can all learn something from this, both for ourselves, and when it comes to sharing. For ourselves, we need to be obedient. When we believe that God is calling us to do something specific, we need to immediately find a way to work towards it. We shouldn’t be messing around trying to see what we can do to get out of answering God’s calling. When we read in scripture that God calls all Christians to do specific things – like share the Gospel, give, and love one another – we should do it. The other part of this is that we should be sharing. Once the man knew who it was that had healed him he immediately went to share.

Now, he did go to the religion leaders of the day – who didn’t like Jesus at this point. It was pretty obvious that there had been something miraculous that happened for him to be up and walking around. Did this eventually lead to problems for Jesus? Yes. Are we going to blame this man for telling the religious leaders (those who should have been supportive excited for what God had done) to share what happened? No. This man set an example of how, in excitement, he was 1) obedient, and 2) ready to tell others about what had happened.

Isn’t that what we should be though if we are claiming Christ – obedient to him and what he is calling us to do, both as Christians and individually? Not only are we called to be obedient, but also to be excited about telling others of what God has done.

Remember the Sabbath

There is a lot that is tied up with Sabbath. There are some who believe that we need to set aside a physical day to do no work; others believe that this has to be Sunday; still others believe that it is to be on Saturday. Yet, there are others who believe that it can be any day or time that we remember that we are supposed to be relying on God to meet our needs.

I happen to fall in the fourth category. It can be any day, but the purpose of Sabbath is that we remember that God is the one who sustains us, that they we are to be reliant on him. I do not think that is matters what physical day you choose to remember Sabbath – actually, I think we should be in a continuous attitude of it. I think this is what Jesus was getting at.

When we look to the second half of Chapter 5, and even a bit before, we see that an issue appeared because the man who has been healed was healed on the Sabbath. Why is this an important detail? If we go back post-Babylonian captivity, when people were returning to the land, collectively they began to put religious laws in place that eventually lead to a VERY legalistic and fundamentalist view of religion. This came from a good place, but it veered off the path. By the time we are in the life of Jesus, Judaism as the people knew it looked extremely different from what it looked like during the time of Moses or King David. It was like an onion that had layer upon layer upon layer to the point of the religion leaders defining work. This man picking up his mat had worked on the Sabbath, and Jesus having healed him on the Sabbath had also worked. This was the moment that the Jewish leaders determined that they were going to need to do something about Jesus.

And yet, Jesus takes everything in stride, and as is typical of Jesus, he begins to teach.

Truly I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life  and will not come under judgment but has passed from death to life. – John 5:24 (CSB)

It isn’t about the things that you do, but it is about the relationship that you as an individual have with God. Jesus was here fulfilling the will of God. He was here to reach out to the people of Abraham and show them what a right relationship with God was to look like, and to share with them the heart of the Law. God did not give it to the people because he wanted them to go through the motions and have not connection to God. He gave it to them, so they would know that they were a people who had been set apart by him, who were called to love God and in loving him they want to be different from the world that is around them.

Final Thoughts

We are called to respond in specific ways to God. He tells us that he is the living water, and by drinking it and steeped in it we are going to have life. We’re given directives to be excited about what God has done in our lives and what he has done and what he is doing. Finally, we are called to remember that we are reliant on God and it isn’t a once a week deal – it’s a daily remembrance of what God has done, is doing in our lives, and