Our gospel today is complex and even confusing, almost convoluted. However, not simply allowing it to wash over us, but rather trying to attend to it can bring us into deeper relationship with the One God from which the text, and all our lives depend.
Our text is classic John – both in its complexity and movement back and forth on itself, but also with statements where Jesus identifies himself, implicitly and explicitly, as equal to God. This of course is why “the Jews” are seeking to kill him. Two thousand years later, raised in a church where we know Jesus, Christ as God robs us from the absolute horror and blasphemy this idea represented to “the Jews”.
But we need to be careful here, because whomever, whatever social grouping the author of John is referring to when he writes, “the Jews”, he is not referring to, cannot be referring to, the culturally and religiously identified Jewish people today.
Judaism as we know it today, developed slowly within the first two centuries of the common era, just as Christianity did. John did not know this future Jewish community.
As well as being careful in our identification, to really enter the mystery of our Gospel we need some context.
At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus goes up to Jerusalem to attend one of the festivals, one of the Jewish festivals, a festival of his native and family culture. So, all we hear today comes from this – Jesus has situated himself at the heart of Jewish land, at the heart of Jewish religious-cultural practice and life. He chooses to operate from there, to bring his message to the heart of the establishment of the day – not to attack from outside, but, in modern terms, to bring about change from within.
How he enters the city is really significant, and shows his mission of change, his mission of sharing the love of the One God, through and as his person. He enters the city through the Sheep Gate, the gate through which lambs were led, led up to the temple for sacrifice – Christ, the Lamb of God entering Jerusalem for his own sacrifice.
Near this gate was a pool famous for its healing properties. Naturally then, it attracted those who were sick, lame, paralysed – the ‘unclean’, the abused, the neglected and the shunned of society. People looking for any ray of hope in their suffering.
Ordinary people, sensible people, automatically avoided the pool and the unclean outcasts it attracted. Jesus, of course, goes directly to the pool and there encounters a man, who has been unwell his whole life, some 38 years. Hearing this, Jesus is moved by compassion and heals him.
This healing, however, this transgressing of social conventions, this entry of the son of God through the Gate of Sheep, this all occurs on the Sabbath. This is the Jewish day of rest, the day where no work is to be performed, when all is to be dedicated to God. So, in the verse just before where we start today, we hear:
“16 Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath.”
And then we start with our text: “17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” ”
Sabbath and work, rest and action, stillness and activity – this is the binary set-up, these are the seemingly irreconcilable pair of opposites that the religion of the day sought to uphold. This was the spiritual reality of the Jerusalem Temple, the established understanding of God and God’s universe of the day. And Jesus, the one who collapses all binaries, heaven and earth, outsider and insider, clean and unclean – he literally walks and works through it.
We need to be clear; the Sabbath as a day where work is forbidden was, and is, a human convention, but a human convention in faithful and dedicated response to what was seen as God’s will, revealed in the Law given to the People by God through Moses. The keeping of Sabbath, the motivation behind it, was holy. Completely holy.
And … and … Jesus nonetheless says …
“My Father is still working, and I also am working.”
God is still active. God is still love, and God is still loving and nothing can stop that love.
In the human sphere, and in modern parlance, Jesus with his body, with his healing, with his work is showing practically and so clearly, that ‘People are more important than processes’. The spirit is more important than the letter.
And just as Christ, fully divine and fully human, was the one to disrupt and disorder the status quo to bring the healing of God and restoration to the lost, so too we, as human and as images of God, so too we are also called to disrupt and disorder those processes, those ideas that place rules above people, ideology above life. In our lives, in our families, our community, our church and in our world.
In the cosmic sphere, Jesus is also saying, the work of God continues, abides and remains. At this particular moment, right here, and right now, and at each and every moment, God, the uncreated creator of all creation, holds us all in Her love and embrace, bringing and maintaining all things and all people in creation and being.
The work of God continues, the work of the Son continues, the work of His Body, as our bodies, and as our church, also continues, even when it disrupts and breaks the rules. Even when it breaks the Sabbath.
The Sabbath in the Jewish culture of the time was not just associated with ‘rest’, the literal meaning of word. It was also associated with darkness, endings and fallowness, the still point from which the new week, a new beginning will emerge. And so, for us, in the midst of our deep Lenten journey, our Gospel, our Saviour is speaking directly to us. Even in the dark, even in the wilderness, even when all the stars have fallen and all has gone, even there, God is active, God is working with us and for us.
And because we enter this darkness willingly and knowingly, because we choose to enter the Lenten-wilderness Road to Jerusalem with Jesus, because like him we consciously enter that place beyond all time and space where death is inevitable, we become part of the journey, part of the mystery. We participate with God, and in our walk, in our work, today and every day, God is still working, Christ is still working.
In his Name, Amen.