Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

October 14, 2007

Those Who Need Love Most

John 5:1-18

First Century Judaism was a religion that really sought after purity and perfection. The impure, the defective, was rejected. In so many ways, this is very admirable. If you think about what we know and what we read about lambs and sheep that are sacrificed in the temple, we all know that only a pure, unblemished lamb was appropriate for sacrifice. This goes all the way back to the children of Israel when they are in captivity in Egypt and that first Passover when they are instructed to slay a lamb without blemish and take its blood and mark the doorposts so that the angel of death will pass over them and not touch them. Then throughout Israel’s history, the appropriate animals to sacrifice to God are those that are pure, those that are without spot. What would it mean, what value would there be, in sacrificing a sickly, mottled, or someway handicapped lamb to God? What would that really mean? It would be no sacrifice whatsoever to give up a lamb that really had no market value or a lamb that you thought was going to die anyway. What kind of sacrifice would that be to offer that to God?

Throughout Israel’s history, they had begun to have more sacrifices and they would have what they called “first fruit offerings.” Think for a moment of how when you have gone all winter and the only tomatoes in the grocery store are those that are grown in hot houses or in some climate where it gives them the texture of cardboard. When those first tomatoes of the season come in, maybe you see someone on the side of the road selling vegetables. When you taste those first new vine-ripened tomatoes of the season, those are the best.

If you still know someone that has a garden, when the first corn comes in or the first beans, those are always the most perfect, the unspotted, the best. That’s why Jews gave the first fruit offerings. It was always considered the best.

Perhaps that would be another sermon to think about what those things mean about our own offerings to God, but that was an admirable way in which the Jewish people in the First Century sought that which was unblemished and that which was pure and that which was perfect.

There are other ways that are not so positive, some ways in which we find ourselves a little bit mixed in our action. Think about all the stories we read about people who are unclean. We live in a world that seems to be fairly impure, a world where everything seems to be sully. No matter how good it may be, something comes along and seems to want to taint it. It is appealing to us to think that the people might actually stay clean. That there might be people, places, and things that are not touched in some way to make them unclean. But when we read the Gospels and we find out how some people are treated because they are thought to be unclean, we find ourselves not being able to go along with it all the way.

There are some ways in which the First Century Jewish preoccupation with the pure and the perfect just seems downright wrong to us. When you begin to look at how things that are imperfect, things that are blemished, and things that are handicapped are rejected, we find ourselves feeling a distance from that mindset.

If you think about all the stories we read in the New Testament where someone either by accident or someone by birth or someone by illness or someone whose body is incomplete and how they are pushed away, how they are not wanted, not included, it’s not a good thing.

Think about the stories we read where Jesus encounters individuals with leprosy. There was one where the man with leprosy approaches Jesus and he says, “If you will,” not “If you can,” “If you will, you can make me clean.” Mark says that Jesus shuttered within himself, a demonstration of emotion. This man doesn’t doubt Jesus’ ability; he doubts whether anybody would love him enough, whether anybody would accept him enough, to heal him.

There is the story of the Ethiopian eunuch whose bodily imperfection keeps him from worshipping in the temple. There are individuals such as the man with the withered arm, and we have the story in John 5 of the man who has been lame for 38 years. These people are unwanted and unaccepted in the community or worship. Read the New Testament and you will not find anybody in this circumstance in the temple. They are barred. They are not allowed in.

This is the scene in John 5. It says that Jesus comes to the sheep pool Bethesda. In today’s world, Bethesda is inside the walls of Jerusalem that were established in the 15th Century. In the time of Jesus, the pool was outside the city walls. It was right outside the city walls and right outside where the temple stood. People who were at the Pool of Bethesda could see the temple and it is called the sheep pool because this is where they brought the sheep who were going to be sold in the temple and they bathed them here in this pool. Nice pool, isn’t it? Sheep are always really attractive from a distance, but when you get close to them, they are not the most attractive animals. They do smell and their wool does want to catch an awful lot of dirt.

So here is the pool where they bring the sheep to wash them before they can take them into the temple. This is the place where the people in Jerusalem and the people who have come to Jerusalem, the people who somewhere want to approach the presence of God because of the need in their lives, this is where all these people are relegated. “You can’t come in the walls. You go over here to the pool where they bathe sheep.” What is it that we just said a little bit ago? This is where the people who are blind and people who have a number of disabilities, the lame and the paralyzed are all sent. “You can’t come in and worship. Go where they bathe the sheep and stay outside the wall.”

To make this scene even more tragic, there is a footnote in most translations and one that we kind of read into the text, whether it’s read aloud or not, that there was a tradition, a belief, that the angel would come and stir the waters. The first person into the water, after the water was stirred, was the person who would be healed.

Think about what this scene would be like for just a minute. An angel comes. Maybe it happened. Maybe the wind blew. Maybe just somebody in the crowd who liked a practical joke said, “There’s the angel,” and everybody jumps in. Your momentum starts that way and you can’t stop yourself even though you realize that you are not going to be the first, the second, the third, the fifth or the tenth in. Soon you have a whole group of people who have come into the water. These are people who are in desperate straits, trying earnestly, honestly, with all their hearts to be better. Surely, not all of them can pull themselves out of it. You can just imagine after they have gone in on top of each other, sputtering and trying to climb back out, they are already disabled in some way. This is not easy.

Imagine for just a moment that I said, “We have found a cure for arthritis, and we are going to line up out front outside the church. The first person to run down to Broad Street will be the person who gets the cure for arthritis.” The first person down the street is going to be the person who needs it the least. The person who is last down the street will probably be the person who is most hobbled by that pain. The first person in isn’t the person who needs it. The person who is most in need is going to be last.

Imagine I said, “We have a cure for all your eye problems. The first person to thread a needle gets the cure.” Well, who threads the needle first? It’s not the person with the worst eyesight. It’s the person with the best. So what a cruel tradition this is. So we find ourselves here with these people, relegated to the sheep pool, outside the gate because they are not wanted. The people who need help the most are the ones who are always seemingly the fartherest away from it.

But Jesus, true to our picture, our image, and our hope, comes outside the wall. Jesus comes out of Jerusalem to the place where the people who are unclean, imperfect, and unwanted are. He comes to this place and he brings God’s presence to everyone there.

You can tell how much these people wanted this because where does Jesus find the man after he has healed him? For 38 years, he has been there. You can imagine for some time, maybe a family member, maybe a friend, maybe someone was by him for a while saying, “I’ll help you into the pool if the waters are ever stirred,” but after 38 years, any help is gone.

“Do you want to be well?”

“I don’t have anybody to help me.”

Those people are long gone, the people who were going to stand by him. You can tell that he wanted the presence of God because when Jesus encounters him later, he is in the temple, a place that he has looked at for 38 years, the place he has wanted to be for 38 years, longing for the presence of God. When Jesus heals him, he gets up and he goes there. He doesn’t even realize that Jesus has brought the presence of God to him, where he was.

So we read this story and we see that the people who have needed God the most have been rejected. The people who needed healing the most were last in line to get it. It reminds me of a line of a professor in college. I don’t remember much of anything else this man taught, but I have always remembered this. He said, “Those who need love the most are least likely to get it.”

We have all experienced this. We have all experienced that person, that family member, friend, schoolmate, someone who is so needy in their life that they cling to you in such a way that you almost can’t stand it. In their need for acceptance, their need to be loved, they just hold on to you so tightly that you finally just have to push back. You just push back, and when you push back, they find themselves feeling rejected and the person who needed love so desperately was the least likely person to get it.

Think of someone who has experienced a divorce and the divorce was so devastating that a simple cup of coffee turns into a therapy session every time and, finally, friends and co-workers and family members just avoid that person because they feel too drained. The person who needs love the most is least likely to get it.

Think of someone in poverty, someone who doesn’t smell all that attractive and the person who needs someone to care about them but we are just kind of disgusted and shove them away.

Think of a person with mental illness who acts a way that frightens us or puts us off. So we just avoid and ignore. The people who need love the most. . . Have you experienced this in your life? The people who need love the most are the least likely ones to get it.

So that story in John 5, Jesus here at the sheep pool, by the Pool of Bethesda, has a two-pronged message. It is a message to any of us that ever feel unloved or unwanted that there is nowhere that is outside the realm of God’s love, that even though we may artificially draw boundaries and we may artificially put up a wall or a circle and say, “This is where the love of God ends,” Jesus goes outside of that boundary to find the people who need love, the people who are the least likely to get it and brings that love to them. Whatever we might feel kind of puts us outside the pail. We come to church and we think, “Gee, I hope nobody really knows what I am like or they would never let me in this place. Gee, I hope nobody really finds out what I thought or what I have done or my past because nobody would let me come into church and worship if they really knew what I was like.” There are no boundaries like that because Jesus is walking outside. When he comes, he brings the presence of God with him to wherever we are. Prong one.

Prong two. That the people of God are to love all people, and that we are to especially notice, care about, minister to, and give ourselves to the people who feel the greatest need in their lives for love.

Everybody loves a puppy. Everybody loves a kitten. Everybody loves a baby whose nose has been wiped and whose diaper has been changed. But that’s not who we are called only to love. We are called to love the people who put us off. We are called to love the people who would cling to us and sometimes bother us. We are called to love the people in this world who need the presence with a great, great intensity. Would we nullify, would we negate, would we take away the love of God who would come outside the wall to us and not do the same for someone else?

Those who need love the most, and you can probably put someone in your mind’s eye, are the least likely to get it, aren’t they? But let us say that they are the least likely to get it someplace else, for we commit ourselves to the task of loving all people everywhere, no matter how much they put us off, no matter how unattractive they might be, because God has loved us. We love because he first loved us. Amen.

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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