“Time and space make way for love.” — St. Nikolai Velimirovich’s Prayers by the Lake XV
The Third Sign in John’s Gospel is all about time, beginning with the special time of the Sabbath, and ending with Jesus blending past, present, and future into one. Yes, it’s kind of mindblowing, and may be troubling to those who don’t like their world shaken up.
In the beginning of the Hebrew scriptures, time is organized. Even an advent calendar shows this underlying organization as it jumbles up the days so you have to search for which window to open. And the Hebrew organization of time is special.
All humans can see how the sun establishes day and night, the moon establishes months, and the seasons establish years. But the week isn’t tied to any of these. Its seven days are tied to the action of God, creating all this in six days and resting on the seventh. The Sabbath is a holy time set apart, in the same way that the Temple was a holy space set apart, by the words of God himself.
This third sign takes place at this special time and in a special – well, weird — kind of holy space. It was a pseudo-temple named Bethesda that you can still see today. It looks like a Roman temple of healing (an asclepion), being built around a sort of spa-like pool. But Bethesda was not dedicated to a foreign god or presided over by a priest. It had a folk religion around it, that the waters would roil when stirred by God’s angel, and the first person in the waters when this happened would be healed.
Apparently only the first would be healed, and everyone else was out of luck. This miraculous place had a strange “survival-of-the-fittest” feel to it. I imagine there were some sharp elbows and curses interjected once those waters started to move.
“The blind, the lame, and the withered” (John 5:3 DBH) huddled around the waters for a chance to be made whole. It was like a waiting room at a hospital, with long waits and quiet suffering, the only certainty being uncertainty.
John tells us of a man waited 38 years. Jesus sees him and asks him if he wants to be well, and his answer – well, it’s not “no,” but it’s not “yes,” either. Jesus makes the man take a stand, quite literally, with a three-part command: “Arise, take up your pallet, and walk.” (John 5:8)
The man obeyed. Only at this point does John let us know a crucial missing detail – it was the Sabbath (John 5:9). The very first thing God did after creating the heavens and the earth was to bless the Sabbath as a day of rest (Genesis 2:3). God ordered space over six days, and on the seventh he ordered time. Israel’s identity in proclaiming God as Creator of all was to follow God in his act of rest.
The thinkers who decided the limits of God’s Sabbath blessing, these people had agreed that the act of picking up a pallet was too much work for the Sabbath. One of them pointed this out to the man before he could even leave the poolside. Later they found Jesus and put him through a sort of informal trial for teaching someone else to break the Sabbath.
This trial is all about time. It starts with whether it was the right time for Jesus to heal the man’s broken body, and as it proceeds, Jesus makes claims about the past and the future that also involve time. Just as the angel agitated the water, Jesus agitates their understanding of God and of time. If they want to be well, they can all be healed. But do they want that?
Jesus doesn’t back down from this legal dispute, and as it unfolds, his words get bigger and bigger. He worked on the Sabbath not because of disobedience, but because of his obedience as a son: “My Father is working right up to the present, and I am working too.” (John 5:17) This is where it’s clear that he came to his own, and his own received him not. Instead of receiving him, they planned how to silence him, permanently.
The Father’s work including raising the dead in the last days (John 5:21), and Jesus says he brought this future action into the present. “An hour is coming – and now is” when Jesus’s voice will raise the dead (5:25), and judge the dead (5:27). This is the Messiah’s job description – to be both King and Judge, making things right.
Jesus continues to agitate time itself, mixing past, present, and future together like a roiling spring of water. The future resurrection of the dead is mixed with the past testimony of John and of the Father. The future status of Messiah as judge is given as a reason why the past commands requiring Sabbath rest don’t apply to Jesus – as well as the reason that the Father is always as work, in every present moment.
This can make your head spin, as it made theirs. The question is not, “Can I understand this? Can I grasp this?” In fact, grasping it all is precisely what the Judeans tried and failed to do. They thought they could “take hold of” eternal life by searching through the Scriptures, to grasp it, to possess it. But eternal life is staring them in the face, and instead of following him, they want to destroy him.
The prime piece of evidence is in the present tense: a man is walking around, healed. The prosecution has quite forgotten about him by this time. Jesus says, “You’ve quite forgotten about what God wants, too.”
Jesus knows God wanted that man to be whole more than God wanted him to be rested. The Father that Jesus testifies to, the same Father who made the world, and who led Israel through the wilderness, this is the Father that Jesus is saying, to paraphrase: “not my will, but His will be done.” (see John 5:30) This is the key question: what does God want, right now?
God wants the same thing that He’s always wanted, as every word of the Scriptures testifies, and what God wants is summarized and shown in Jesus. God wanted to dwell among his people, so Moses wrote about the tabernacle, but Moses was also writing about God’s dwelling place in Christ (5:46).
The fascinating thing about the tabernacle narrative is that Moses also collapses time like Jesus does in John 5. Both seem to be working with a sacred, “nonlinear time.” “Beginning in Exodus 25 the restless advance of chronological time slows to a halt and even, in some places, flows backward.” One example of this is how the dedication of the tabernacle is described twice with no real explanation of how Exodus 40 “flashes forward” to Leviticus 9. I don’t understand this or intend to grasp it, but I just note that science says we live in a cosmos where time is relative – so something like this seems possible with God.
Moses was writing about the eternal God dwelling with us, in a structure made by human hands, a power great enough to distort time and space, like a black hole can. But that tabernacle was itself a sign, pointing beyond itself to the one who made the cedars, metals, and dyes that the craftsmen built the temple from. All of their work was a gift to give back to the one who made them. That work continued and was fulfilled in the work of Jesus – yes, even on the day of rest, because He is Lord of all seven days of the week.
Beginning quote from Father Stephen Freeman’s blog:
Time quote from P.10 That I May Dwell Among Them by Gary Anderson quoting William Propp.
Image credit: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/chukchi_oli_2018169_lrg_0.jpg
