Beeson podcast, Episode 442 Laura A. Smit April 30, 2019 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Well, today you're going to get to hear a sermon by the reverend doctor Laura A. Smit, who is a Professor of Theology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan where she's been teaching since 1999. Timothy George: Now, if you're a regular listener to the Beeson podcast, I know many of you are, the voice of Laura Smit will be familiar to you, because she's been on the podcast before, she's one of our favorite preachers here at Beeson Divinity School. And we ask her to come back during our series on the Gospel of John, and you're going to hear a sermon by Dr. Smit, Sabbath Breaker or Sabbath Giver is the title, and it's from John Chapter 5, the first 18 verses, in our series Jesus Christ: Abundant Life, on the Gospel of John. Timothy George: Dr. Laura Smit is not only a very good preacher, she's also a professor. She has a PhD from Boston University in Medieval Philosophy, and Theological Aesthetics. She's been the Dean of the Chapel at Calvin College, very active in several denominations. The Christian Reformed Church, but also the PCUSA, and more recently ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Timothy George: Let's go to Hodges Chapel and listen to Dr. Laura Smit, as she preaches Sabbath Breaker or Sabbath Giver from John Chapter 5. Laura Smit: It's very good to be back here with you at Beeson, a place where I do feel quite at home. It's especially wonderful to be asked to preach from this great text in the Gospel of John. I always rather like it when I'm assigned a text as a preacher. It's like a present, right? A gift. Sometimes when you pick your own texts you pick what you want to say, but when you're assigned a text, you're asked to find what God is saying to you, and that's a good place to be. Laura Smit: Let's pray together, shall we? Holy Spirit come into our hearts and prepare us for the receiving of this, your holy word. May our hearts be good soil. May your word take root in us and bear good fruit in our lives. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, who is the word made flesh. Amen. Laura Smit: What I'd like to do today is look at the four things Jesus says in this passage. Jesus has four things to say, so we're going to look at each of them. Laura Smit: The first thing he says is, "Do you want to be made well?" Do you want to be made well? It's not a pro forma question, I don't think. This is a real question, a serious question. It's not like someone like, "Would you like to come this way?" Or something, when obviously that's what's going to happen. It's a real question, "Do you want to be made well?" Laura Smit: The sick man's answer seems to me to be a little defensive. Maybe in the question he hears a suggestion that his desire is too weak. Maybe he hears a little bit of blame in the question. Are you still here because you don't really want it? This is a very common idea in our culture. I don't watch a lot of sports, but it seems to be that after every athletic experience, you know, when they're interviewing the winners. There's always this statement about, "Well, we just really wanted it. We were really hungry." As if the people who lose didn't really want it. Laura Smit: As if you don't win, if you're not a success, if you're not really on top it's because of a lack of desire. And it's not just in sports that you hear this. People who are successful, "Well, I was really hungry for this. I really wanted it." What a nasty, self-justifying thing to say. I mean, come on. Right? All the people in the world who don't have things, it's because they don't really want them. All the people in the world whose lives are difficult, it's because they don't really want anything else. Laura Smit: And the man responds to the question of Jesus sort of as if that's underneath the question. He says, "Well, I don't have any help." He gives an excuse; he gives an explanation. Maybe he's also hoping that Jesus will volunteer to help him, so carry him into the pool. Maybe he's hoping Jesus will feel sorry for him and give him some money. Laura Smit: There's no suggestion that the man has any thought of any source of healing apart from this magic pool. That's all he's fixated on. "Well, obviously, I haven't gotten well because I can't get into the pool. There's no other way I could get well." And we notice that, actually, at no point did he answer the question. But what is Jesus really asking? I think he is asking about counting the cost. "Is this really what you want?" And most of us, I think, know the difference between wanting something to happen, and wanting to go through the process of getting there. Laura Smit: When I was a little girl, I really wanted to be a good pianist. I wanted to play piano really well. I wished I could play the piano better than Susan in my class, who was such a good pianist, and who is now a professional pianist, which makes me feel better about this. But at the time I didn't know that that was her destiny, and I just, "Well, I can never be as good as she is." I really wanted this, but I didn't want it enough to practice. I wanted to be a good pianist; I didn't want to become one. I didn't want to go through that process. Laura Smit: And we all do this all the time. I think we would all say we want to be healthy. I want to be a healthy person. Now it seems to me, from what I'm reading, the people in the world who live the longest, and are the healthiest, are the people who eat 800 calories a day and no more. Radical, simplicity of life. I don't know, you don't all look like you're living on 800 calories a day. No offense, neither am I, okay? Yeah, I want to be healthy, but I mean, come on. I don't want to go through that. I want to be holy, but come on, I don't want to go through all that. Laura Smit: And I have to wonder if Jesus is thinking, "Maybe this man hasn't quite thought through what will happen in his life, how radically it will change if he becomes well. Do you really want this? Do you want to become well?" The man never answer the question. I find that interesting. Laura Smit: Second thing he says is, "Take up your mat and walk." He doesn't say, "I'm going to heal you now." That's presupposed, that is now apparently already happened. It's done. "Okay, I've done it. You're healed now. Act on that conviction. Take up your mat and walk." Laura Smit: Now, for a man who's completely focused on this magic pool, that must have been a bit confusing. "Wait, we haven't been in the magic pool. Wait, you didn't help me get there when the water was moving. This whole thing that I've been waiting and waiting to do for all this time that didn't happen." Laura Smit: "Take up your bed and walk." Notice that the healing has occurred without the man ever at any point saying, "Yes, please heal me." I know it's very popular in American Christianity to tell this story. Even my very favorite person in the world, C. S. Lewis, sometimes tells this story that God holds back his healing, God holds back his redemption until you say yes. He waits. "Are you going to say yes? It's on offer. All you have to do is say yes. If you say yes, here it is." Laura Smit: That viewpoint gets no comfort from this text. Jesus doesn't wait for the yes, he heals him. It's Jesus who chooses the healing. It's Jesus who chooses to make this happen. But now the man does, in response, have a choice. Are you going to act like a healed person? Laura Smit: Makes me think of Romans Chapter 6. Paul says, "You've been baptized into the death and the resurrection of Christ. You can no longer live in sin, so count yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." The work has been done, now live as if it's true. Laura Smit: A few nights ago, I caught the end of a movie, late night movie on I think it was that TV show that shows really old movies. It was an old movie, anyway. It was the old version of Heidi, the little mountain girl who has a cousin who's a cripple. But she wants to live with her Grandpa on the mountain. So, this little girl can't walk. Laura Smit: She's a main character in this story. Can't walk. But she confesses to her cousin Heidi that she's heard the doctors explaining to her father that, actually, there's nothing wrong with her legs. She's been healed for a long time. But she doesn't want to walk. It's painful to walk, which it would be if you haven't walked in many years. And she's afraid that maybe she's responsible for the death of her mother who was in the accident that crippled her, and so there's some guilt here. And she's trying to keep her father close. She's got lots of reasons to remain in her wheelchair. Laura Smit: And so, she confesses to Heidi that she has this idea, that maybe she could walk if she just were willing to go through the pain. And you may remember the story, either the book or the movie, some version of it that some tough love leaves her alone on this mountain, and she has to walk. Laura Smit: What struck me, watching it this time, is how badly she walks. And I though that was pretty realistic. She walks. She's crying, because it hurts, and she's walking kind of like a toddler. Like she could fall over at any moment. I think I expect that's how this healed man walked. 38 years of being too sick to walk, he's not going to get up and dance. He probably didn't walk very well. He probably fell down fairly often, and when he fell down, he probably looked a lot like he looked before he was healed. Laura Smit: But there has been a change in him, a change in his nature, a change in his body. His legs are different than they used to be. He is now able to walk, and that seems to me is what Paul is saying in Romans 6, "There's been a change in you." Now you may fall down fairly often, and you may look like the same sinful person you used to be, but in fact, there's been an ontological shift in your nature. You no longer live under the domination of sin, you live under the domination of righteousness. You no longer live as someone who breathes in the air of sin, you're someone who breathes in the air of righteousness. And when you sin, you can still go swimming there, but that's no longer your natural habitat. Because you have been made a new person in Jesus. His new nature is now your new nature, because you've been baptized into His death and resurrection. So, take up your mat and walk. Laura Smit: The third thing Jesus says, "Do not sin anymore so that nothing worse happens to you." I'm very grateful for this saying that Jesus gives us here, because it gives me permission to do what I just did, which is allegorize the story to Romans 6. Jesus Himself, you see, makes a connection between this physical healing and the much more significant question of your spiritual healing. Laura Smit: Jesus Himself makes a connection between what it means to have your body repaired, and the much more serious question of having your spirit repaired, and how dangerous it is to be sick in your body versus the far more lasting problem of being sick in your soul. Laura Smit: I do think, and perhaps ... I don't know what's taught here at Beeson, perhaps this will be a dangerous thing to say in this context. But I do think that the allergy some Evangelicals have to the idea of allegorical preaching, and allegorical interpretation of scripture is pretty silly. Sorry, silly is an unkind word. It is perhaps not justified by the Christian tradition in which most Christians have thought it natural to at least sometimes think about the Word of God as speaking on multiple levels. And why wouldn't it, if it's living and active? Laura Smit: I mean, I'm not a great writer, but I am capable of writing a sentence that means more than one thing, and I think the Holy Spirit is capable of that too. The Holy Spirit is capable of loading a lot of meaning into a text, and the idea that you have to decode the one and only meaning, and it had better be the most historical, the most literal, the most unimaginative. That that's got to be the end-all and be-all of this text. That's really selling the Bible short it seems to me, and Jesus tells us here, in making this little analogy, that we don't have to do that. Laura Smit: We're allowed to see the connections between different levels of our life. Not just because it's imaginatively satisfying, but because that's how reality is. Because reality is that all of our life is connected to the life of God. There is nothing in your life that's not somehow connected to your life with God. And when you're sick in body, and you don't feel well, and you can't do the things you usually do, there is a connection between that experience and your spiritual life. Laura Smit: Those things are tied to each other. Not in the sense that your spiritual frailty has made you ill, not in a sense of guilt, but that you are a person who exists on many levels, and those levels are not isolated from each other. Laura Smit: Clearly, Jesus wants also to tell this man that he is not, in fact, sinning on the Sabbath by carrying his mat. He has run into the leaders of the Jews, who have said to him, "Why are you carrying this mat? You're breaking the Sabbath." And he says, "The man who healed me told me to." Laura Smit: Well, working on the Sabbath is something we don't do because the Sabbath is supposed to be consecrated to God. But one of the things that's happening in this passage and has been happening since Chapter 1 Verse 1 here in John, is Jesus is making divine claims about Himself. So, when Jesus says to you, "Pick up your mat." Then obeying him is a good Sabbath thing to do. If you're consecrated to God, you obey God when He tells you to do stuff, and He told him to pick up his mat. Laura Smit: I don't think Jesus is saying all of those ideas about keeping the Sabbath separate are gone now, forget about it, do whatever you like on the Sabbath. That's not what He's saying. He is saying something about judging other people's Sabbath observance, that you may not know what is being done by someone else as an act of obedience, and what is being done by someone else as an act of defiance. But this man is obeying God. He's glorifying God for his healing by carrying his mat. Laura Smit: Finally, is the enigmatic, fantastic statement where Jesus responds to the accusation that He's a Sabbath breaker. "My Father is still working, and I am still working." Isn't that fantastic? "My Father is still working, and I am still working." Laura Smit: The Sabbath has never been about God being passive. When God rests on the seventh day, in the Book of Genesis, it's not because he's decided, "Okay, I've done enough now. I need a little break." It's not because he's decided to move from being active to being passive for a time. It's not that God Himself has to obey the rhythm of six and one that we obey. That's a created rhythm. When God rests, it is to rest on His throne. To take His throne, which he has just created. He has created His throne room here, and He takes His seat and begins to rule. Laura Smit: This is not a passive action. When God rests, God's way of resting isn't going to be like our way of resting, which is not surprising. God's way of being is not like our way of being. What God is doing cannot be rest like we rest, because God has no passivity, no potential, no inaction in Himself. God is all act, all action. Laura Smit: This is the point of the first of Aquinas's famous Five Ways, the way from motion. Aquinas is establishing the existence of God by motion, and he doesn't have in mind this kind of motion in space, he has in mind the motion from being potential to being actual. He says, "Everything in the world that we see moves from being potential to being actual." It's always potential first, and the only way you have this movement from being potential to being actual is if some outside agency of actuality moves you. And there has to be some being for there to exist anything in the world there has to be some being who is all act. Pure act. And that being is God. Laura Smit: Now, I find this an extremely reassuring idea. When we say that God is love, that doesn't mean that God is becoming love, that he's thinking about being love, that maybe he'll love you tomorrow, that there's potential for love in God. No, it means that God is all love, all the time. He is loving you in action. His love is not waiting to be engaged. His love is always fully engaged. Everything God can be, He is. Fully, actually, actively. Laura Smit: For God to rest simply cannot mean that he stops acting. That would be to stop being Himself. God is always in act. I think that when God rests, and when he talks about Himself using that language, He's like a parent of a very, very little baby, who gets down on the floor and says, "Look, this is how you crawl." And starts crawling on the floor in order to demonstrate to the baby, "Move like this". Laura Smit: Crawling is not the natural behavior of the parent. The parent doesn't need to crawl in daily life. Crawling is not something the parent really has to do, but the parent does it to help the child. And God is helping us to see what it is to rest, demonstrating for us what it is to rest. But this is not part of God's natural way of life, this rest. Even that language is strange when applied to God. God is moving us from what is potential to what is actual. Laura Smit: So, what does Sabbath rest mean for us? If for God it can't mean passivity, what does it mean for us? Well, first it means if we want to move from potential to actual, we do that only through the agency of the full actual one. You want to become a holy person? Not by your work. Not by your will power. Only by the one who is all holiness coming into your live and getting you started. You want to be good? I long to be good, to have nothing in my life I have to be afraid of, or cringe at, or try to hide. Just to be good. And there's potential in me for goodness. I've been healed. But how do I do that step of taking up my mat and walking? How do I do that? Laura Smit: Only through the agency of the fully actual good one, the one who is goodness Himself, the one who can move into my life and move me. I need that, I need that in all sorts of parts of my life. God has a destination for me in mind, of what kind of person I'm made to be. And I can't get from this potential to that actuality without His intervention. Can't be done. Laura Smit: So, what we remember on the Sabbath is our radical dependence on God to become what we're supposed to be. All through the Old Testament it seems to me this is what's happening in Sabbath observance. Think about the manna. The manna itself is already a pretty big sign that you're really dependent on God. Your food is hand delivered every day, and yet I don't think it took the Israelites too long before they started thinking about picking up Manna as going out to do the harvest, "I'm working. I'm collecting my good." Laura Smit: It wasn't hard, I suspect, to stop remembering this is a miraculous food. It just became every day food, and I'm doing this work. But if you remember your story about manna, things were different on the Sabbath. Any other day you kept more than one day's worth of food, and it would get rotten, and it would be full of worms. But on the Sabbath, it wouldn't, because you weren't supposed to go out and do that on the Sabbath. Every week, God's reminding you, "I'm in control of your food. The thing that's keeping you alive, that's from me. Your life is at my pleasure. You are radically dependent on me." Laura Smit: The sacrificial system teaches us this. So much in God's first interactions with His people is designed to say, "I am the one who is holding your life. I am the one who keeps you alive. Your life belongs to me, you are so completely dependent on me." And we say that every time we actually keep the Sabbath, every time we fail to do something that would help us in our job, that little bit of extra work that the people we're competing with have time to do on Sunday, and we say, "No. I'm not going to do that. My dependence is not on my work, my dependence is somewhere else." Laura Smit: What Sabbath is not, is a time to recharge so that you can work better. The point of your life is not your work. The Sabbath itself is the point of your life. You got to do work, work is good, but the point is not the work. You don't take a day off in order to get rested so that you can work like a crazy person for the rest of the week. That's how secular people do. They take rests too, not consecrated to God, they just take rests because they run out of steam, and they need to recharge. That's not what the Sabbath is. Laura Smit: Now, work is good if it's done right. It's very easy to do it wrong. It's very easy for work to become an idol. It's very easy for work to become something that demeans you, enslaves you, tries to turn you into a machine. Just work, meaningful work, it's a good thing, but it's not because it's the point of your life. The point of your life is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That's what we're here for, and work is a little bit of practice at that, it's a little moment in your day, throughout the week, where you are participating in God's work, which is the sustaining of the creation. Keeping things going. Laura Smit: And again, like a parent with a toddler, He doesn't need us to do this, He's quite capable of sustaining the creation, but it's good that we share in His work. So, we take out the trash. We do the dishes. We keep things clean. We raise children, and we educate them. We pass on knowledge to the next generation. We build things, and we hope to build them safely and well. We take care of the earth. We fight for justice. We enact law. We do things that are, in the best of times, a participation in God's will for the world, and that's a good thing for us to do. But it's not why we're here. Those are our training moments to get us ready to show up on Sunday and praise Him. Because we've been brought into His life a little bit more, and now we're better equipped to be praising Him, to be glorifying Him, to be enjoying Him forever. Laura Smit: It's because God is the one who is always working, because God is the one who is always sustaining the world, because God is the one who is all act. But the question Jesus asks this man is not "Do you want to be well?" But, "Do you want to be made well?" Do you want to be made well? And lots of us would say, "I'd like to work my way into wellness. I'd like to take responsibility for my life." But that's not what Jesus is offering. Laura Smit: Jesus is offering to acknowledge you as a completely helpless person. A person with lots of potential, but no ability at all to self actualize, because only God is self actualizing, no ability at all to move from what God wants you to be, to actually being it, apart from His intervention. Apart from His healing, which he gives you whether you ask for it or not. If you're here in this place, and you're longing for Jesus, and you want to live a different life, it means he's already done that for you. Where else does that longing come from? It means you are already healed. You are already being set free from the slavery, the sin. You are already a new creation. So, take up your mat and walk. Laura Smit: Let's pray. Lord Jesus, you know how much easier it is for us just to remain. Remain in our sin, remain in our sickness, remain in our brokenness. We take a look at what it would really mean to go all in for you, and we know it would mean such a radical change in our lives, and we'd rather just be half in. We'd rather not count on your healing being as complete as you tell us it is. We'd rather make excuses about why we're still not better. Lord Jesus, break through our excuses. Pull us to our feet. Make us new, able to live in holiness. We pray it in your name. Amen. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast, with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.