The Gospel of John for Tumultuous Times 7

 

John 5:1-18  The Old and the New

photo by Levi Guzman on unsplash

Here again we have a story that can be read as “the old ways aren’t working; we need to try something new.”  Note that the man who was made well by Jesus’ ‘new way’ was the man who ‘told on him.’  Why is it we tend to cling to what is familiar and block change even though we know it would be better for us to move on? 

Verse 18 summarizes the threat that the Jews felt from the Christians.  They were breaking the laws which held them together as a community and they were threatening their unique theological claim that there is one God.  From the perspective of 2000 years, it is easy to see why the Jews rejected the Christians.  They threatened to wipe out their faith, their culture and their community which had always been a small minority surviving tenuously in a very different and powerful majority. The question for us is why did we Christians feel the need to persecute them so violently?  How were they a threat to us?  Why do they still get persecuted? 

Is there a similarity in the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries? Does the continued existence of the old faith mean that maybe the new faith hasn’t got it right?  Does the emergence of a new faith mean that the old faith is wrong?  How do we get to the point where different people can hold different beliefs and even different values and yet live together in peace and share the wealth of the land?  What values need to be shared, what ones are optional, who gets to decide?  Isolation, mutual denigration or persecution is no longer an option. 

Moving on towards some ‘new normal’ requires us to set aside our natural human inclination to see those who oppose us as the enemy.  What if we set aside the ‘fight’ mentality?  What if we stopped fighting climate change and stopped fighting the virus?  What alternative image or metaphor would give us a different way of approaching those who oppose us?  I recall Alanna Mitchell in her book on cancer rejecting the image of fighting against the disease and replaced it with an image of dancing with it. Can we dance our way to a ‘new normal’? What other image would help us move on?