Father Richard explores midrash, the ancient Jewish practice of reading sacred texts that Jesus would have been familiar with:
More than telling us exactly what to see in the Scriptures, Jesus taught us how to see, what to emphasize, and also what could be de-emphasized or ignored. Beyond fundamentalism or literalism, Jesus practiced a form of Jewish commentary called midrash, consistently using questions to keep spiritual meanings open, often reflecting on a text or returning people’s questions with more questions. It’s a shame we didn’t imitate Jesus in this approach. It could have saved us from so many centuries of righteousness, religious violence, and even single-issue voting.
Rather than seeking always certain and unchanging answers, the Jewish practice of midrash allows many possibilities, many levels of faith-filled meaning—meaning that is relevant and applicable to you, the reader, and puts you in the subject’s shoes to build empathy, understanding, and relationship. It lets the passage first challenge you before it challenges anyone else. To use the text in a spiritual way—as Jesus did—is to allow it to convert you, to change you, to grow you up as you respond: What does this ask of me? How might this apply to my life, to my family, to my church, to my neighborhood, to my country, and even the world? [1]
Father Richard suggests several steps for a contemplative reading of Scripture:
- Offer a prayer for guidance from the Holy Spirit before interpreting an important text. This begins to decenter our egoic need to make the text say what we want or need it to say. Pray as long as it takes to get to this inner intellectual freedom and detachment.
- Once we have attained some honest degree of intellectual and emotional freedom, we must try to move to a position of detachment from our own will and its goals, needs, and desires.
- Then listen for a deeper voice that isn’t our own. We will know that it isn’t the ego because it will never shame or frighten us, but rather strengthen us, even when it is challenging us. If it is God’s voice, it will take away our illusions and our violence so completely and naturally that we can barely identify with such previous feelings! I call this God’s replacement therapy.
- If the interpretation leads our true self to experience any or several of the fruits of the Spirit, as they are listed in Galatians 5:22–23—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control—I think we can trust this interpretation is from the Spirit, from the deeper stream of wisdom.
- If any negative or punitive emotions arise from our interpretation—such as feelings of superiority, self-satisfaction, arrogant dualistic certitude, desire for revenge, need for victory, or any spirit of dismissal or exclusion—this is not the Spirit at work, but our own ego still steering the ship. [2]
(I preached this at the women’s prison a couple weeks ago and have been so busy with the tour that I’m just now getting around to posting it)
Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The ill man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. – John 5
There were a few months of my life when I came down with a “touch” of hypochondria. You know thing where people are mostly sick with thinking they are always sick? I had a baby and a toddler and I was trying to take a college class here and there. We were so broke and WIC only went so far. I was exhausted all the time and I got sick a lot that winter and one day I started to think that maybe something was seriously wrong with me. And it sounds weird but secretly, without being totally conscious of it, I kind of started to hope something was wrong with me. I mean, nothing fatal. Just something bad enough that I could kind of get a hall pass from my life.
In fact, when I was overwhelmed, I would find myself fantasizing about how amazing a hospital stay sounded. I know that sounds messed up and anyone who has stayed in a hospital can tell you it is not that restful – but at that point, a hospital stay was my escape fantasy. Because someone else would bring me food while I laid around all day watching tv and taking narcotics. Like, what’s not to love?
But, after ending up in my doctor’s office for the 3rd time in six weeks demanding that he run more tests on me since I was sure I was sick…he caught on to what was really happening – and God bless him, my doctor looked me in the eye and said Nadia, nothing’s wrong with you. You just have to deal with your life.
I mean, how dare he? I hated that doctor so much…. until…I realized he was right. I wanted an out of some kind and kept thinking the doctor could give that to me. And he did, in a way. Because when he dared to say what was true, I just sort of snapped out of it and dealt with my life.
For the record, I was so embarrassed that I for sure never went back to that doctor. But I do always think of him when I read our Gospel story for today.
We just heard the story from John chapter 5 where Jesus encounters a man who was ill and had been sitting at the healing pool of Bethesda for 38 years.
And honestly this has to be the most insensitive healing text in the Bible, because Jesus asks him a really harsh question. He looks at the man who has been stuck for 38 years and says “do you want to be made well?” and the guy doesn’t even answer the question, when asked if he wants to be made well he says no one will help me into the water and when I try to get in other people get in the way.
I don’t want to be a jerk, but seriously? For 38 years not one person was willing to help? For 38 whole years other people got in the way? Not to diminish his illness but it makes me wonder what the payoff might have been to staying stuck there since when asked if he wanted to be made well he didn’t seem very interested.
This is a sticky issue, but this week I started thinking about how hard it is to be honest about the payoffs we get from things we say we want to be free from.
You can ask any alcoholic in recovery about this. When I was still drinking I’d complain about my hangovers and the unreliability of the people in my life. But there was a payoff to being a drunk. I got to live without any real responsibility, no matter how it affected others. I got to feel tragic. And the best payoff was that I got to be inebriated whenever life, or basic human emotions, or the results of my bad decisions started feeling even a little bit unbearable. I got to just check out.
It all reminds me of Paul’s letter to the Romans when he said I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. Some things are so true they hurt a little. And being honest about what the payoff is to staying stuck in a situation I say I want out of is rough. But that’s the whole point, I think. Jesus said that we will know the truth and the truth will set us free.
Don’t get me wrong, we should understandably be sensitive to the dangers of what is called blaming the victim. For sure. There are things that happen to us that are truly beyond our control. Children have no blame in the abuse they suffer. My father is not in a wheelchair because he has given up in any way shape or form. I’m not to blame for being chronically ill as a child. And to imply so is cold hearted.
I’m just saying that what is also true, is that sometimes staying stuck feels safer than getting free.
That day when Jesus was walking along the healing pool of Bethesda, he saw someone who had given up on themselves and he called him out on it. Do you want to be healed?
And when the guy was like, well no one helps me and other people block me….Jesus doesn’t coddle him and say there there, and he doesn’t get someone to carry him to the water and make people get out of the way…
He says Stand up –….Stop waiting for someone to carry you. Stop waiting for other people not be in your way. Why? Because they are not the source of your healing.
In the face of Christ this man was confronted with the truth. And that truth may have stung, like truth so often does, but it also set him free. But what I want to highlight is this – the fact that he was able to take his mat and walk away had very little to do with his own desire for healing. It had to do with God’s desire for his healing.
That’s God’s thing; Seeing us. Offering the truth. Pursuing our healing long after we’ve given up. Loving us into wholeness. And wanting us to stop giving our power over to other people.
This afternoon, God is pursuing your healing as well. I believe that. God’s healing spirit is here among us saying Stand up.
To you who have been depressed for far too long he says stand up. To you who have not been honest with yourself, today he says stand up. To you who have never been told how worthy and how beautiful and how magnificent you are he says stand up. To you who have tried time and again to get clean and sober and think that you cannot live without drugs he says stand up. Stand and Take up your mats, Take up your mats of loss and sorrow and regret and walk, my sisters. Take up your ratty little mat of self-pity and worn out excuses you’ve made your home – It may have gotten you here but it will not take you into what is next. Whatever payoff there has been to staying unhealed, to staying in unforgiveness, to staying in stuck-ness that isn’t for you anymore. That is your past.
So pick that thing up and walk (or roll) into a new day that God has prepared for you, walk into a new purpose that God has laid out for you, walk into a new identity that God bestows upon you and walk .
And when you do, I beg you to walk tall. Tall. Shoulders back, chin up with the full dignity – the full dignity of a daughter of the king.
So stand and walk to this healing place in front of you – no one has to carry you to this table of grace. And here there is no one to get in your way. Come to this table tonight and bring the mats you think you are stuck laying on and leave them at the feet of your savior who bids you walk and be free. Amen.
