The gift of life

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

6^th February 2022

 

John 4.46-54
 
You don’t often hear sermons
            on the story of the healing of the Royal Official’s son,
probably because it’s so similar to the more well-known story
            of the healing of the Centurion’s servant
            that we find in both Matthew (8.5-13) and Luke’s (7.1-10) gospels.
 
But our readings this year through the gospel of John,
            bring us this week with Jesus back to Cana,
                        after his trip to Jerusalem and the Temple,
                        and the excursion through Samaria;
            and we find ourselves back at this site
                        of the first of the ‘seven signs’ of John’s gospel.
 
Last time Jesus had been in Cana he had turned water into wine,
            with the author of the gospel declaring
                        that this was the first of Jesus’ significant actions,
                        which point to the nature of his ministry and mission (2.11).
 
And it’s here in Cana, again, that we get the second of these ‘signs’;
            and this time it’s the healing of the Royal Official’s son.
 
Beyond the geography, there are other parallels
            between this story and the first sign given at the wedding.
 
On both occasions someone approaches Jesus uninvited,
            asking him to sort out a problem.
At the wedding, it’s a shortage of wine;
            in today’s story, it’s a sick child.
 
And on both occasions,
            Jesus comes across as rather ambivalent to the request.
It’s almost like he is annoyed that people keep thinking
            he will pull a solution out of his hat, on demand.
 
Of course, on both occasions he does in fact resolve the issue;
            but the way John’s gospel reports his reaction
                        feels like there’s something more going on here
            than Jesus simply solving a wine crisis, or making a sick child better.
 
And, of course, that’s exactly what John is trying to achieve:
            John’s gospel constantly invites its readers to dig deeper,
to go beyond the obvious
            to explore the deeper significance of the events it narrates.
 
This is why the water-into-wine,
            and the healing of the official’s son,
are both described as signs.
 
The point of these stories is not that Jesus does miracles,
            it’s not even that people should believe in Jesus
            because he’s a miracle worker.
 
Rather, these stories point to the underlying meaning of the incarnation.
            They invite us to contemplate what, exactly, it means
                        for Jesus to be the word of God made flesh
                        as a gift of good news for the world.
 
So when we meet Jesus getting frustrated
            that people are asking him for another miracle,
we can hear the author of the gospel offering Jesus’ words to us,
            inviting us to go deeper than the surface significance
            to discover the underlying sign of the kingdom.
 
In the case of water into wine, as we explored a few weeks ago,
            the miracle was a sign of God’s abundance,
                        of the joyfully overflowing love of God
            that transforms shame into honour,
                        overwhelming disgrace with grace.
 
And so also in the case of the Royal Official’s son,
            we are also asked to delve deeper,
to explore what the story of this healing reveals to us
            about the love of God made flesh in Jesus.
 
The point of this story is not that Jesus heals,
            nor is it that Jesus does miracles at a distance.
 
Rather, this sign is an exploration
            of the significance of the prologue’s statement
            that in Jesus ‘was life, and the life was the light of all people’ (Jn. 1:4)
 
This theme of life as a gift from God given through Jesus,
            is something that the gospel returns to again, and again.
 
We find it in John 3.16, possibly the most famous verse in the Bible,
            ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
            so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
            but may have eternal life.’
 
We find it in John 10.10, where Jesus speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd,
            who ‘came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’
 
We find it in the last verse of the gospel, which tells us,
            ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples,
                        which are not written in this book.  
            But these are written so that you may come to believe
                        that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God,
            and that through believing you may have life in his name.’
            (Jn. 20:30-31)
 
And I could go on, but you get the idea…
 
So, what we meet here, in the healing of the Royal Official’s son,
            is Jesus speaking a word of life,
with new life itself coming into being, at the very moment that he speaks.
 
It’s an echo of the creative act from Genesis,
            with Jesus taking his place as the word of God
            through whom all things come into being.
 
As the prologue put it:
            ‘All things came into being through him,
                        and without him not one thing came into being.
            What has come into being in him was life,
                        and the life was the light of all people.’ (Jn. 1:3-4)
 
Jesus speaks life, and life takes shape,
            because Jesus is the life-giving word of God,
            spoken to a broken, hurting and dying world.
 
This healing of this young boy
            is a sign of God’s intent to bring life to the world through Jesus,
                        to create life and light in the lives of human beings,
            banishing the fear of death and deeds of darkness
                        that blight the human experience.
 
So what do we know about this young man?
 
We’re told that his father was a royal official, living in Capernaum.
            This places him as a servant of Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great,
            whose royal palace was on the shores of Lake Galilee at Tiberias.
 
The family of the sick young man was therefore of high social status:
            it was a family of privilege, it had its own servants (4.51).
 
And whilst it is true that sickness and death can strike any household at any time,
            it was also as true back then as it is now
            that the better-off tend to enjoy healthier and longer lives.
 
A Royal Official of the court of Herod
            would not have expected his son to get sick and die;
in stark contrast of course to those in that region
            who eked out their living as peasant farmers,
            for whom child mortality was something to be expected.
 
So when this man’s son falls seriously ill,
            he makes the journey to Cana of Galilee,
                        a walk of about seven hours from Capernaum,
            to beg for help from Jesus.
 
This is a man who is desperate,
            having suddenly discovered that all his wealth and status
            have not, in the end, protected his family from sickness.
 
And, maybe because he had heard about Jesus
            and the water into wine at the wedding,
he goes on a quest to find Jesus,
            to see if he and his family can also receive
            the blessing of God’s gift of abundant life.
 
Although the text doesn’t say so explicitly,
            it’s very likely that this Royal Official was a Gentile.
Certainly, in the parallel stories in Matthew and Luke’s gospels,
            the man begging Jesus for help is a Roman.
 
And if he is a Gentile, then this story takes one step further
            the trajectory we have already seen of the widening of God’s mercy.
From a Jewish Wedding, to a Samaritan woman,
            we now encounter Jesus speaking words of abundant life
            to a Gentile official in the royal household.
 
For the original readers of John’s gospel,
            the statement at the end of the story,
            that the man believed, ‘along with his whole household’ (4.53)
would have made sense to them in their context
            of a church that included not only Jewish followers of Jesus
            but also Gentile converts as well.
 
This gift of life, that comes into being in Jesus,
            is not restricted to one group, to one nationality,
                        to one religion, to one social class.
Rather, this is a gift for all people,
            it is abundant life welling up in people’s lives
                        like a spring of water gushing up from the ground,
            creating new life in the parched landscapes of the human soul.
 
All of which is deeply symbolic, deeply spiritual,
                        deeply mystical, and deeply compelling
            as you would expect from a sign of the kingdom in the gospel of John.
 
But in the midst of all the symbolism,
            I don’t think we should lose sight of the fact
            that this is a story about a healing.
 
It’s a story about a young child at the edge of death,
            a story of a desperate father pleading for his child’s life.
 
And in this sense, it’s a story that resonates with our world,
            and the situation faced by so many people around the globe.
 
The statistics on infant mortality make depressing reading.
 
On any average day, 15,000 children under the age of five die,
            that’s just under 4% of all live births,
and almost all of these are of preventable causes.[1]
 
This is much better than the estimates for the ancient world,
            where a quarter of all children born died before their first birthday,
            with nearly 50% failing to reach adulthood.
 
But then, as now, the distribution of child mortality was disproportionate,
            with those living with poverty facing a far greater risk.
 
The knock-on effect of child mortality is itself deeply problematic,
            with parents consequently choosing to have larger families,
            something which then negatively impacts opportunities for women.
 
In fact, it is in countries with higher infant mortality,
            that population growth is also at its highest,
            whilst female education is at its lowest.
 
And as we face pressures on the environment
            from an expanding global population,
addressing infant mortality,
            and consequently giving women the education and ability
            to make choices about family planning,
are key factors in addressing the impact of humanity on our planet.
 
But even in a globally prosperous city such as London,
            inequality still affects issues of infant mortality.
 
Did you see the version of the Tube Map that was released a few years ago,
            which showed how life expectancy changes in different areas?[2]
 
The average life expectancy for people born where I live, at Canada Water, is 78;
            if you’re born near Marble Arch, it’s 91.
 
The greatest disparity in life expectancy,
            from the richest to the poorest areas of London,
            is nearly 20 years.[3]
 
And of course, as with all life-expectancy statistics,
            the key factor is not the age at which an average adult dies,
                        although that is part of the story,
            rather, it is the number of children who die in infancy.
 
So when you hear of a country with an average life expectancy of less that 50,
            such as the African country Lesotho,
this doesn’t mean that a person of 60 would be a rarity there,
            rather it means that a very large number of children die in early life.
 
And our story for today,
            of a rich man at his wits end because his child is dying,
invites us to reflect on the correlation between wealth and infant mortality,
            and to then reflect on what it means,
                        for us to be proclaiming a gospel of life
            to a world where too many, far too many, children
                        never get their chance to live.
 
Well, I think we should resist any application of this passage
            which suggests that someone who asks Jesus for healing,
                        either for themselves or for someone else,
                        will automatically receive it.
            Firstly, that patently isn’t the way it works,
                        and secondly, this would be to focus on the sign,
                        rather than on what the sign points to.
 
This story is not about Jesus miraculously relieving humanity
            of its responsibility to care for the poor and the vulnerable.
 
Rather it speaks to us of the care that Jesus has for those facing tragedy,
            and of his desire for all, whatever their nationality, creed, colour, or status,
            to receive the gift of life in all its fullness.
 
In other words, it tells us
            that we cannot separate spiritual and practical concerns.
 
We cannot say that we long for people to receive life eternal,
            if we do not also desire that they get to live life in all its fulness.
 
This story directly challenges all forms of Christianity
            which focus on the spiritual
            to the detriment of the practical.
 
We are not called to save people’s souls for the hereafter,
            so much as we are called to save people’s lives in the here and now.
 
This is a recurring theme in John’s gospel:
            that the benefits of following Jesus are more about today
            than they are about some unspecified otherworldly future.
 
And in the desperation of the wealthy official
            at the sickness of his child,
we are reminded that, in the end, all of us are mortal,
            and that those of us with the means and resources
                        to keep us healthy into old age
            are in no way more deserving of our good fortune
                        than those whose place of birth condemns them to a different prospect.
 
So this passage calls us to compassion,
            to action for justice,
and to following the example of Jesus,
            who took action at a distance
                        to bring life to a child he had never met,
                        and in all likelihood would never meet.
 
Jesus didn’t go to Capernaum to bring the child back to life personally,
            rather, he spoke words of life from afar,
            transforming the life of the stranger and their family.
 
As a church, we have long supported Christian Aid,
            and they have recurring campaigns to address issues of child mortality.
 
As we close our reflection on this passage for this morning,
            let me share a story from one of those campaigns
            which ran a couple of years ago,
and we’ll let these words challenge us
            to continue our generous and life-giving support
            for those who bring life to children around the globe.
 
The project was a partnership for Improved Child Health
            and ran in Nigeria until 2019
 
Every year, hundreds of thousands of children
            under the age of five years in Nigeria do not live up to their fifth birthday
            due to preventable childhood illnesses such as malaria, pneumonia,
                        diarrhoea and severe acute malnutrition.
Most under-five death occurs in remote, hard to reach communities
            where caregivers are faced with physical, social and financial barriers
            to access health services.
Christian Aid , through this project,
            has empowered communities to take ownership of their own health
            by improving knowledge and health-seeking behaviour,
                        giving hope in despair,
            and saving children under five who face imminent death
                        due to barriers of access to and uptake of quality health services.[4]
 
Thanks be to God for Christian Aid,
            and may we here in Bloomsbury
                        once again hear the call to be partners with them
                        in the life-giving work they do
            bringing the gift of life in all its fullness
                        to those who need it the most.

---

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#child-mortality-is-an-everyday-tragedy-of-enormous-scale-that-rarely-makes-the-headlines
[2] https://life.mappinglondon.co.uk/
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18917932
[4] https://www.christianaid.org.uk/resources/about-us/press-release-changing-course-under-five-mortality-nigeria

The Water of Life Eternal

 A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

30th January 2022

John 4.1-42

Last week, for the week of prayer for Christian unity,
            I went on a pilgrimage.
 
Not to Lourdes, or even to Canterbury,
            but to the Temple Church not far from here,
            with a group from King’s College London.
 
We had actually hoped to get as far as Westminster Abbey,
            but as is often the way with journeys,
            things took a bit longer than we had anticipated!
 
We began in the chapel of Sir Thomas Guy:
            the Baptist founder of Guy’s Hospital,
who made his money through the unusual combination
            of selling Bibles and investing in the slave trade.
 
Then, via Southwark Cathedral, we made our way over London Bridge,
            and stopped to pray and reflect in a variety of city churches,
before making our way to St Paul’s Cathedral,
            and then finishing in the astonishing Temple Church.
 
Many of the churches we visited I’d been to before,
            but one discovery that has stayed with me
was the ruined church of St Dunstan in the East.
 
Originally established by the Saxons,
            it was rebuilt in 950 by St Dunstan,
            who became Archbishop of Canterbury;
but then Dunstan’s church was destroyed by the great fire of London,
            only to be rebuilt 30 years later by none other than Christopher Wren.
Tragically, Wren’s church was destroyed in the blitz, in 1941,
            and after several decades as a derelict ruin
            the church was transformed into a picturesque public space in 1967.
 
I tell you this story of our truncated pilgrimage,
            and the history of St Dunstan in the East,
because in many ways, they a metaphor for the point of my sermon this morning:
            Which is that things don’t always work out as you intend them to.
 
Sometimes, you don’t make your intended destination on the pilgrimage of life;
            sometimes you build things, only for them to come crashing down around you;
            sometimes things don’t work out as you intend them to.
 
But, and here’s the good news,
            within the love of God, such things are not the end of the story.
 
Let me share a photo with you
            that I took when we were at St Dunstan in the East.
 
This is a fountain in the ruined church,
            placed where the altar would have been.
 
And as we stood around it, on our pilgrimage,
            one of the women in the group quoted from John’s gospel.
 
            Those who drink of the water that I will give them
                        will never be thirsty.
            The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water
                        gushing up to eternal life. (4.14
 
There was a moment of silence,
            and then she said,
‘Well, who wouldn’t want that for their life?’
 
And as I thought back over the history of that site,
            with its history of rebuilding, ruination, and restoration,
and as I looked at the beauty of its current state,
            with the fountain bubbling gently,
            with seats for office workers and tourists to rest,
I thought of the woman of Samaria,
            to whom Jesus said those words of blessing,
            promising the gift of the water of eternal life.
 
She was certainly someone who knew what it was
            for things not to turn out as she had hoped and planned.
 
The story of her encounter with Jesus beside the well of Jacob,
            includes a conversation about her marriages.
 
It seems that she has been, as they say, ‘unlucky in love’,
            having had five marriages,
            and now living with someone who is not her husband.
 
We need to pause here, just for a moment,
            and reflect on the way in which preachers have often handled this story.
 
In the earlier traditions of the church,
            the Samaritan woman was celebrated as a witness to Christ;
but in the years following the post-reformation rise of evangelicalism,
            with its emphasis on sin and forgiveness,
preachers have tended to cast her as a scarlet woman:
            a sexual sinner in need of repentance.
 
As such she becomes an example
            of Jesus associating with prostitutes,
showing that no-one is too sinful, too depraved,
            too ‘other’ for Jesus.
 
And whilst I applaud the sentiment
            of Jesus going to the margins and the marginalised,
            there is a problem here,
which is that the text offers us no indication at all
            that this woman is a sinner.
There is no act of repentance on her part,
            and no offering of forgiveness from Jesus.
 
It seems she has been demonised where no demons reside,
            scapegoated for a sin she hasn’t committed,
all in the interest of the proclamation
            of a gospel based on sin and repentance.
 
And I wonder if there are some of us here today
            who have been similarly demonised and scapegoated.
Told that we’re sinful, shameful, and marginalised,
            because aspects of our personal story or identity
                        don’t match the dominant conception
                        of who or what a good Christian looks like.
 
From ethnicity, to gender, to sexuality;
            from economic status, to mental health, to disability;
many people today find themselves cast into the same space
            as the Samaritan woman in some interpretations of this story
 
Those who would perpetuate a gospel of sin and repentance
            all too often require others to deny who they are, to change who they are,
            in order to fit a narrative that without repentance there is no salvation.
 
But I don’t think this matches the story
            as we encounter it in the gospel of John.
 
This woman is not sinful, she has no need of repentance,
            and those who have made her so
            have asked her to carry a shame that is not hers to bear.
 
In fact, in John’s gospel, sin has nothing to do
            with past actions or present indiscretions;
rather, sin is always an indicator of a broken relationship with God,
            which the presence of Christ is always seeking to restore.
 
But there is another side to this too,
            which is the desire of some preachers to rehabilitate the Samaritan woman,
            to cast her as a hapless but virtuous victim.
 
And the problem with this, as my friend Meredith Warren puts it,
            is that ‘attempting to rehabilitate the Samaritan woman
            reinforces normative feminine sexuality’[1]
 
Just as it is unacceptable to demonise the Samaritan woman,
            so it is also unacceptable to try and rescue her
            to some imposed definition of ‘normality’.
 
The truth is, we don’t know why she has been married five times,
            although a plausible scenario
            is a combination of divorce and widowhood.
 
It may be that she was unable to have children,
            and so was divorced by a series of men, each seeking to secure an heir;
and it may be that her living arrangement with the man who is not her husband,
            is the result of the complex arrangements
                        demanded by Levirate marriage law
                        following the death of her final husband.
 
But the truth is that we just don’t know,
            and we cannot impose upon her a normality
            that her abnormal and unusual situation resists.
 
Because it wasn’t normal for a woman to find herself in this situation;
            which means this is a situation that resists normalising,
            every bit as much as it resists condemnation.
 
And again, there will be those here, and those known to us,
            who have been subjected to normalising pressure,
to cast themselves in roles that alleviate the shame
            that society would otherwise heap upon them.
 
There will be those whose personal story defies convention,
            who find themselves being ‘rescued’ or ‘rehabilitated’
            by the imposition of normalisation narratives that are not theirs to own.
 
And this can be every bit as damaging
            as the tendency to demonization.
 
What if some people need neither rescuing nor demonising,
            neither rehabilitation nor repentance?
 
What if the Samaritan woman is one of them?
 
So what’s going on with her?
            And why does Jesus raise the subject of her marital status in the first place?
 
I think the clue is in how she responds.
 
When she goes out at the end of the story,
            into the Samaritan city, to tell what has happened to her,
she simply says to her countrymen,
            ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’
 
What convinces her, and her fellow Samaritans, that Jesus is a prophet,
            is not that he forgives her, or rescues her:
            she doesn’t need forgiving or rescuing.
 
Rather, he sees her, he knows her.
 
What she meets in Jesus is someone who meets her as a fellow human, as an equal,
            in full knowledge of all the complexity of her story,.
 
Jesus neither judges nor normalises,
            he places no expectations upon her in terms of change or status.
Rather, he offers her a gift,
            a new experience of being human,
            which he says will well up in her like a stream of living water.
 
This isn’t Jesus exercising some creepy telepathy, to read her darkest secrets,
            a prospect that many today find deeply terrifying;
rather it’s Jesus knowing her fully, seeing her completely - with all that that involves -
            and welcoming her, as she is, to be part of his new family of followers.
 
And this, surely, is the message of good news,
            that is symbolised by the metaphor of the water
            bubbling up to eternal life.
 
We’ve already seen water transformed into wine at the wedding of Cana,
            and we’ve already heard Nicodemus challenged at night
            to be born of both water and the Spirit.
 
So we already know that water is symbolic in John’s gospel,
            that it points to something beyond itself.
 
And this is what we meet here,
            not in the darkness of night,
            but in the brightness of the noonday sun.
 
Water from Jacob’s well might quench a person’s thirst for a while,
            but the water of life that Jesus offers,
                        the gift that fills a person to overflowing,
            is a new relationship with God
                        which fulfils our deepest needs,
            not once, not just today, but in an ongoing, life-supplying way.
 
Samaritans and Jews had been arguing for centuries
            about which mountain God dwelt on,
            about which high place you should go to, to encounter God.
 
But the proclamation that Jesus, the Jew, gave to the Samaritan woman,
            was that God is no longer to be found on either mountain.
 
The prologue to John’s gospel
            has already proclaimed that the Word has become flesh.
 
The creative and wise word of God,
            is no longer found through words of wisdom, or edicts of the law,
            but in the person of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah.
 
God in Jesus is the one who can tell us everything we have ever done,
            because in the noonday light of his presence,
                        all shadows and secrets, all shame insecurity,
            are vanished and banished,
                        to be replaced with the light of life,
                        the water of eternal life.
 
And this means that wherever Jesus is, God is.
            God is at large in the world, beyond boundaries and borders,
                        outside of temples and sanctuaries;
            taking residence in the hearts and lives
                        of those who follow the invitation of Jesus,
            drawing all humanity into a new relationship with God,
                        where people are fully known, fully seen, and fully loved.
 
And so the Samaritan woman tells her friends,
            and they too recognise the good news of a new relationship with God.
 
They come to believe in Jesus
            not because they have concurred with statements about him,
            but because they have experienced relationship with him.
 
The point of God becoming human,
            the good news of the incarnation,
            is that it reveals the deep relationship
                        that God desires to have with each of us.
 
Salvation is never about abstract assertion, nor dogmatic declaration,
            and it isn’t about some future hope for a better life to come.
Rather, it is about entering into life eternal in the present,
            it is about drinking deeply from the water of life today,
            it is about experiencing the abundance of life in the here and now.
 
And so as we conclude our thoughts on this story,
            and there is much more that could have been said,
I want to leave us with the words of the unnamed Samaritan woman,
            and I want us to hear her challenge to us,
            as it was heard by those in the city in Samaria.
 
Her witness to Jesus is framed as an invitation and a question.
 
            ‘Come and see…’, she says.
 
            ‘Surely, this cannot be the Christ, can it?’, she asks.
 
God is not encountered in the certainty of faith,
            but in the mystery of a question.
 
Witnessing is not about offering people statements of certainty,
            it is an invitation to a relationship.
 
Life is complex, life does not always work out as we planned,
            but in the complexity and uncertainty of life,
the offer of a new relationship with God,
            and the summons to a new way of being,
these are the gifts of the living Christ,
            that well up in our lives like a spring of water
            gushing up to eternal life. (4.14
 
And as my friend put it in the church of St Dunstan in the East,
            ‘Well, who wouldn’t want that for their life?’
 

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[1] Meredith J. C. Warren, Five Husbands: Slut-Shaming the Samaritan Woman, THE BIBLE & CRITICAL THEORY, 2022. https://www.bibleandcriticaltheory.com/issues/vol-17-no-2-fall-winter-2021/vol-17-no-2-2021-five-husbands-slut-shaming-the-samaritan-woman-meredith-j-c-warren/