What Abides

... for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool,
and troubled the water: whoever stepped in first after the troubling of
the water was healed of whatever disease he had.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

It is a spiritual truth that the only reality is God and that everything else is illusory, temporary, and fleeting. We might say that encircling and interpenetrating the illusion of the world is the light of Everlasting Heaven breaking in through its many chinks and cracks. St. Basil the Great wrote that the most worldly man is covered with mud, yet the sun-rays of the Holy Spirit will find a little chink in the mire of his sin to penetrate and fill him with hope, prompting him to make a new life and to wash himself of his personal filth.

Here on earth, we have it backwards. We say that experiences of the holy are fleeting, momentary, a fractional glimpse into the Divine. Reality consists in the things we can touch and which stimulate our physical senses.

But as far back as the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (b. 1710), who used optics to prove that we cannot directly map a right angle onto the brain using a spherical eye, we have understood that there is some other layer or process between us and the world. You see, he proved that we cannot directly impress our senses with physical objects called reality. There is some other force or entity between our minds and what we call the world. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg (b. 1901) pointed out that the presence of an observer renders direct apprehension of the world impossible. You see, once we shed light on the object we wish to observe, and nothing is visible without light, the photons have struck the electrons of the atoms you wish to see and they are already gone at the time you wish to seem them. Direct and precise apprehension of the world is not possible. Reality turns out to be elusive if not illusory.

Yet, we do not need philosophers or physicists to know down deep that the things of God are the only things that are permanent, stable, and immune to deterioration. Everything else is subject to corruption and will become ever more so, disintegrating finally into dust. The classical physics of Newton (b. 1643) posits that every spontaneous event contributes to the disorder of the universe (Second Law of Thermodynamics). Imagine, every single thing that happens makes the universe more disorderly. Our sacred book of Genesis describes this with unerring accuracy, and the Psalms repeat it: our world is built upon chaos and constantly tends back toward chaos — everywhere and with every tick of the clock. In terms of living creatures, everything will decline, wither, and rot.

On earth, however, there is one exception. Only one. God created His human creatures to be permanent. Being made in His Image, God plans a life for humans that is subject to the world for a time, but intended for eternity and for Him. In like measure, humans are the only creatures created to become holy. The destiny He foresees for each of us is holiness and, therefore, familial intimacy with Him, our Father.

How different are these two views of reality — material and spiritual. The material world, insisting that everything be measured and weighed according to its standard of atoms and cells, proposes that other orders of being, least of all the Kingdom of Heaven, do not exist (either through benign neglect or outright repudiation). By contrast, God, the Transcendent Spirit, not only affirms the material world. He made it ... while reposing Himself in a changeless, spiritual realm to which He invites all humankind.

Each day we countenance this convergence of the material and spiritual when we pray the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds, as one example: "I believe in God ... I believe in the resurrection of the body." It is the body, therefore, which is the celebrated focal point of this cosmic convergence ... as the Incarnate God is the place where Heaven meets with earth. How wonderful! Of all earthbound things the human body is made to be the holiest material creation and the only permanent creature. How ironic then that the one thing which the sciences refuse to countenance, the resurrection of the body, turns out to be the most important material fact in the universe. For beyond our permanent selves, only the angels, the saints in light, and the Holy Trinity remain. Well, there is that other realm of darkness, which is also permanent, but we need not go into that this morning.

We love the word holy. This morning, let us consider for another most remarkable word, permanent — that is, when all the dust has cleared, what abides.

Is not this the scene set before us at the Pool of Bethzatha? An "angel of the Lord" touches the waters of the pool with the life-giving quality of Heaven's Kingdom. The waters become lifegiving as well, as all of Heaven is the fullness of life. Anyone who enters these waters with their disease and brokenness is healed, but in that selfsame act, the waters are polluted and made unholy such that anyone who follows is not healed. The premise is that disease and sin are intimately linked. You see, it is not just infectious disease that is of concern — the chance that a diseased cell will reach another person in the medium of the water. No, that's not it. It is much more than this. It is the fact that sin alienates life and ushers in the culture of death. As Jesus reminds the paralytic whom He has just healed,

"See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse befall you."

Sin no more.

This presents us with a picture of reality, which we, inured to materialism, might find hard to accept. We view disease as being an objective external having nothing to do with our moral state. But even at the level of common sense, this is not true across the board. Are sexually transmitted diseases not the outcome of moral failure? (And these are epidemic, if not pandemic.) Are collapsed veins and shattered minds discontinuous from heroin injections? Is most obesity not the result of gluttony? Is shattered long- and short-term memory not the inevitable outcome of constant marijuana use? Is a wasted liver and lost mental capacity not caused by drinking alcohol? Here, in the United States, a society founded upon individual rights, we are used to overturning general principles with lone examples, solitary examples: "Well, I know someone with AIDS who got if from a blood transfusion" or "I have a friend with Hepatitis C who did not contract it from drug use or promiscuity." Yes, there are exceptions. Nonetheless, general rules are never framed from exceptions. This would turn logic on its head. The example-of-one does not overturn the preponderance of truth. Truth in the the natural world is what is mostly true. Outliers or exceptions, found to the left and right of a bell curve, are just that: outliers and exceptions. And we must admit that the leading causes of disease and death in the world are mostly preventable and have more to do with our choices than we want to admit.

The medical doctor might say that genetic mutation and infectious disease have nothing to do with immorality. But while the ancient Church does reject the doctrine of Original Sin, it accepts the premise of generational disease. For all disease and death itself came about through disobedience and sin in Eden. Moreover, remission of disease brought about by prayer is never granted to those who are separated from God. God's abundant and manifold blessings alight upon the faithful alone, and it is "the souls of the righteous [that] are in the hands of God" (Wisdom 3:1). God is our Father. Like any Father, He longs to bless His children. But as with all parents, He cannot bless everything we do and say. As all parents do, He must patiently endure the children whose lives cannot be cause for mirth or blessing.

It is ironic that Jesus has become known as the healer or the good physician because He healed very few. As He Himself reminds us, Heaven does heal but only where Heaven touches the Creation with its high focus and light — always rare, however remarkable:

"... the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah,
when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a
severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except
to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel
in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman
the Syrian." (Luke 4:24-27)

And he tells the multitude on one occasion:

When the crowds were increasing, He began to say, "This generation is
an evil generation; it asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it
except the sign of Jonah. For just as Jonah became a sign to the people
of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation."

Without question, Jesus is the Lord of Life. It was within His power simply to raise His hand and heal "this generation" and all, in Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Phoenicia, .... the whole world and in a twinkling. But, in fact, He healed only a tiny, tiny fraction.

The purpose of Jesus' ministry was not to heal, but rather to remind us of the only and true reality and good, which is the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not come to fix our world. He does not pray for our world (Jn 17:9). Indeed, He brought not peace but a sword (Mt 10:34). He came to point us away from the world, that wherever and whenever anyone should draw near to Heaven, there they will find life, and, yes, healing and abundance of good. The Advent of Christ permitted people to see, even to touch, the Kingdom of God ... unthinkable to anyone who knows anything about the Day of the Lord or the Coming of the Kingdom. Remarkable! Miraculous!

The world we find in the Gospels is one that is filled with disease, death, and demon possession. It is not a happy place. It is not a gladsome place where children pray. In our pericope today, we find that from time to time Heaven touches a small part of it, a small part of this broken world: the Pool of Bethzatha. From time to time an angel endows it with the life-giving properties of Heaven. In this pure state, the pool becomes a little circle of Heaven's life, a little unspoiled Garden of Eden. As soon as sin and disease enter this pool, two things happen. First, he or she is healed. Next, the waters are despoiled as Eden was despoiled when sin and disease entered it. Everything in the Creation is despoiled by sin, and our own world is filled with moral and bodily disease. Sin alienates holiness. The Lord's angel must touch the waters with Heaven's power again and again and in certain seasons.

The meaning of the Pool at Bethzatha — entering it in brokenness, emerging in purity and wholeness — was not lost on the people of Judea who encountered John the Baptist. He invited them to bring their diseased souls to the waters of Heaven and be healed. He was the man of Eden, the natural man who lived on manna in the wilderness with God, and he promised his countrymen and -women that there was a way back to Eden. The Gospels record that

... people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people
of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in
the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

St. Peter described the Baptist's ministry as a Noah's Flood. And St. John in his Prologue was forced to strive against the notion that John the Baptist was the Christ.

The Pool of Bethzatha was crowded with broken men longing to be whole. "All the people of Jerusalem" went out to the Baptist to be restored to their Edenic state. Soon the Disciples of Jesus were baptizing more people than John the Baptist (Jn 4:1-2). And God Himself, the Bottomless Well of goodness and sanctity roams the earth inviting people everywhere into waters of Heavenly wholeness and life.

Jesus said to her, "... The water that I will give will become in
them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life."

Sir, I would have this water alway.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.