I think we all know what it feels like to feel rejected. Most of my life at primary and secondary school I can remember being bullied. I can’t remember when it started, I can’t really remember why it started, but people always found a way to put me down and make me feel de-valued and alone. Why wouldn’t they? I was small, I didn’t fight back, I was an easy target. I know I’m sadly not the only one who has very few good memories of school, and often the things that are said over us, and the labels people put on us, that have a nasty habit of sticking with us for years to come. They become ingrained in our identity, part of who we are and what makes us, us, good and bad. In John 5 we find another of the signs that Jesus does to show us why he came to earth, and we hear a little bit about the kind of person Jesus came for.
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“After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.’ But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me,
”Take up your bed, and walk.” They asked him, ‘Who is the man who said to you, “Take up your bed and walk”?’ Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, ‘See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.’ The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working.’”
Here we see the story of a man who’s been an outcast his whole life. This man, 38 years old, had spent most of his life at this pool in Bethseda, with no one to help him, no one to talk to him, and a label of being unclean, unvalued and unimportant.
But then he meets Jesus.
Then he encounters this unconditional, unending, unquenchable love that transforms his life. Jesus doesn’t see him as the rest of the society saw him. Jesus doesn’t judge him. He doesn’t label him. He doesn’t put him in a box and treat him differently to everyone else. He just loves him. And this man gets healed.
Total identity change. The man who was unclean is now clean. The man who was unvalued know feels valued again. The man who was unimportant now knows he is SO important to God. His life is transformed! But not only that but he then meets Jesus again in the temple and Jesus affirms to him “you’re well, you don’t need to live that sinful lifestyle anymore, you’ve been forgiven”. He’s not only changed on the outside but he’s washed clean on the inside. How amazing is that?
But this didn’t go down to well with the religious people at the time. Jesus had broken the rules, he’d worked on the Sabbath, he’d not done things the way they wanted to. You see they’d got so comfortable with their way of doing things, labelling people, preaching at people, telling people the law.. They’d forgotten the whole reason the law exists. They’d forgotten to love.
When Jesus was asked by a Pharisee to what the most important command was, he said it was to Love God with everything you have, and out of that love everyone else including yourself. And he said that all the law makes sense through this, that this is the point of the law, to help us do this.
And you know so often I think the church forgets this. So often we forget that we are first and foremost called to love people. We are called to love people with the same love that drove Jesus to the man in Bethseda. With no motives, no prerequisites, no catches. Just love them. That’s it. We feel the need to place people in boxes, give people labels, if we love people it’s to make them like us.
Why is it when you look at the news, the way the church, God’s people comes across is for what we are against? The labels we put on people and the boxes we put them in, and the fact that we don’t accept people because they are ‘sinners’. Why is it that we have gone from setting people free to making them feel outcast and unaccepted?
This New Years I was at Shift, and we were challenged to stand up and say something we want to see shift in 2014, I said I wanted to see the church known for what are are for and not what we are against. I want to see us known for loving people unconditionally and not expecting anything back. For giving people value and acceptance and welcoming people no matter who they are.
Let’s stop being a church that pushes people out and rejects them. Let’s stop being a church that’s only known for what we’re against. And lets be a church that introduces people to Jesus, and loves people no matter what.
Because that’s what Jesus would do.
