The Angel of Bethesda

As a child, my literary taste was decidedly for the narratives of the Old Testament. That’s where the really riveting action always took place. In Genesis, it was the overwhelming catastrophes of Noah’s Flood or brimstone engulfing Sodom and Gomorrah. Exodus contained the plagues of Egypt, pillars of cloud and fire, and the near-magical quality of Moses’ staff to part a sea, determine a battle, bring water out of a rock, or even wax serpentine. To my eleven-year-old mind, this was Scripture at its finest and I always felt a little disappointed when confronted with sermons on New Testament texts, or at the very least, a touch unfulfilled. Pauline texts were the most burdensome as they contained the least proportion of what I deemed to be “the good stuff.” At least in the Gospels (and in Acts) I was back on narrative ground, though even then I was suspicious of the highly moral atmosphere. When Shamgar picks up an ox-goad to wallop a horde of Philistines, no one urged me to “go and do likewise.” Similar ethical freedom did not exist in illo tempore.   A lesson to be learned lurked around every corner. As a result, my childhood imagination most treasured Gospel passages that have proven to be off the beaten exegetical track.  They are those instances or asides that most curiously rebuff ethical significance and are most certainly not material for exhortation.  With these memories in mind, I intend to salvage something of these passages where they have sunk like ancient shipwrecks deep in my imagination and bring a handful of their hidden treasures to light.

In the fifth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, we find Christ healing a man who has been a paralytic for decades. After languishing by the pool of Bethsaida for thirty-eight years, this invalid can take up his own pallet and walk. Now, told thus far, this story should be just as enthralling as similar Old Testament miracles like Elisha and the widow of Zarapheth or David soothing King Saul with his harp. However, my keen and youthful mind could discern even then, that St. John was not going to leave well enough alone. It was never just a miracle; there were always complications that upstaged the wonderful events. In this case, the story is ultimately about Christ’s authority to heal on the Sabbath. On the surface, this Gospel healing seems to belong in the same genre as the cleansing of Namaan’s leprosy, but I sensed (even if I didn’t consciously reflect on this) that in the time of the prophets the miracles were more important and interesting than the men, but in the time of the Messiah, the Son of Man overshadows even his signs.

Therefore, I desperately wished that the Pharisees had not asked the ex-paralytic about his new Master’s interpretation of Sabbath-keeping but rather, why he spent all those years by that particular pool named Bethesda. I was tantalized by the manuscript discrepancies surrounding verse four (which appears as a footnote in most translations including the NIV, ESV, and RSV) revealing, like a book of ancient lore, that some texts contain versions of the following addition:

“[F]or 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.”

This seemed more promising. It explained the preliminary question of why a conglomerate of invalids would set up camp at Bethsaida. The real prize, however, was that the explanation managed to provide a cause which contained another question. Why would an angel hang out by the Sheep Gate with no clearly delineated purpose but to stir up a pool from time to time? It differed from other accounts of angels appearing to Manoah’s wife or to Zechariah, where a specific message is communicated. It was even distinct from angelic events like the plague on the first-born or the preservation of Daniel from the lions where a discrete action is performed and the angel subsequently disappears. But here, at Bethsaida, it was almost as if I were being told that an angel had been appointed over an earthly place and visited there with some kind of regularity. On top of that, these roiling waters provided healing on the seemingly arbitrary basis of “first come, first served.” 

And yet, as much pleasure as I take from this strange account, it seems to remain an insignificant curiosity. Perhaps this is the reason for its continued relegation to the (sacred) marginalia. Something so tangentially bizarre might be deemed too undignified for the grave purposes of Sacred Scripture. There are also textual concerns that prod NT scholars like Dr. Gordan Fee to argue for the inauthenticity of John 5:3b-4. This is also, I suppose, by implication an argument against its inspired quality. Yet, enough uncertainty remains for its continued inclusion in most major translations, even if that inclusion is functionally equivalent to a textual house-arrest. From a purely literary standpoint, the absence of v.3 would prove problematic when in v.7 the invalid replies to Christ’s question: ‘Do you want to be healed?’ by saying  ‘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.’ At which point, one would expect St. John to add the explanatory gloss ‘The invalid was, of course, absolutely bonkers’ and the section to be titled ‘The Healing of a Lunatic Paralytic’.

I may not like the way Dr. Fee manages to wink angels out of scriptural existence through the powers of critical scholarship, but I hardly have any evidence to say that that St. John’s account will suffer in any seriously theological way without its wonderful Whirlpool Angel. While maintaining the internal coherence of the story, granting full inspired dignity to vv.3-4  still leaves one with a marvel that is, at best, a set-up for Christ’s healing and, at worst, a distraction from it.   Is there any way to include this behind-the-scenes angel as a principal character in the drama while continuing to keep it Christ’s story? Tertullian’s De Baptismo, the earliest Christian writing exclusively dedicated to the sacrament of baptism, may fulfill just such a hope.

Now, on the surface, the institution of baptism seems to have little or nothing to do with John 5 v.4 or even the events of John 5 as a whole. One might even argue that Christian baptism does not exist until the Great Commission and Pentecost. And there is certainly no explicit mention of the practice in the chapter. What then, does Tertullian see in the angel of Bethesda which relates to baptism?   A swift aside on Tertullian’s purposes and methods are in order. 

The inciting incident for De Baptismo is a theological crisis. Tertullian reports that a sect has formed which has made ‘a particular point of demolishing baptism’. Despite this grave situation, his style sometimes strikes our ears as almost playful. For instance, we read in the first paragraph: 

‘But we, being little fishes, as Jesus Christ is our great Fish, begin our life in the water, and only while we abide in the water are we safe and sound.’ 

 It’s tempting to hear these words as being spoken with the tone and inflection of a Kindergarten Sunday School. This, I think, is a failing on our part, and not whimsical indulgence on Tertullian’s. Instead of a school-teacher, imagine that sentence being spoken with the high gravity of a small child. I’m reminded of a story Garrett told me of a boy in an abandoned class-room conducting what seemed to be imaginary battles. When asked what he was doing, the child replied that he was “Fighting Chaos.” After a pause, he added “Some people don’t believe in Chaos. We protect them.” Tertullian’s prose displays a similar holy sincerity. 

Another potential pitfall is that his methods of argumentation may strike us as unpredictable or even arbitrary. There isn’t time to explicate the inner logic of his reading, but for now let it be enough to say that Mr. T’s style is pre-eminently poetic rather than philosophical. (I consider both of these modes to contain a rigorous logic and discipline capable of discovering theological truths.)   He defends the ‘sacred significance’ of the waters of baptism by highlighting the primeval waters of Creation. God created this element before any other and it was already the resting place of the Holy Spirit. And if Creation was accomplished by separating the waters, is it not fitting that it should be the element of our Re-Creation? Tertullian compiles an impressive case for the dignity of water from its material nature and Sacred Scripture. From there, his argument hinges on whether or not God would sanctify this already honorable element into a vehicle of salvation. 

Here Mr. T turns to John 5 v.4 as an outstanding instance that illustrates the larger structure of God’s salvific economy. 

‘An angel used to do things when he moved the Pool of Bethsaida.¹Those who complained of ill-health used to watch out for him, for anyone who got down there before the others, after washing had no further reason to complain. This example of bodily healing was prophetic of spiritual healing, by the general rule that carnal things always come first as examples of things spiritual. Therefore, as the grace of God makes general progress, both the waters and the angel have obtained more power.’

Suddenly, by fitting v.4 into a larger schema, the angel becomes related to any instance where the natural is meant to point to the supernatural, a theme prevalent in John’s Gospel. Think of the woman at the well who politely refuses living water because she doesn’t have a bucket, or the almost comedic shock of Nicodemus’ ‘Can he enter a second time…?’ The tragic frustration of the paralytic’s decades-long vigil by Bethsaida is dissolved by the authority of Christ. Through baptism then, a higher healing takes place and it is available for far more than the multitude around the Sheep Gate.  The angel of Bethesda becomes the angel of the baptismal font, bearing the sacred power of the Spirit of God. In this way, by being caught up in the work of Christ for men’s salvation, our beloved angel neither disappears nor obscures, but serves as a living image of invisible realities. 

The moral of this story? Neither the child nor the adult, enjoys stories which are simply stand-ins for abstract moral or theological lessons. When Sacred Scripture is taken to be just such a collection of tales (albeit for the highest moral and theological purposes), something of their savor is lost. Part of the mystery of divine authorship lies in the fact that the smallest or strangest Biblical passage is as unbreakable and un-interchangeable as the iota of the Law which will never pass away.  There my childish tastes were right in avoiding moral-injected readings. Where I remained a foolish child was in failing to understand that sacred stories always bear the ethical with them. No one gathers flowers for long in the garden of Sacred Scripture without catching the eye of its hidden Gardener.

Raymond visited us recently and read me his new poem. It's well worth the lengthy read.

Muskeg

by Raymond Spiotta

 

It was a Swine’s-Elysium… the suck of mud,

the romp and wallow of it as we would track on through

the slobber of the saturated moss hedging the

sinkholes, our hearts swilling those thousand pockmarks on

the face of that broad bog…. oh, all was squishy gold,

and it was ours for all that unwatched afternoon.

My brother and I’d come up with Elder Ron, our dad,

and the occasion for our flying up here, up

to Mitkof Island, population 3000

all scrunched in one town, Petersburg, was that just then

the liturgical year had reached its climax in the

summer Expositor’s Conference.  The millionaire

fishermen of the congregation, Pastor Leston,

plus the lead pastor of the local PCA 

church, who had thought I guess that his but tenuous-

ly Christian “church” deserved communicatio

in sacris with kosher Petersburg Bible Church...

If there were any OCA or ROCOR outposts,

I never knew: we tagged no strata for those fossils.

We were let in, brother and I, though I was merely in

6th grade, having been only just thrown down this pit of

puberty and homeschooling.  I’m not sure, but

I think the book we tackled then was Genesis.

That synod seeded just one memory in me;

it was something the PCA pard said, comparing

battleships’ dimensions to the Ark of Noah’s.

My birthday fell into this trip.  Added to stash,

three books: After the Flood, One Blood, one more. Oh, I

was deep into all this Young Earth Creationism,

a pleasant polystrate that seamed dark slabs of thought

for moments when my mind would clutch at comfort, turn

from Calvinism to the milder dinosaurs

in Anglo-Saxon chronicles, or Loch Ness monsters; 

or, when sunbeams of truce would interpose, once paused

on getting my fix slurping down Puritan sermons

like horror movies, I would rove outdoors, pretend

that I was somebody from Genesis 11,

a pilgrim chieftain striking bravely out from Babel

toward a whole world washed clean.  It was a time for new

visions, these two weeks were: the Alexander chain,

its mountains bigger, I think, than myth itself, an un-

balance between the sisters night and day there, and

the way that suns would melt to slick and crease the sky

with hammered gold, would curdle clouds into ambrosia…

I learned there also other newnesses.  There was

this vastness in my heart that caught the land’s, whose lords

have made it so Alaska is the one state left

you can still homestead in…  And then, too, there was this

new drink, where broken leaves surrender all their blessing,

changing water into something so much more. 

These days saw also my first fishing – I mean fishing –

not trout, bass, bluegill, catfish: I mean Halibut.

Now, you don’t hold these fishing poles; this kind is bolt-

ed to the gunwale. First the !twitch! twisted the line

down, then I jiggled till it snagged; and I did battle

for that mud-huddling bottom-feeder, and it felt

like I was bulldogging a barn door.  It barged on,

thrashed, writhed just like an anaconda through your bent

intestines till at last I wrangled him on deck,

wrenched him from deep jade murk into the shock of day.

What launched us out to romp there that one afternoon?

It was a kind of sheer play, play ungoverned, there

was no, “I’ll be Nimrod; you be Melchisidek,”

no roles, no rules there, where the forest cut out just

a short march from the Pastor’s house, petered out, left

this muskeg patch: a day’s blank slate, 5 acres square

let’s say, a bubbling chemist’s lab and all the day

a pure experiment as irresponsible

as infancy or the government.  What muskeg is

I’ll tell you.  It’s a swath of slop made up of this

sphagnum moss over waterlogged plant rot in low,

slow undulations that are puckered all over

with swallets, these round pools the size of manholes and

as rusty brown, membrane to package all this sewage

cytoplasm to whose phagocytosis whole

railway cars left there have been known to fall victim,

slowly swallowed.  Here’s how we made our first incursion:

we shed shoes like snakeskin, so nerves could sample that

jungle fecundity – the fungal sponginess

of obsequious green things – straight through our raw feet;

we dabbled toes in one of those brown slurry-pits,

next, perched upon its soggy brim; next, dangled all

leg beneath knee, mammals shifting amphibian…

frogs in dire crawl-evolving water, we succumbed;

even Narcissus couldn’t get as hypnotized

by this pool too mote-shot to mirror anything

as we got, looking down, musing its depth must be

scarce more than two feet.  Here I Stand – or did!  Feet slipped

like lightning through the false floor of glum trub; I tell you,

we were butt-deep in this stuff till we snagged, our faces

breaking with 2-yr-old enrapturement and luck

of things unlooked-for.  Now adieu to cleanliness,

compromised, shirts shattled; now we’d go whole hog from

one to a hundred almost-portals to the neth-

erworld.  Jurassic swampbeasts, we had Dionysus

now to loose the dance; and all those sinkholes were

so many ants to stomp, packing bubbles to pop.

We fumbled out of each one like amino acids

from primordial soup, we tested each one’s depth.

They differed. (But they could not go below the bed-

rock, that so-shallow bedrock that makes muskeg muskeg.)

But our care was not then for the Eben Shetiyah;

it was all for the way this pseudopodded hogwash

glommed on our surface like the tentacles of that

stowaway kraken in the shrimp-cage we’d tugged up,

oozing like glue over the deck, with ancient, glazed,

impotent, lazy, crafty evil in his eyes. 

Our care, as we slinky-ed like walruses or lobbed

ourselves up like Leviathan to slosh out on

soft moss like neon gangrene, was all for the way

the sludge lingered to kiss us, like the overripe

smooch you plant on a baby’s face to make him laugh.     

As we plumbed down, plucked up, were half-drowned, got dredged up,

those sump-pumps purged, submerged, like Lethe: I lost thought

of all but how we were the only sons of Adam

here, and did my brother need a keeper? for

we both were free, and thick as thieves, as thick as mud

that clung to us, that felt just how “galoshes” sounds…

Gushing like geysers with our twinned, our absolute

animal brotherhood, we stomped, we dominated,

how we binged, we purged, squelching like liposuction…

I’d said I got a third book as a birthday present.

It was Desiring God, a book by John Piper,

and it’s almost embarrassing how much this one

book changed my life.  I had, I’d said, just turned that page

where all the words seem strange; my gums had forked stalactites

like new roots, and, next thing I knew, I had this tooth

for beauty.  Beauty.  Yes: that’s what those mountains were;

that’s what makes you annex ten extra souls to fling

thought out into the warfulness of Asgard, or

waft soft down into gentler Vanaheim, so when

I’d read Surprised by Joy I knew exactly how

Clive felt to be rapt upward by some moment’s half-

immortal Valkyrie to temporary heaven…

but here, I found another word of his set down,

quoted thus:  “We are half-hearted creatures, that fool

about with drink, sex, and ambition when infinite

joy is offered us, just like an ignorant

child who wants to go on making mud-pies in

a slum because he can’t imagine what is meant

by a holiday at sea.  We all are far too easily

pleased.”  And how I craved that sundered half of heart,

with all my dread of hell – to trade mud-pies for breakthrough...

In my first great awakening I had read Whitefield,

then Edwards, yearning for some fly-by-night forever

to punctuate my equilibrium and make

me make that quantum leap of “saving faith” – but there,

there on the couch where every morning brother and I

sat as our dad read straight through all the Pentateuch

to us – all, bit by bit, before he’d head to work –

there on that couch alone I’d sob to my dog, wishing

to sink down through its fabric, a Slough of Despond…

but this once I just barely felt the heavens tremored

by some heart’s-Valkyrie, and on this reckless

gust of hope I winged back to the swing-set, and swung,

taunting the hunter he would catch me in the end.

But here I’d be, then, later, swinging, states away,

behind the Pastor’s house, in view of Crystal Mountain,

frantic to splice rainbows and oceans to my best

approximation of the “glory” I was told he had –

me, a mere Messalian holding out for some

1st-Temple Glory-Cloud, a Manichaean lightshow

like I’d later read St. Austin fell for for

a spell… but what was all that flimsy dwimmercraft

to not be broken by the face then waked in me,

the face of Kelsey Schmidt, 1st chair clarinet

at Hubble Middle School where I was “homeschool boy”

for each day’s one-hour dosage of The World…?

What could usurp that face’s keen uniquenesses?

For they were like the dayfalls here up north, which I

would open my eyes wide for like a poacher’s sack,

since not a one would come to me again; I gorged

myself on gore, heartbreak sunsets like Ragnarok,

clouds slashed, and gilt spilt crimson viscera of God’s

huge love… but who that ferryman was I did not

yet know, Skidbladnir’s helmsmen, who might shanghai me

to sail straight through those clouds, old Diotima sporting

like some valkyrie mermaid about the prow, the sun’s

gold-vermilion sea-path a runway we take off from,

as she would teach me how to fall forever in love,

so deep you come unto this place where poles switch, grav-

ity backfires…; but no, I might as well have had

my back unto that sun, playing with shadows like

mud-pies, some dumb caveman; no phoenix, not even

an archaeopteryx, but just some shabby reptile…

One of those sunsets wasn’t long in coming now,

and so we loped out waddling under our bemucked

swaddling sheets.  Mother would be waiting. Home

awaited, my new drink waited to warm me: so

we changed our ways and left the place where the bedrock

had been so close, but not touched, and to Petersburg

were drawn just like a pair of animals.  And when

Pyrrha saw us, she smiled, and we got hosed down good, 

outside this house in Peter’sburg, and entered through

its cedar portal like new men, in time for supper.