Without Favors in Return--January 22, 2020

Without Favors In Return--January 22, 2020

"Then [Jesus] came again to Cana in Galilee where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Then Jesus said to him, 'Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.' The official said to him, 'Sir, come down before my little boy dies.' Jesus said to him, 'Go; your son will live.' The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, 'Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.' The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, 'Your son will live.' So he himself believed, along with his whole household." [John 4:46-53]

You know what Jesus needs in order to bring someone back to life?

Nothin'.  Absolutely nothing.

Jesus charges no price, makes no transaction, and requires no raw materials in order to restore someone to life.  Just that by itself is amazing, and frankly countercultural.  Ours is a time where everything--everything--is framed by somebody as a deal to be made or a transaction to be brokered.  "What will I get for my trouble?" it is sometimes asked.  Or, it's "Why should we help <gasp> those people, when they haven't done anything for us and have nothing to offer us in return?"  Maybe it is phrased, "People who give their resources to others and don't get anything in return, well, they're losers."  Or maybe it's, "We would be happy to do something for you--but first... we're going to need you to do us a favor."  We have become so used to accepting the terms of deal-making and exchanging favors that it sounds impossible to our ears that there could be a genuinely free gift with no strings, no conditions, and no fine print.  Maybe we have forgotten that we once assumed it was a sign of decency when someone could do the right thing or offer help without a catch.  But Jesus never forgot.

Jesus not only doesn't use his healing power as leverage to get something from the surely influential "royal official" who has come to him for help, but he doesn't even need anything from the father to be the ingredients to power the healing.  Not even faith.

Seriously.  I know that might run counter to our assumptions about the "right religious answers," but notice in the story that Jesus declares healing that restores this young child back to life before anybody believes him.  The young child, of course, is never even on the scene with Jesus, and so doesn't have the chance to believe in Jesus first... and the father only begs.  We don't hear that he trusts Jesus or believes his word until after Jesus has granted the healing.  And as John the narrator recounts the story, he connects the end of the fever with the timing of Jesus saying, "Your son will live," not any sufficient amount of believing from the father.

In fact, it seems that it is Jesus' word that creates faith, rather than faith that powers Jesus' healing.  That's huge.  So much of what passes for Christianity in our culture treats faith as a sort of fuel that God needs in order to make things happen.  We are drowning in prosperity preachers' messages and social media memes that all say variations on, "If you believe hard enough, God will then be able to do X or Y or Z for you."  But the clear assumption that goes unspoken is, "And, of course, if the thing you want doesn't happen, it is because you didn't supply God with enough faith to charge up the ol' divine batteries."

It's really all just a variation on transactional thinking: that God needs us to do some part in order to move the hand of the divine, or that Jesus is just as corrupt as some back-room deal-maker insisting on favors before we get what we are desperate for.  But that isn't how this story goes.  And in fact, it's not really how any story from the Gospels goes.  What the begging father and the dying son bring to the situation is their desperation... which is another way of saying they bring a big plate of hot, steaming nothin'.  And Jesus takes their nothing, their need, their desperation, and has compassion to bring the boy to life exactly on those terms--a restored life in exchange for nothing.  A free gift.  Grace.

Jesus seems to think that the desperation of this father to help his son to live is, by itself, enough reason to help.  He doesn't need to get credit, payment, or appreciation.  The healing that restores the boy to life is sheer unmerited grace--it hasn't even been powered by strong faith, but at best, has been granted alongside of the father's weak and wobbly desperate plea.  

That is good news for us, because if God's action is dependent on the sturdiness of our faith, nothing will ever happen.  Our faith is unsteady and easily misdirected, and we never have anything we can offer God if all of a sudden there were "favors" to be required.  But once we realize that this is how the God we meet in Jesus acts, it will change how we see the whole world, too.  And maybe we will stop insisting on "getting something in return" in our own lives.  Once we see that Jesus conducts his affairs wholly in an economy of grace, maybe we will be able to let go of our insistence that we only ever do something for others if they will do something in return.  Maybe we will finally see that it is not "losing" to give something to someone else without getting paid back, but just the opposite--that the most pathetic thing of all is to keep angling for something in return for helping another person.

Jesus leads us beyond that.  Jesus calls us to life beyond the deathliness of deal-making and transactional thinking.  Maybe we weren't ready for that before today.  Maybe we didn't have the faith to make that move on our own.  That's ok. Jesus didn't need our faith to bring us to life--it's the other way around.  Jesus is bringing us to fuller life than we had been settling for, and his power creates the faith that allows us to get up and walk on his way.

Lord Jesus, our faith is feeble, but you can raise us to wholeness of life when all we bring is empty hands.  Here they are.