Who Was That Masked Man?

Who was Jesus?

For many, he’s a mystery.

It’s easy enough to say he died for our sins. It's quite another matter to comprehend what that means – or what we should do about it.

Most Baptists preach you don’t have to do a thing: you just have to believe it.

Every day with Jesus, we proclaim, is sweeter than the day before. Baptist Sunday schools are adorned with pastel drawings of Jesus the good shepherd, surrounded by preternaturally white sheep and laughing little children.

He seems like a nice guy. He died to save us. But for many of us, he then disappeared into the sunset like the Lone Ranger. Barely understanding who he was and what he did, our belated reaction is like the old prospector: “Who was that masked man? I wanted to thank him.”

But it can be disturbing to look too deeply into what Jesus did and said.

A recent posting in The Port Chester Patch noted how difficult Jesus can be, especially when he commands us to love people we despise.

Many of the 88 responses to the blog took issue with the notion of “loving thy enemy,” which they felt should not be extended to Jihadist terrorists. Loving terrorists, one said, was a “screwball” idea. Another responder wrote, “Gee, Maybe we all should pray for Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin and all the other sick minded individuals around … Yup, just believe in Jeasus (sic) he sure does love us.”

It’s impossible to know where these responders got their religious training, but one thing is sure: there is no Christian church in Port Chester, the United States, or the world that denies Jesus told us to love our enemies. He didn’t leave any room for misinterpretation:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’” (Matthew 5:43-44).

And yes, Jesus – who extended his love to those who betrayed him, stripped him, beat him, and nailed his wrists to a cross beam – would tell us to extend the same love to history’s most abominable villains.

That’s his commandment, and that's the example he set. It’s not an easy example, and our gut instinct is to reject “love your enemies” as a screwball idea. But by that standard, Jesus is full of screwball ideas:  sell all you own and give the proceeds to the poor; smile passively at someone who slaps you upside the head; give your coat to a thread-bare person on a cold day.

Jesus’s teachings strike a lot of people as crazy. His intent, of course, was to model God’s unconditional love for all people. Loving one another unconditionally is hard because it requires behaviors that contradict our natural tendencies to wallow in the seven deadly sins. (*) It’s easier to dismiss the quirkier sayings of Jesus than to face the reality of what he meant – and how he expects us to embrace one another.

More than two millennia after Jesus walked the earth, it’s no wonder he remains a mystery to many of us.

But one of the Gospel readings for the Sixth Sunday in Easter reminds us it was no easier to understand Jesus when he stood beside you.

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids--blind, lame, and paralyzed.

One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”

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 making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”

Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”

At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a Sabbath. (John 5:1-9)

No one knows the name of the paralytic of Beth-zatha, but his rudeness is striking. It almost makes you stop caring that he has been ill for 38 years.

Granted, his life is terrible and he is surrounded by jerks. Every time he manages to drag his useless limbs to the edge of the curative waters, some able-bodied person jumps in ahead of him.

He has been lying in the same place for a long time, probably fuming every time someone pushes him out of the way. If life wasn’t bad enough, a stranger leans over and asks, “Do you want to be made well?”

The poor guy rolls his eyes. The stranger is either taunting him or oblivious to what is going on.

Stifling his sarcasm, the guy spells out to the stranger what should be painfully obvious. “Every time I get close to the water, some two-legged ass jumps in front of me.”

But the stranger has not come to debate him. “Stand up,” he says abruptly. “Take your mat and walk.”

Before he can think about it, the man is rising to his feet. He is so dazed by the unexpected development that he just keeps walking. And walking. He shows little interest about the person who made him walk.

Even if he turned around to see who cured him, it wouldn’t have mattered. Jesus had disappeared into the crowd. The former paralytic scores zero on the curiosity scale and a perfect ten on the ingratitude scale.

While the poor guy had no idea who cured him, he must have been terrified by the pious passers-by who scolded him for carrying his now worthless mat on the Sabbath.

But in 38 years, the guy has learned a thing or two about survival. He quickly shifts the blame to the mysterious stranger.

“The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” (John 5:11) Who ever he was.

But Jesus has not disappeared from his life quite yet. Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.”  (John 5:14)

Even then, the man fails to fall on his knees in gratitude to Jesus; he seizes an opportunity to ingratiate himself with those who criticized him for carrying his mat on the Sabbath.

“The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath.” (John 5:15-16)

Thus is recorded the moment when the persecution of Jesus began.

Actually, as Bishop N.T. Wright wrote, Jesus’ “very presence was subversive. He was born in the run, fleeing Herod … He came into the world with a death sentence already hanging over him, as the paranoid old tyrant up the road got wind of a young royal pretender.”

Garry Wills, in What Jesus Meant, points out that it was religion that killed Jesus. Jesus was anti-religious, Wills contends, and he opposed small-minded religious habits that harmed people, including the Sabbath law that made it a criminal offense to heal the sick – or to get up and walk, carrying one’s mat.

“What is the kind of religion Jesus opposed?” Wills asks. “Any religion that is proud of its virtue, like the boastful Pharisee. Any that is self-righteous, quick to judge and condemn, ready to impose burdens rather than share or lift them. Any that exalts its own officers, proud of its trappings, building expensive monuments to itself. Any that neglects the poor and cultivates the rich, any that scorns outcasts and flatters the rulers of this world.”

Oops. “If that sounds like just about every form of religion we know,” Wills concludes, “then we can see how far off from religion Jesus stood.”

Among the many lessons to be learned from the story of the paralytic at Beth-zatha, two points are compelling.

One, the paralytic himself had no idea who Jesus was, He was so stunned by his sudden ability to walk that he forgot to be curious about him, or express thanks for the miracle.

That’s probably not his fault. His life changed so radically in matter of seconds he was probably experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome. And no one knows if he was trying to get Jesus in trouble when he identified him as the culprit who cured him. 

But we do sense that he was acting very much like we do at times. He was glad enough when his situation changed from bad to good but he was unwilling or unable to reflect on how it happened or how he should react. The Son of God crossed his path twice, and there is no record he saw any need to take advantage of his new ability to walk and follow him.

The second point is an indictment of the pious passers-by who threaten the miraculously healed man because he was carrying his mat on the Sabbath.

The cured paralytic responds with too little. The pious passers-by respond with too much, blind to the miracle in their midst because their vision is clouded by centuries of social and religious custom.

For both, Jesus remained a mystery. He remains a mystery for many of us who are unable to comprehend his “screwball” ideas: abandoning the ornate and shallow facades of religion, becoming intimately involved in the lives of the poor, proclaiming peace and justice, opposing violence, loving your enemies.

But Jesus is a figure we cannot ignore: an individual of “devastating greatness and incomprehensibility,” as Romano Guardini wrote, “a figure even more colossal and incomprehensible than any conveyed by even the most daring statements of St. Paul or St. John.”

Wills writes, “Jesus ghosted in and out of people’s lives, blessing and cursing, curing and condemning. If he was not God, he was a standing blasphemy against God. The last thing he can be considered is a ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild.’”

When this figure of devastating greatness passes near us, he may be hard to understand and his commandments of unconditional love may be hard to accept.

But he cannot be covered and concealed in the minutia of our church customs and social biases. 

And he must not be ignored.
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(*) In case you missed it when Sister Mary Perpetua covered the seven deadly sins, they are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. I usually engage all seven of them every day, often before lunch.