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The Third Sunday after Trinity – 20 June 2010
Watching children learn to walk is like watching a meteorite shower for the first time. Every movement is brilliant, every wobble exciting, every fall glorious. It takes months and months of training to prepare children to walk and their training is intense. My mother-in-law told me that she heard a physical therapist say that the movements of babies are almost impossible for adults to imitate, and they are, I have tried. They lay on their backs and kick their legs in the air for hours on end, they pull them selves up thousands of times, they work on their balance one second at a time and after months and months of training, after hours and hours of practice, they take their first step and immediately fall down. They zealously adhere to the routine of stepping and falling and stepping and falling until one day they walk. Except for the lame man who sat outside the gate called Beautiful. When Peter, in the name of Jesus, healed this man who was lame from his birth, a man who had to be carried everywhere he went, his first steps were leaps, hops and sprints. In the name of Jesus, this man, who had never exercised his legs had his shriveled and weak leg muscles immediately strengthened. In the name of Jesus, this man who had never practiced balancing on his feet, began to leap and dance. In the name of Jesus, this man who had never practiced baby steps, began to run. In the name of Jesus, this man skipped the entire developmental stage of learning how to walk and began to run, hop, skip and jump (which, incidentally, where things I could not do in kindergarten as my kindergarten report will attest!)
In the name of Jesus a great and marvelous miracle, a miracle as spectacular as an autumn meteorite shower, was performed. Names in ancient Semitic thought were more than ways to identify and distinguish people. A name was more than just biological nomenclature, a description of the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species of a living creature. A name expressed the very nature or being of a person, which means “the power of a person was present and available in the name of the person.”[1] That is why the Scripture hold the name of the Lord in awe and reverence, because the Lord’s name conveys his power and presence. That is why we have the third commandment which forbids the misuse of the name of the Lord because misuse of the name is a misuse of the Lord. That is why the God told Israel in Deuteronomy 28: 58, “[If] you do not revere this glorious and awesome name – the Lord your God – the Lord will send fearful plagues on you.” Israel was to revere the name of the Lord, because the Lord’s name conveyed the power and presence of the Lord. That is also why in I King 5:5 Solomon said, “I intend, therefore, to build a temple for the Name of the Lord my God, as the Lord told my father David, when he said, ‘Your son whom I will put on the throne in your place will build the temple for my Name.’” In Jewish thought, the name of the Lord conveyed his power and his presence, a power and presence that dwelt in the temple. The temple was consider the place on earth where heaven and earth overlapped because that is where the Name of the Lord dwelt.
However, sometime before 586 b.c. the prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision the glory of the Lord leaving the temple, which means the presence and the name of the Lord left the temple. (Ezekiel 10) The Name of the Lord never came back to dwell in the temple built by Zerubabel or in the temple built by Herod. When the presence of the Lord left the temple, it became an empty edifice to an absent God. The temple sacrifices became bloody, pointless rituals. To paraphrase that infamous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, “What is the temple now if not the tomb and sepulcher of God.”[2] When Jesus denounced the Pharisees in Matthew 23:27 calling them whitewashed tombs, his remarks could have applied to the temple, which was just a beautiful, whitewashed religious monument to a God whose Name no longer dwelt within. Thus, we should see great irony in the lame man sitting outside the Beautiful Gate, a gate overlaid with Corinthian bronze.[3] First, it is ironic for only the outside of the temple was beautiful. The inside of the temple was as disabled and dirty as the lame man sitting outside. Second, the lame man’s disability bared him from entering the temple for no disabled person was allowed to enter the temple precincts. The lame man thus symbolized the impotence of the temple to cleanse and cure the ailments of men.
God, however, was not entirely absent, he was present in Jesus, who was God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God. In the person of Jesus, God’s presence, God’s name, once again dwelt among people. In the name of Jesus, God’s power and presence, moved a man who had never walked to leap, dance and run. In the name of Jesus, God’s power is still active, present and known for when the name of Jesus is proclaimed the power of God is present.
Not all of us suffer from physical disabilities like the lame who sat outside the gate called Beautiful, but we all do suffer from a disability, a life threatening disability, our addiction to sin. There is no part of our being that escapes this addiction. Listen to what Graham Tomlin has to say, “Christian theology pulls no punches. It …thinks of us all, [to put it] bluntly, as addicts. We may not be addicted to drugs or drink, but we remain addicted to a life centered on ourselves rather than God, to putting our own interests before that of others. …Like the alcoholic unable to resist the lure of a quick whiskey on the side, we find ourselves similarly unable to resist for long the sly comment that puts down a colleague at work, or the indolence that watches the sufferings of others and does nothing about them. Our ability to love with all our hearts is about as effective as an alcoholic’s self-control.”[4] The history of all human cultures reveals our desperate search for a cure to our disability, but there is no cure known for sin except the power and presence of God found in the name of Jesus. As Peter said, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12) There is no other name under heaven whereby we can know God, because there is no one name that conveys the power, the presence, the grace and the love of God but the name of Jesus.
We, who know Jesus or rather we who are known by him, have been given a glorious, unfathomable privilege, a privilege the prophets of old longed to have, we have been given the name of Jesus, a name that conveys the power and presence of the Lord Almighty, a name that can cure our disability of sin, a name that lifts us up into the presence of God, a name that communicates God’s great love and forgiveness. Therefore, in the name of Jesus rise up and walk, walk toward the Lord your God and feel free to leap, dance, run, sing and shout!
[1] Richard Longnecker, Acts, pg 294.
[2] My paraphrase of the last line of “The Madman”, The Gay Science, The Portable Nietzsche, ed and trans by Walter Kaufmann, pg 125.
[3] Longenecker, pg 294.
[4] Graham Tomlin, The Provocative Church, pg 114.
