How Do You Find Real and True Rest in a Restless World?

I don’t remember when I first saw it, but when I did, I was hooked.   I wanted that!   What was that?  It was something called Calgon, which seemed to be a magical potion that transported you to a land of bliss and beauty.

At least that’s what the commercial told me.  It started out with this poor woman crying out as the dog barked, the boss yelled, the baby cried, and the traffic honked.  All of it was driving her nuts.  But in her desperation, she said the magic words!  Calgon, take me away!  In an instant she found herself in this spectacular tub in a palace in a magical land.  I had no idea what Calgon was, but it if could do that, I wanted some. 

Now, since then, my Calgon bubble has burst.   I’ve learned.   Calgon can’t miraculously transport you to a blissful land of bubble baths in beautiful palaces.   But that image has stuck with me, because isn’t that what we all want?   Maybe not that exactly but rest, a place where we can let all the stress, all the burdens go, where we can truly be at peace in every way.   Don’t you ever yearn for that, a place like that?   Yet, here’s the problem.  Does it even exist?  Can it ever exist?   Yet if it doesn’t exist, why do we yearn for it, so deeply yearn for it so that just showing a picture of it for a few seconds sells us on Calgon?  Maybe because it does exist.   As C.S. Lewis put it.  “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

But what is this other world, and can it even exist in this world?   In this story of a healing gone wrong, Jesus shows us the way to such a peace, such a place of rest.  Let’s listen and hear what Jesus has to say.

John 5:1-18

Have you ever thought in the crazy, hectic life that so many of us lead, isn’t there a better way?   Have you ever yearned for a life with more peace, a life where we can really rest?  Even when we have a day off, it doesn’t seem to happen.   Let’s say you decide to take the family to the beach, but along the way you and your spouse get in a huge argument over what you can’t remember.  Then the kids complain about the sand in their suits and one of them gets sunburned.   By the time, you get back to the car, you’re drained, exhausted and cranky.   Still what do you do?   You get everybody together for a big smiling picture that you can post to Facebook or what it should be called Fakebook.   Look another awesome family day at the beach!

Is that rest?  Really?  How do you get to a place of true rest, not just glimpse it in some rare stolen moment, but live it more and more each day?   How does that happen?  In this story of a healing gone wrong, Jesus shows us the way. 

The story begins so well.   Jesus goes to this pool in Jerusalem where all the sick people hang out.  They hang out there because there’s a belief that every now and then an angel stirs up the water, and the first one in after the stirring gets healed.   Likely there was no angel, just a bubbling up from the spring that fed the pool from below.  But hey, if you’ve got no other option to get well, why not hang out at the pool?  What do you have to lose?

So Jesus goes there, and finds one poor guy who has been hanging out there for 38 years.  Now this kind of rest, nobody wants.   This guy doesn’t have rest.  He has a prison sentence, one that has kept him locked up in a broken body for almost 40 years.   So Jesus comes to set him free. 

The man doesn’t approach Jesus.   Jesus reaches out to him.  Interestingly enough, this is always the pattern.   Even before we reach out to God, God is reaching out to us.   The Bible tells us that even the questions we have about God are prompted by God.   God is always seeking us out, and God uses any means to connect to us, including questions and doubts,   If you’re wondering about God, it’s because God planted that wondering in your heart.   God always moves first, even when we think God hasn’t.   

Yet when Jesus moves, when he asks.  “Do you want to be healed” what does the man say?   He says, “Sure, I’d like some help to get to the water when the angel stirs it up.  Can you help me with that?”   Do you see the irony of what he’s asking?   He’s saying to Jesus, “I need you to help me get to what will save me, to that pool of water.  But, Jesus, the One who can actually save him is standing right in front of him.”  But we do the same thing.   We come to Jesus, and say, “Jesus help me save my marriage or my career or my health or whatever.  Because if my marriage gets better or my career gets saved or my health improves, then everything will be ok.”    But as good as those things are, they don’t save us.   They’re good but they’re not ultimate.  They don’t really give us what we ultimately need.  Only Jesus does that.   Yet instead of looking to the One who can ultimately save us, we ask him to get us to what we think will.  

And this man does just that.   When Jesus heals his body, he thinks he’s good, but he’s far from well.   His body might be made whole, but his spirit that’s a very different matter.  When the religious leaders come after him for carrying his mat on the Sabbath, what does he do?    He throws Jesus under the bus, or at least he tries to, except he doesn’t know Jesus’ name.

And when Jesus sees him again, he knows.   He knows that this man he healed is still far from well.  Whatever his outward body looks like, inside he’s still crippled by fears and insecurities.  That’s why Jesus warns him about sinning.  Jesus wants to heal this man inside and out, but all this man wants is healing on the outside.  He doesn’t want Jesus to go any further.  So instead of letting Jesus save him, he gives up Jesus, the man who healed him, to the leaders he fears so much.  

Ultimately, that’s what really sabotages us in our lives, the stuff inside, the lies we tell ourselves, the fears we let rule, the anxieties to which we cling.   Whatever foolish and hurtful actions we do to ourselves and others, they begin with that brokenness inside.   Yes as much as Jesus yearned to heal this man inside, it didn’t happen.  The healing only went so far.   This man’s broken body might have found healing and rest, but his spirit was as broken and restless as ever.

So the leaders come after Jesus.   And what does Jesus do?   He doesn’t apologize.  He doesn’t justify.   He doesn’t defend.    Why?   He knows.  The only One who gets an exemption from the Sabbath rules is God.   So how does he reply?  He tells them.  “My Father and I gotta do what we gotta do.”  And they’re appalled.  They have every right to be.  Jesus is claiming the same exemption.   Jesus is telling them.   “God has come to earth in me.”

But more than that, Jesus is showing us what God deems so important that even the Sabbath can’t stop it.   What is that work?  It is making the Sabbath what God intended the Sabbath to be, not just in our outer world (as important as that is), but more crucially in our inner world, the very work that Jesus tried to complete in the man by the pool. 

In the Creation story God rested on the 7^th day.  Now why was that?  Was he tired?  Of course not.  God was satisfied.   God was content.  God was at peace.   God had completed his work.   God intended Sabbath not just to be about physical rest.  That outward rest is only meant to lead you to the inner one, to the place where you truly need rest.   Why is it that even when you take a day off, it so often it doesn’t feel restful but hectic in a different way?   It’s because whatever work you and I might have stopped; the work behind the work continues on.   Our minds buzz with worries and anxieties, with things to be done, with resentments and disappointments that rent space in our head.  Whatever work has stopped on the outside, the frenzied work behind the work is going full blast.  And that’s where you ultimately need rest.  That’s what the Calgon commercial hints at, to where you truly need peace, not simply in your outward activity but at your deepest core.

As Shabbat ends, Jews pass a box of spices, and pray words such as these.  Just rest in the vision they give.

The added soul Shabbat confers is leaving now, and these spices will console us at the moment of its passing.  They remind us that six days will pass, and Shabbat return.   And their bouquet will make us yearn with thankful heart for the sweetness of rest and the fragrance of growing things; for the clean smell of rain-washed earth and the sad innocence of childhood; for the dream of a world healed of pain, pure and wholesome on that first Shabbat, when God, finding all things good, rested from the work of creation.

That’s the true rest to which every Sabbath points.   And that Sabbath Jesus came to bring, the ultimate rest.  That’s what he yearned to give that man by the pool, what he came to give us.   What were Jesus’ last words on the cross?    He said. “It is finished.”   And he meant it.   The work was once again coming to completion. The healing of creation, our healing had begun.

How did it happen?  On that cross, Jesus took all the junk that takes our rest away, our chasing after good things as if they were ultimate things, and the fears and insecurities and restless pain that chase brings.   At the cross you can lay those burdens down.    You can rest your hearts in the Only One who can complete you, who can heal you, who can bring you back to the wholeness of that first Shabbat.    You can lay those burdens down because at the cross Jesus took them up.  Jesus entered into the ultimate work so that he could give you ultimate rest. 

And more and more as we live into this reality, then less and less will you and be tempted to make good things ultimate things.  Less and less will the work behind the work take hold.   More and more, even when you are working, you will be at rest.   So come and lay your burdens down.   Let Jesus take them up.   For his yoke is easy and his burden islight, and here you will find rest for your souls.