Jesus said to him, “Do you want to get well?”

“Sir,” the sick man answered, “I don’t have a man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I’m coming, someone goes down ahead of me.” (John 5:6-7)

Jesus asks one of his famous questions, and the crippled man’s response seems almost patronizing. Like, “Clearly you don’t understand how this thing works. Let me explain it to you. These are the steps necessary for me to achieve healing, and yet clearly they aren’t working for me.”

He is answering with methodology and inability. Jesus is asking a question of desire and faith.

How often I have this same idea in my mind about how things should work, how to get from A to B. How to be healed. How God’s promises should be fulfilled. But, like this man’s idea, many of mine are rooted in works, not faith. Jesus offers a gift, but so much more than just the gift of the end result – Jesus offers freedom from a crippling, enslaving way of thinking. Jesus offers the freedom of faith. Jesus offers freedom through and through.

Jesus asks a question that cuts through to desire, to worldview, to understanding and perception of God – how he works, his character. He wants to reveal to us how small our view is of his love and his graciousness. He wants us to see that his gifts are better than anything we could earn.

May Jesus open our eyes to who he really is. May he awaken faith in us, trust in him and his goodness, not some formula or process. May our hearts be opened to his gifts – more than we can ask, more than end results, but a new creation from start to finish.

The sun sets on Bethlehem’s horizon, dragging with it the heat of the day. The dark and the chill of the night creep in, spread across the land, find their way through open windows, cracks in walls, find their way into skin and bones, make themselves at home. A people living in darkness kneel in darkness, heads bowed by a weight they cannot shake, and beg God for mercy. Beg him for a miracle. Plant yet more tears in the poisoned soil of their lives.

The first Christmas day has risen and fallen. The wait is over. Jesus is here. But for every joyful shepherd or seeking wiseman, there are thousands who go to sleep that night still waiting for their miracle. Still unaware that God has not only heard and answered, but become. Immanuel. Redemption has arrived.

The wait is over, yet still they wait. Still they wake in the middle of the night, plagued by trembling heart and aching soul. They cry out in the all too familiar refrain: “How long, Lord, how long?” For all they can see, the promise of God is still unfulfilled. For all they know, there is nothing to believe in but silence and emptiness.

Across town, the promise lays asleep in a manger. The miracle sleeps. Light asleep in darkness.

 

This will not be the last time Jesus sleeps. This will not be the last time the power of Jesus underwhelms, delays, displays itself as apparent inaction. The storms will come and Jesus will sleep in the sinking boat. The dead will be buried and Jesus will sleep for three more nights. The cross will kill and Jesus will sleep.

If I am honest, sometimes I wonder if he is sleeping still. We wait and wait and cry and beg for mercy. For miracle. We hang all our hopes on him and wonder if he will ever show up. Jesus sleeps and we resign ourselves to our inevitable end.

Christmas tells a different story: Immanuel, God with us now. Jesus has shown up, though maybe not in the way we expected. The promise has been fulfilled, even if our eyes can’t see it. The miracle is a reality long before we ever see the proof. Jesus sleeps, but the storm will be calmed, the dead will rise, all things will be redeemed.

“Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.”

(Habakkuk 3:17-18)

“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—

how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”
(Romans 8:32)

I begin at the end.

Not because I can see it on the horizon. Not because I can see the path to it. Not because I can see, but precisely because I can’t.

If I am brutally honest, I do not even believe in this end. I look around at the rubble and ash, and think: impossible. There is no way from here to there.

Which is why I must write about the end now. Because at the end, there is redemption.

There must be.

It is the hardest truth to believe, but the only one I cling to when I doubt everything else: the redemption of all things.

Even now, I think again: impossible! There are some things too horrible, some wounds that cut too deep. Crushed beneath the weight of injustice, suffering, death… can there really be redemption at the end?

There must be.

The redemption of all things.

Yes, even that.

And not just a bandage. It is not enough for the past to be merely wiped away. We require redemption.

Strength from weakness. Life from death. A crown of beauty from ashes.

We require a love powerful enough to redeem us beyond mere restoration.

Impossible.

And yet…

• What was meant for evil, God used for good.
• Dry, dead bones coming to life.
• Lazarus hears the Voice of the Resurrection and the Life… of all things.
• All things work together for the good of those who are His.
• Restoration of all the years the locusts stole.
• Death swallowed up in victory.
• The God become man, who came to die, not just to destroy our curse, but to redeem it with His life in us – better off broken and redeemed than never lost at all.

Jesus, the Redeemer of all things.

Impossible, and yet there is no other hope. There is no other name.

Jesus.