Scriptures John 5:1-18
“Do You Want to Be
Healed?”
A number of years ago, on a vacation trip to Quebec, I visited the
Cathedral of St. Anne de Beaupre. St
Anne is a beautiful, large Cathedral, located just outside the city of Quebec, which in years
past had a reputation as a site for miraculous healings, especially of people
whose legs were crippled. To this day, on
walking into the Cathedral, just inside the entrance, one will see stacks of
crutches and canes left behind by those who were cured.
Our Scripture reading for tonight takes place at a place
known for healing in the time of Jesus.
The location is the Sheep Gate – in Aramaic, Beth-zatha, one of the
gates in the ancient temple. We’re told
that this gate had five porticoes or porches, in which lay many invalids. At Beth-zatha was a pool, and we’re told that
an angel of the Lord used to come down from time to time and stir up the water,
and whoever made it into the water first – but only that person - would be
healed. While one would be grateful for
the healings, our Gospel paints an almost pathetic picture of frail,
desperately ill people scrambling and tripping over one another to be the first
to get to the water in a frantic competition for healing. It seems a bit unfair – one would expect that
those who were the least infirm, the least in need of healing, would get into
the water faster than those most in need.
Hadn’t someone thought to set up a line so that people could enter the
water in order of arrival? Maybe set up
a system like at the deli counter: “Now
healing number 1,328. New arrivals please take a number for better service.” Didn’t any of those who had been cured ever come
back to help others get to the healing waters? The Gospel reading does raise
some odd questions.
Our Gospel says that Jesus had gone up to Jerusalem for one
of the festivals – we’re not told which one – and that he walked by this
particular gate of the Temple, seeing the many infirm persons there. He speaks to one particular person, who we are
told had lain there for thirty-eight years.
Jesus asks the man, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man tells Jesus that he had nobody
to help him, and that when the water was stirred, someone else always got there
first. Jesus said, “take up your mat and
walk.” At once the man was made well,
and he took up his mat and began to walk.
The little we’re told of the man makes for a fascinating
character study. We might remember
another healing story, the one in the 2nd chapter of Mark’s gospel,
in which a paralyzed man was physically carried by four of his friends to
Jesus. When they couldn’t get into the
house where he taught, the friends tore open the roof of the house and lowered
the man right in front of Jesus, put the guy right in front of Jesus’ nose. By contrast, no friends were tearing open
roofs or even doing so much as lifting a finger for the man Jesus healed at
Beth-zatha. And you would think that,
after 38 years, the man might have moved himself – or enlisted the cooperation
of others to take pity on him and move him - close enough to the edge of the pool
that, even with his limitations, he could manage to lurch himself into the
water first – but, no, that hadn’t happened either. At the very least, the man’s personality hadn’t
endeared him enough to those around him to enlist any aid for his cause, and he
wasn’t exactly overflowing with imagination or initiative. At worst, he could be seen as a malingerer,
one who was perhaps more interested in being pitied than in being healed. On first reading, Jesus seems to be Captain
Obvious in asking his question “Do you want to be made well?” – the obvious
answer would be, “yes, no kidding, that’s why I’ve been laying here for almost
40 years.” But on further consideration,
the question may reflect more insight into the man’s character than we first
suppose. “Do you want to be made
well?” If you’re made well, you’ll no
longer be entitled to the pity of passers by; you’ll have to take up your mat
and walk, to return to the duties and responsibilities of society. Your life will change. Are you ready for all that? Are you ready to take all that on? Do you want to be made well? It’s
telling that the man doesn’t respond to Jesus’ question with “yes” but rather launches
into an explanation of why he hadn’t been made well in the past, wasn’t well
now, and likely wouldn’t be made well in the future – you can almost hear the
whining tone in the man’s voice coming through the text. Almost certainly Jesus wasn’t the first
person to hear the man complaining about his predicament. One could say that the man was as crippled in
spirit as in body. Despite all this,
Jesus takes the initiative and heals the man.
We’re told that the healing took place on the Sabbath. The religious authorities see the man
carrying his mat. You’d think they’d rejoice
over the man’s miraculous healing. And
you’d be wrong. Instead, they chastise
the man for carrying his mat on the Sabbath.
The man says, “well, the man who healed me told me it was ok.” True to the man’s character, he hadn’t
actually bothered to find out who had healed him, let alone thanked Jesus, and
Jesus had slipped away out of sight.
Later Jesus met the man in the Temple,
and told him, “don’t sin again, or something worse will happen to you.” So the man turns around and dimes Jesus out
to the religious authorities, throws Jesus under the bus, so that they start to
persecute Jesus for healing on the Sabbath.
What a nice guy! (You might be
getting some idea why people hadn’t been falling all over themselves to help
this guy during his 38 years of illness.)
Jesus’ response to the religious authorities bears close reading. Remember that the law about Sabbath rest had
been instituted in remembrance of God resting on the seventh day after creating
the universe. And yet Jesus is saying,
“yes, today is the Sabbath, but God my Father is working on the Sabbath, is at
work today, right here, right now – because if God weren’t at work right now,
the universe would fall into chaos, would cease to exist – and do you know
what, I’m working too.” We can see
perhaps more clearly why the religious authorities were infuriated by Jesus, as
he seemed to interpret his act of healing as a part of God’s ongoing work of preserving
and renewing the universe God created.
Aside from Jesus, nobody comes out of this story looking especially
good. The man who had been healed repaid
Jesus’ kindness by snitching on him, and the religious authorities condemned a
miracle of God because it didn’t come according to their exact specifications. I’m glad I wasn’t there, and likely so are
you. And yet we may be able to find ourselves in this story.
The basic problem of the man at the pool was that he was
stuck, physically stuck in one place. He
couldn’t move. And I think that’s one
place where we can find ourselves in the story.
In various ways, we all get stuck from time to time – physically stuck,
perhaps, but also mentally stuck, or emotionally stuck, or spiritually
stuck. Sin, separation from God, makes us stuck. Addiction
or dependency on alcohol or drugs or other ways to numb ourselves out can leave
us stuck. We know in our heart of hearts
that what we’re doing is tripping us up, perhaps slowly destroying us, and yet
there we are, drink in hand again. Or it
may be a form of sin that’s socially acceptable, but destructive just the same
– envy, gossip, lust, anger, the pride that brings contempt for those around us
– thank God that I am not like those other people. Or it may be some other self-destructive
pattern, but we all struggle against the darkness in our own lives. In our heart of hearts we know that these
sins are destructive of our relations with God and neighbor and of our own
peace of mind….and yet, in the words of the Brittany Spears song from a few
years back….”Oops, I did it again….” Or
as Paul put it, “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my
members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the
law that dwells in my members. Wretched
man that I am. Who will rescue me from
this body of death?” Probably the very
question that the invalid at the pool asked himself as he lay there day after
day, decade after decade. We may truly want
to change our destructive behavior, but we fear the changes in our lives that
may come as a result. For example, if I
stop drinking, I’ll have to deal with spouse and job and life sober…and who
wants to do that? If I learn to control
my anger, those around me may take my apparent serenity as a license to walk
all over me, and I’ll need to find new ways to negotiate disagreements with
others that don’t involve blowing my stack.
But Jesus Christ who rescued the man at the pool is ready to rescue us. We may have to hit bottom in some way and
admit to ourselves that our sins has taken us too far out into deep waters for
them to be able to swim to shore on their own strength. We become ready to take the first step of
admitting that we are powerless over our sinfulness and our lives have become unmanageable. We come to believe that a higher power – God
- can help us. And we become willing to
let God take over. And through Jesus,
the healing process begins – not because of our winning personalities, not
because of who we are, but because of who God is.
Another place that we in the church can find ourselves in
the story is among the religious leaders who criticized the man for carrying
his mat on the Sabbath, and more importantly criticized Jesus for healing on
the Sabbath. You see, the religious
leaders are stuck, too, but in a different way.
They’re not stuck physically, but they are spiritually stuck, stuck in
expecting God and God’s people to behave according to their expectations – to
quote a song from U2 from a few years back, they’re “stuck in a moment, and
they can’t get out of it.” We can make
the same mistake that the religious leaders in Jesus’ day did, missing miracles
from God in our midst because they doesn’t fit into the familiar boxes of
expectations that we’re prone to build.
We’ve grown up in the church, lived with the church all our lives. Jesus has been a part of our lives for as
long as we can remember – he’s walked with us and he’s talked with us, and he’s
told us we are his own. We know how the
church has worked for most of our lives, we’re used to doing church in a
certain way, and because of this we think we know how God works. Except when God starts coloring outside the
lines we’ve drawn, when God starts working in the lives of folks that are way
outside our comfort zone, when God gets busy in the lives of folks that just
plain creep us out, or when God sends us magnificent blessings in really
strange packages. We look at people being blessed that we always
though were beyond God’s love; or we see ourselves being blessed through people
that we thought were too whatever to be used by God, and we ask, “Can God
possibly be behind this? Can God do a
new thing?” Will we allow God to do
God’s new thing? Or do our fears prompt
us to shut down and block out the signs of God’s grace, to close our eyes to a
miracle in our midst
“Do you want to be healed?”
The question Jesus asked the invalid at the pool is the question he asks
us today, and asks those around us. May
our answer be “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in Christ Jesus.”
No comments:
Post a Comment