John 5:1-9

02/15/09
John 5:1-9
Hudson UMC

Ever since the church has been made up primarily of Gentiles, we have tended to forget that Jesus was indeed a good Jew. In the law, God declared that there were several times during the year when the Israelites were supposed to have festivals when all the men of the nation were to be gathered in Jerusalem. Though Jesus had just gotten to Galilee, and though there were probably a bunch of things that could have been done there, He turns around and heads back to Jerusalem, the place where the leaders do not like Him, the place where He will ultimately be crucified. It is amazing that, though He does not seem to stay in one place for very long, He does not waste any time, but does good to everyone He meets, regardless of where He is. At this point in the Gospel according to John, He heals a crippled man.

This man, we read, was lying by a pool called Beth-zatha. Now, we do not read here why so many sick people gathered by this pool, but the Jews at the time, as well as the early church tradition, believed that an angel would come down and stir up the waters and the first person who got in the pool when this happened would be healed of anything that was wrong with them. People might spend days, weeks, months, even years at the side of this pool. This was not because they were lazy; after all, most of them could hardly move, let along work a steady job. The people who were gathered had no guarantee that the water would be stirred up at any predictable time. Not only that, but each time the water was stirred up, only one person would be healed. Since very few people, when left to themselves, will give up their opportunity to be healed, there was no sense of duty to follow a “first come, first served” kind of order. Everyone wanted to be healed now. You can almost envision the kind of scramble for the pool as soon as that water got moving. The ironic thing is that, those who were the most sick, the ones who needed healing the most, were the least able to get into the pool first, so they remained sick.

So, here comes Jesus, the man who has just healed the son of a royal official in Galilee. Now, we get the impression that this sick man did not know who Jesus was; we know from our very next passage that he at least did not really understand who Jesus was. However, he is just lying there and Jesus comes up and asks him what seems to us to be a silly question. “Do you want to be made well?” Now, I don’t know about you, but that seems like a pretty silly question to me. Imagine that you have been lying on a mat for thirty-eight years, just waiting for a chance to be healed. Every time the water in the pool that can heal you is stirred up, someone else gets in right before you do. You have seen miracles in front of your eyes over and over again as person after person gets healed before you. On top of this, in the nearly four decades you have been lying there, you have had a lot of free time to think about your situation and yearn for healing. In light of that, what would you think if some guy who clearly does not know what it is like to lay on a mat for thirty-eight years, indeed, has not even been alive for thirty-eight years, walks up and asks, “Do you want to be made well?”

The fact of the matter is that this question is not nearly as silly as it sounds to us at first. We assume that anyone who is sick would rather not be sick. It just seems natural. I doubt that any one of us, if given the choice, would choose to be sick rather than not sick. Most of us, when we get a cold or the flu, consider ourselves to be miserable and cannot wait for it to run its course. However, things get much more complicated when we are dealing with sickness that is very much chronic. Now, I don’t mean that people who are chronically ill do not wish that this were not the case, what I mean is that, when people are sick for very long periods of time, especially with little hope of being healed, some people begin to find their identity in their sickness. This, again, is not because they enjoy being sick, but rather because it is what they know, perhaps all they know. The fear of facing a new world might be more overwhelming than the joy of being delivered from the sickness or condition.

Let me illustrate this with a humorous scene from the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian. The movie takes place in first century Judea and centers on a man named Brian, who lives with his mother and was born down the street the same night that Jesus was and leads a somewhat parallel life. After attending a stoning, Brian and his mother are walking home through the marketplace. They pass by a group of lepers who are all begging for alms, crying out “alms for a leper!” They, along with everyone else, continue on without making a contribution. The last man in the group of lepers hops up suddenly and begins to follow Brian. He comes up and says, “Alms for an ex-leper!” Brian, noticeably confused asks, “ex-leper?” The man explains that he had been a leper for sixteen years and was proud of that experience. “Well, what happened?” “Oh, cured, sir.” “Cured?” “Yes sir, it was a miracle, sir.” “Who cured you?” “Jesus did, sir. I was hopping along, minding my own business. All of a sudden, up he comes, and cures me! One minute I’m a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood’s gone. Not so much as a by-your-leave! ‘You’re cured, mate.’ Stupid do-gooder.” Brian, apparently not shocked by the man’s ungratefulness, asks why he doesn’t go back and tell Jesus that he wants to be a leper again. The answer is, “I could do that, I suppose. What I was thinking was to ask if he could make me a bit lame in one leg during the middle of the week; something that’s beggable, but not leprosy, which is a pain in the neck.”

Now, I hardly need to remind you that this is indeed a work of fiction and we must not use it to think about how Jesus really is. However, I think that the ex-leper shows us, granted in a comical way, how we sometimes end up identifying with our weakness to the point that to lose that weakness would not seem like a good thing anymore. The man had been a leper for so long that he did not have another trade, could not provide for himself anymore. When he was healed, he did not rejoice in his new opportunity and go and get a more conventional job, he simply kept doing what he had always been doing: begging. He was someone who did not want to be healed. “One minute I’m a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood’s gone.”

Let me put this back into the context of our passage. The man had been by the side of this pool for thirty-eight years. In doing so, he must have learned a thing or two about surviving in such difficult circumstances. He had clearly endured for many years and could probably endure for many more. In fact, he was no longer a young man. Most people in that time and culture got married before they were twenty years old. By the time you were thirty, you were considered to be fully mature and old enough to be an expert in whatever you did. This man who was at least thirty-eight, and likely much older, had missed out on much of his life and very well may have resigned himself to his condition. The question, “Do you want to be made well” is not so unusual. If he was made well, his whole life would change. Though he would love to be able to walk again, his condition was comfortable; it was what he knew.

In any case, when Jesus asks this question, the man gave an answer that did not really make sense, either. He said, “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.” This man has answered the wrong question. His answer would have made sense if he had been asked, “Why have you not been healed if you have been here for so long?” The question, “Do you want to be made well” requires a “yes” or “no” answer.

This man believes that mighty healing can take place. He has probably seen it many times in his long stay at the side of this pool. He cannot doubt that healing is available to people in general, but, after being unhealed for so long, he might very well believe that it is not available to him. Every time the water is stirred up, someone else gets in ahead of him. He might be thinking that, if Jesus would have compassion on him and wait with him, He might be able to help him into the pool when it is stirred up, enabling him to be healed. To him, healing is available, but it is only available in one place, in that pool. He could not imagine that healing was possible in any other way. He had this one hope and he focused so much on the pool that he missed the fact that the only reason that the pool had any healing power in the first place is because God was working miracles. He was so caught up in the water that he began to assume that there was something magical about it. In fact, the God who worked healings with the water was standing right in front of him in flesh. The question was not rhetorical nor was it sarcastic. Jesus asked because He was ready, willing and able to make him well.

Jesus was able to look past the imperfect answer that the man gave and gave him an order instead. “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” This is something of a callous command to make, is it not? Who would ever command a man like this, who has not been able to walk for nearly forty years, to stand up and walk? And yet, the man does not hesitate, but obeys in faith. This is an important thing to notice and remember. Jesus did not simply make a command on the man, nor did simply work a mighty healing, the man responded. The man might have been healed but if he never stood up, the healing would not have mattered. The man indeed stood up, picked up his mat and walked. This was not an inconsequential thing. In the very next verse, he gets in trouble for doing what Jesus told him to do. The Jewish leaders simply could not understand what had just taken place. Obeying Jesus made this man the subject of conflict and controversy. The only way he could have avoided the negative attention he was to receive would have been to not obey Jesus.

I said earlier that it is entirely possible for people who have been sick for a long time to begin to identify themselves as sick people and to dismiss any thought that things could be different. I contend that for many of us, this is not simply an academic idea, but something that we have had to come to terms with. I myself was not raised in the church. I did not have any real interaction with the love of God until I was a Sophomore in high school. I admit that I was not lying helpless for nearly as long as the man in the passage, but I was equally helpless. I was bound by selfishness, I was living in the kind of corruption that is and has always been common in high school. Not only was I helpless and crippled in myself, I had a bunch of friends that were also helpless and crippled who encouraged me to stay how I was. It was only when some other friends, particularly Rob Mulye and Katie Jo Suddaby came up to me and, through their acceptance, through their love and concern, asked me if I wanted to be made well by inviting me to encounter Christ for myself that I was able, like the man in our passage, to stand up and walk.

This room has a bunch of people in it and each of us might be at a different place in this story. Some of us might be the man on the mat, feeling abandoned, stuck in our ways, feeling like there is no hope for us, that we have no other option other than to just lay here, unable to move, unable to do anything other than what we have done for the last thirty-eight years. If this is you, I assure you that Jesus has come to you today, asking you, “Do you want to be made well.” What will you do? Will you continue to do what you have always done, hoping that somehow doing the same things over and over will somehow do something different tomorrow than it did yesterday or today? Or will you receive the grace of God with joy, standing up and walking by the power of God, living a different life that has been miraculously offered to you? Do not wait for the waters to be stirred. You do not know when that will happen and you might miss it. Receive the promise of God.

Though I do not doubt that there are probably a few people in this room who are like the man by the pool, I do not believe for a minute that everyone here is like him. There are people here who have been, like the sick man, healed by the Word of God, raised up to newness of life and released from destructive patterns of behavior. There are people who can remember the time before God broke into their lives and rescued them from the power of sin and death. These people are a source of inspiration, not only because they have tasted the power of God, but because they understand what it means to be someone who needs it.

So far, I have discussed two types of people: Those who need to be healed by God and those who have been healed by God. You might be expecting me to discuss a third type of person, those who, because of being good people all their lives, have no need to be healed by God. I am indeed not going to discuss that kind of person because that kind of person does not exist and has never existed. When the rich young ruler came up and claimed that he had never broken the law, Jesus showed him that he had flaws that he did not know about. We all need healing.

So, all of us either need to be healed by the power of God or we have experienced that healing and have therefore needed that healing before. None of us are self-sufficient. However, this universal need for God is not something to get depressed about, but something to rejoice in. It is empowering beyond measure; for it means that, if, in reflecting on your life, you feel that you indeed need the healing of God, you are not alone. Everyone else either understands your situation because they are also in it, or because they were in it before. Be encouraged. Jesus came to the man, a man who not only did not know how to heal himself, but could not see how the healing he did know about could ever help him, and worked a mighty miracle. Regardless of whether or not we feel like we are sick and incapacitated, Jesus is standing before us and asking if we want to be made well. It is up to us whether or not we will stand up and walk. If we accept the gift of God in faith, our entire lives change. We may have accepted God’s grace before, but can receive it every day. Today is the day of healing. We can shake off our emotional and psychological baggage and walk free in the very strength of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit and purchased with the blood of Christ. At once, we are made well, let us stand up and walk. Let us pray.

AMEN