DO YOU WANT TO BE HEALED?Reading: John 5: 1-15
The man had been lying paralysed and hopeless in the same place with countless others for thirty-eight years at the asylum in Jerusalem, by the pool of Bethesda. We are not told his name. It was as if he had lost his identity, had faded into anonymity, his only name, like so many people today, a number, Number Thirty-Eight. Long ago any flicker of hope that the healing water would move for him had died. He had no one belonging to him, no care attendant who would help him get in at the crucial time. He’d been waiting for thirty-eight years and this particular day was no different. There he was, lying as usual, having long since stopped expecting a miracle. No angel of mercy there for him!
It was festival time. Jerusalem was crowded. People were thronging everywhere, and the porches around the pool of Bethesda were packed with sick people, more than usual; blind, lame, paralysed, and, among them, was Number Thirty-Eight. Jesus had come to Jerusalem for this particular holy day. And, as so often during his earthly ministry, he moved through the throng and singled out one person from among all the others as if, knowing his condition, he had come through the Sheep Gate to the pool specifically to meet with him. Number Thirty-Eight didn’t know it yet, but this was to be his day! You can imagine him, from his prostrate position, watching the feet of the people who passed by. Then suddenly, a pair of feet stopped in front of him and didn’t move away again. And the unthinkable happened. Someone was noticing him and asking him a question, but what a crazy question! “Do you want to be healed? Would you like to get well?” Number Thirty-Eight was so conditioned in his thinking to there being only one way to get well, that is, to get into the pool first when the water was stirred up, that he immediately responded by explaining how absolutely impossible it was. “I can’t, Sir, for I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I am trying to get there, someone else always gets in ahead of me.” He certainly didn’t expect what came next; not an expression of sympathy, nor even an offer of help to get him into the water, but a quiet and authoritative command, “Stand up, pick up your mat and walk.”
The man by the pool at Bethesda reminds me of ourselves, especially as the body of Christ. We have become so conditioned in our thinking that there is only one way to ‘be’ Church, that this is the way life is and there’s probably never going to be any significant change, and it all seems so impossible. So we present to the world very often an air of hopelessness or lifelessness that turns people away. The sleeping mat beside the pool is uncomfortably comfortable. And if that is true of the Church, it is also true of any organisation, any community, any individual. Do you want to be healed? Would you like to be a community of God’s people, standing up, carrying the sleeping mat that had once carried you, moving forward, walking, on your way – home? We can’t make that happen for ourselves. In that sense the man was right. But we need to be alert, so that when it comes, we do not miss the question. What would we answer? ‘Yes’ implies movement. Would we, after a while, a bit like the Israelites long ago, long for the security of the slavery of Egypt, or sigh for the mat beside the pool where no one really noticed us, not much was expected of us, and we could remain in the vague half hope that, someday, something might happen?