John 5:1-9
Jesus entered the walled city of Jerusalem through the Sheep Gate. It was the gate closest to the Temple. There was a pool there. Five covered porches butted out like docks into the pool. On these porches and all around the edge of the pool was every kind of sick person imaginable.
The Pool of Bethesda was the nursing home of Jerusalem. Every hopeless human condition was there. Only, there were no individual, antiseptic rooms where these patients could be hidden away. No nurses to change their dressings, take their blood pressure in the middle of the night, and provide a smiling presence. No doctors dispensing medical assistance. No pharmacists doling out medications. No volunteers bringing magazines or mail or flowers. Just people who had been dumped and left by family or friends.
There were the sick. They not only had diseases of every kind, but there were those who were afflicted with dis-ease: the inability to cope with what life had thrust in their faces. Those with dis-ease showed no physical signs of wounds or illness, but they were sick nonetheless. I like the way the King James Version describes these people: “...a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered..” I like the terms “halt” and “withered.” The halt describes people who have just stopped in life. They landed there, and they will go no further. The withered describes, to me, not just a physical condition, but a spiritual condition. The soul has just gone limp and shriveled away.
In the cartoon, “Lockhorns”, the husband comes home, puts his briefcase on the table by the door. He is taking off his coat and saying to his wife, “The day went the way it usually does when your life is going down the drain.” That kind of dis-ease of attitude is just as debilitating as being sick. Maybe more so. You can take medicines for physical illnesses and injuries, but what do you take if your spirit is “going down the drain”?
John tells us that, “Hundreds of sick people...were laying close to the pool…” These diseased people were laying close to the pool because the pool symbolized for them a hope, a cure, a chance. The closer they were to the pool, the closer they were to having their hopes come true. they could play with their fingers in that liquid desire. They could dangle their feet and ankles in that pool of possibility.
It was a pool of superstitions. Every once in a while the water would spontaneously shudder and ripple. It was believed an angel descended into the water. The water, with the angel’s presence, would come alive. The first person to roll, jump, dive, or fall into the angel-filled waters would be healed.
When I was a kid, I nearly lived all summer in the waters of a pool near our home. Every hour, the lifeguards would clear the pool of us kids. For 15 awful minutes, we had to stay out while the adults--what few of them there were--got the whole pool to themselves. Some kid would dangle his hand or feet in the pool, and the rest of us would shout, “Not fair! Get your hands outta there--the lifeguard hasn’t blown the whistle yet!!”
Then the lifeguards would come out. One would have the whistle in her mouth, playing with it in her teeth. “C’mon, blow the whistle!” we’d shout. Finally she would blow the whistle. With a frenzied rush of excitement, that only a hundred or so kids can create, we’d throw our bodies into the pool, flying from every direction. Off the diving board. In controlled or uncontrolled leaps off the side. Sliding over the wall of the baby pool. Into the big pool we’d come--a wild horde of kids invading the placid surface of the empty pool. It was a race, a competition we had to see who could get in first. It was simply for bragging rights, until the next hour.
At the Pool of Bethesda, it wasn’t for bragging rights for which this collection of sick people vied. It was for healing. It was out of desperate hope of being made well. When the whistle was blown, when the angel troubled the waters, imagine the rush of sick, diseased, and crippled bodies the leaped from the sides of that small pool, hoping against hope to be the first one in.
The sick people lay close to the pool because they never knew when the waters would come alive. It was not something that happened as dependably as Old Faithful. Sick and infirm people couldn’t just show up at the prescribed time, stand like a crowd of swimmers on their starting blocks, ready to dive in at the first indication of rippling waters. So full of expectation, imagine how many “false starts” there must have been.
Waiting became a way of life. Waiting became a main ingredient in their vigilant hopefulness. But there are many different kinds of waiting. There is an old Sanskrit poem that reads:
Spring is past,
Summer is gone,
Winter is here,
And my song
That I was meant to sing
Is still unsung.
I have spent my days stringing and restringing my instrument.
Always being in the process of waiting to be waiting, or forever preparing to wait, keeps us from other moments of healing and filling when they come. So many chances go by to grasp the very thing we desire, simply because we were too busy “stringing our instruments.” When we bet the farm on just one way to fill our unhealed lives, we miss the other ways that God provides. We think we can be healed in only one way, and we miss the other ways.
The Pool of Bethesda represents, to the hundreds of crippled and dis-eased people around it, the last chance at hope. Maybe all these people have given up on any other kind of hope. Given up on God. Maybe they’ve said all the prayers they’re going to say. Maybe they’ve prayed until they were blue in the face. Maybe they are at the point of desperation--desperate hope--grasping at this last chance opportunity of magic, rippling waters.
Hope emerges when all the things that we thought were in our control are now uncontrollable. Hope is what we have when we think we don’t have anything else. Hope is the willingness not to give up precisely when we find no consolation from anywhere else, or anyone else.
Into this area of Jerusalem, into this pool area where people are waiting for ripples, their eyes and attention glued only to the surface of the water, comes Jesus. Jesus saw, in their longing eyes, the hope that would not give up, even though it was grasping at something hokey. Jesus looked upon this community of the dis-eased--people who were waiting--waiting and hopeful, for healing and wholeness.
The world is full of hopeful people who still think there has to be a way to make life good for themselves again. It is a deep yearning in the face of certain realities. The man, sick for 38 years--basically his whole life--symbolizes the length to which people will wait. For our whole lives we have been in need of healing, of our emptiness being filled.
But like the man sick for 38 years, we are full of mixed motives. Do we really want to be healed or not? Do we want to give up our “illness”? Do we really want a Savior?
Jesus asked the man a question that only required a yes or no answer. Instead, the man gave a lengthy “maybe” answer. Being healed after using his 38 year illness as an excuse and a crutch, the man is not sure he wants to be fully alive, fully healed, fully filled. He has gotten used to a life of empty dead ends.
Doesn’t that describe where we are? We are caught up in our style of diseased self-centeredness, and we’re not sure we want to be totally healed of it all. There’s some of it we kind of like. We pray for a Savior. We hope for healing. But when the Savior shows up, when he’s standing right there next to us, we suddenly start back-peddling. We’re not sure we want to let go of everything that has defined us for so long, even though it’s a definition of sickness. Being “sick” suddenly doesn’t look all that bad anymore.
The Savior has come into such a world for such a people. We are such a people. Unfilled. Empty. Ill. The 38 year veteran at the Pool of Bethesda is us. The Savior is standing next to you. The Savior has asked the question, “Do you want to get well?” Imagine the dialogue that might take place between ourselves and the Savior. Maybe something like this:
“Do you want to get well?”
“Do I want to? Do I want to? Let me explain. I’ve tried. I’ve been to all the doctors. They all say the same thing. It’s just not going to happen. This is as good as it gets for me.”
“Get up. Stand up. 38 years is too long to be unhealthy.”
“How do you know how long I’ve been ill? You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know all about you. Now, stand up.”
“You’re new around here, aren’t you? How would you know anything about me. About us here at the pool? No one else notices us. If you did notice me, you’d have seen my muscles are all atrophied. I can’t get up. I’ve accepted my limitations. If you really cared, you’d accept my limitations as well.”
“Your only limitation is trying to brush me off and keep me at arms length. I have not avoided you, nor will I accept your limitations. I’ve come to make you whole. Now, get up. Stand on your own two feet.”
“But I’ve tried. The best I can do is roll. Even when I try to get up to get myself into the pool, someone knocks me down or holds me back. It’s not my fault I’m not well. Don’t you have any sympathy?”
“Quit making excuses. And quit blaming. Stand up tall.”
“But I’m so inadequate. People wouldn’t know how to relate to me if I were any other way. And I don’t know if I would know how to relate to them if I were healthy. They’d have different expectations. They would expect me to do things for myself if I was healthy.”
“Up on your feet, now!”
“Why do you keep challenging me? Can’t you see? Look at me? Why do you think I can be anything different than what I am? I can’t change. People don’t change that fast, if at all. Do you think that in the time it would take me to stand, that I could change, just like that? If I could change, it would take a long time. No, I will always be a worthless cripple. That guy over there will always be blind. That woman over there will always be chronically sick. That woman over there will always be a loony bird. All of us here are what we are, and we can’t be anything else.”
“If that were true, then I have come for nothing. If people are only doomed to remain as they are, and have no chance whatever to be different, then there is truly no hope. And definitely no need for a Savior. But I am telling you you can be changed in the blink of an eye. You can be healed. You can live full. Now is your chance. Stand up!”
“I might fall. People will laugh at me. I wouldn’t know how to act. The others here who are still ill would resent me because I got healed and they didn’t. They are my only friends. How would I make new ones? Or, someone might say I didn’t deserve to be made well. Nobody would help me anymore. I might be left to myself.”
“So you don’t want to be healed? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I want to be healed. I want to be full of life. I want to discover what my purpose in life is as a healthy person. I want to grow. I want to see the world beyond this pool. I want to rub shoulders with the world. But it’s all so scary. Would God be with me if I were made well? Would God go with me out into that scary world? Could I really be sure of that?”
“Look into my eyes. What do you see in my eyes? God is here. Stand up.”
“I don’t know. This is all I’ve ever known. I won’t have anyone to show me the way. I’ll be on my own. I can’t do it on my own. It’s safer to just lay here with my friends.”
“That’s why I’m here. Come. Life is lived forward, not stuck in one place. Take my hand. Stand up and go forward with me.”
“Why should I trust you? I don’t even know who you are or what your name is.”
“I am the One God sent to bring you to your feet. I am the one God sent to save you from your serious condition. I am the one God sent to show you the way. I am the one to move you from here to out there. I am the one God sent to keep you safe when you are on your way. I am the one God sent to fill you up and make you whole. All you have to do is believe what I say, and show me that you believe what I’m saying by standing up.”
“OK, OK. I believe you. At least, I want to believe you. I hope that’s enough, because here goes. (pause) I’m standing! I’m standing!. Hey, everyone, look at me! Whoa. I feel light-headed. I feel like I need to lay back down. But I don’t want to ever lay down again! I’m walking! Now I’m standing! I’m walking. I’m standing. Look at me! Thank you! Thank you so much! Let’s go. Can we go? I want to get out of this place!”
“After you.”
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