(By Dave, 10-15 min)
Scripture
John 5: 1-14
The Healing at the Pool
Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”
But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”
So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”
Do you want to get well?
A disabled man of 38 years is asked this question by Jesus. The man is lying by a pool with other blind, lame, and paralyzed people. All are hoping to get close to the water when it is stirred because they believe it will heal them. If this gentleman was satisfied with his state, he would not be so frustrated by his inability to get to the water’s side. Why then does Jesus ask his question? The man’s answer provides some insight.
He doesn’t say: “Yes, I want to get well”. Instead, he answers by referring to the water: “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.” The man sees the water as his only pathway to healing. So much so that the focus of his life has shifted from being healed to reaching the water. He dedicates himself to a strategy for reaching the pool that he admits has a 100% failure rate because no one will help him. The question from Jesus focuses on this reality and the gentleman’s answer reveals how a desire for actual healing was supplanted by devotion to a process for healing.
The siren call of curative pools
The question from Jesus is put to us as well. Do you want to get well? It is a timeless question because we have our own ineffective, curative pools pursued with the same misguided devotion as the man from John’s gospel. A striking contemporary example is the use of smartphones.
Smartphone addiction is a reality wherever the devices are prevalent. The condition is sufficiently common today that it has a name, nomophobia, and a good bit of literature exists describing its deleterious effects on people. The studies suggest that smartphone addiction is not good for you, but why people become addicted to smartphones is most relevant to today’s Scripture.
In a study of 416 smartphone users, lower feelings of social support predicted later addiction to the smartphone. The finding suggests that socially isolated people turn to their smartphones to find connections. Unfortunately, their compulsion did nothing to alleviate feelings of social isolation. On the contrary, the addiction was related to decreased feelings of social support over time. The very solution sought for their social isolation was making these poor people worse. And yet, both young and old return again and again to their Twitter, Facebook, Tick-Tok and Instagram accounts to provide some sense of social support and approval.
Social media and electronics are an obvious contemporary version of the healing pool where devotion to the process for healing overwhelms the goal of the activity. But there are many healing pools to which we become devoted. Pools whose ownership over us is far deeper and more insidious.
How we engage people sometimes has this futile, compulsive twinge to it. A person is deprived of love from his/her parents and enters adult relationships desperately looking for that love. The person works tirelessly to get approval from those served. Because he/she is a great worker, affirmation comes in abundance. But the goal is never achieved. The person is not loved by the people who appreciate their work like a parent should love. As the previous affirmation fades, the person returns to his/her chosen strategy to earn the next bit of affirmation which likewise fades, and the void of parental love remains.
Healing on God’s terms
To the man by the pool, smartphone addicts, and the rest of us who without exception suffer from brokenness we try in vain to heal, Jesus comes. As we single-mindedly devote ourselves to strategies that never cure, the Lord asks: “Do you want to get well?”
When put this way, I say: “Yes! Tear me away from my devotion to half-baked strategies for healing and bring me home to you.” This answer rests on my faith that Jesus can make me well. Faith that places me and those who share it in the good company of people from the Gospels who received the Lord’s healing touch and were told their faith was involved. For example, a woman touched the cloak of Jesus believing it would heal her of a bleeding disorder, and he tells her: “Take heart, daughter, your faith has healed you.” When 10 people with leprosy are cured by Jesus and one returns with thanks and praise to God, Jesus responds: “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
The man by the pool is entirely different. He didn’t know Jesus and was so mired in getting to the pool it never occurred to him to answer “Yes” in response to the Lord’s query. To him, Jesus was just a passerby to whom he could express his frustration, and yet he is healed. Clearly, the Lord will heal in the presence or absence of faith. What follows in today’s Scripture verse and immediately after adds context to this observation. A context which, although challenging, gives much hope to all who are lying next to their curative pools pursuing healing in vain.
To whom He is pleased to give it
After the man by the pool declares that he has no help to get to the healing waters, Jesus responds with a command: “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” The gentleman is immediately healed and walks away carrying his mat in direct violation of Sabbath prohibitions imposed by the Pharisees. When challenged, the man says he is doing what his healer told him to do.
Jesus had a purpose for this man and in mercy healed him so that he could fulfill that purpose. Because the man complied, he attracted the attention that Jesus knew he would and a confrontation between the Pharisees and Jesus begins. In verses 19-21 the context for the man’s healing and indeed all healing is revealed for both the Pharisees and us: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.”
The Father and the Son do not heal because of what we believe. They heal whomever they choose. Sometimes it will be people of faith in Jesus and sometimes people with no faith in Jesus. The things that happen in this life are under God’s control and no amount of faith or absence of it will change that. The Father and Son will give healing as they see fit perhaps explaining why Jesus did not heal everyone he encountered who was suffering.
Faith defined
Well now, that’s a tough pill to swallow. If you are a believer, does your faith mean nothing? Are our fervent prayers for healing of no consequence because God and Jesus may decide not to heal us? Maybe we should all just return to our chosen pools where healing is more under our control.
These thoughts are why the message from Jesus to the Pharisees in John above is so important for us to hear. The full expression of faith is far more than confidence that Jesus has the power to heal, forgive and redeem us. It is belief that God and Jesus are completely in control and whatever they decide is best. Comprehensive faith is an acceptance of the will of God no matter how you are affected.
For those who believe in Jesus and are healed, this kind of faith is a natural response. The will of God has included their healing and so they experience relief directly attributable to God and are grateful like the healed leper who returned in gratitude. But if you have faith in Jesus, turn from your curative pool to him and are not healed, acceptance of the Lord’s testimony to the Pharisees is difficult.
I have a friend who was definitively diagnosed with leukemia. After a woman at his church and others prayed steadfastly for him, he was healed. I have other friends who have prayed for healing themselves or for a loved one to no avail. Having faith as Jesus describes seems a steep grade for these folks to walk. Even so, Jesus is never wrong and the impact of his words to the Pharisees is the true healing we need. His words push us to a relationship with God that supersedes our physical condition in this world. A relationship where acceptance of God’s will is where healing is found.
When faith is the healing
I used to play guitar at my church and one weekend we visited a local nursing home where several of our members resided. We started to play a bunch of acoustical contemporary songs to a full room of residents. After just a few songs a woman who arrived on a walker, bent over being supported by one of the nurses and blind shouted out that she wanted to hear the hymns. Not this nonsense she was hearing now. You have to love the elderly who say exactly what’s on their mind. She insisted on “The Old Rugged Cross”. We dug out a hymnal and played it.
There she sat, old, broken, and blind singing as loudly as she could the words that lifted her above her physical state. Lyrics that suspended devotion to any curative pool she was pursuing in this world to give her relief. In an instant, ignoring her suffering she traded them all for what was worth pursuing:
“So I’ll cherish the old rugged Cross, Till my trophies at last I lay down, I will cling to the old rugged Cross, And exchange it some day for a crown.”
The woman at the nursing home understood that God’s will, which included not giving her relief from her physical disabilities, also gave her salvation from sin. She knew that when her life ended, she would be healed. Indeed, comprehensively accepting the will of God blessedly includes knowing with certainty that the sacrifice of Jesus will make us physically and spiritually whole.
I hope we can all have this woman’s comprehensive faith. A faith that extends beyond confidence in Jesus’s ability to heal. One that takes a broader view and recognizes that the Father and Son are in control and will heal or not heal as is best. A belief so powerful and steadfast, it prevents us from substituting devotion to this world’s cures for the goal of being healed and overcomes any puzzlement of why some are healed and some are not. A faith that accepts that God’s will is the ultimate recipe for healing regardless of whether or not our maladies are divinely or medically removed. Perhaps Job’s parsimonious expression of this thought says it best: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him (Job 13:15).
I pray that today our faith is comprehensive. That we can look at our circumstances whatever they may be and say with confidence that the Father and Son have chosen rightly for us. I hope that in our belief we will find the peace that no curative pool on this earth can offer: the salvation of our eternal souls. That promise is as sound as the universe is present. If you and I believe it, then when the healings of this world fail, when an understanding God’s ways are hard to accept, we will be able to rise above and join the bent, broken blind woman who sang out “I will cling to the old rugged Cross, and exchange it someday for a crown.”
May that kind of faith be yours this and every day of your faith journey,
Dave
PS – Thanks to my Wednesday Bible study group who always provide interesting perspectives on my interpretations. Their wisdom means a lot to me and I am glad God’s will for me includes them.
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