Becoming Healthy

"Becoming Healthy"

John 5:1-9
May 9, 2010

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in
Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has
five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was
there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew
that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The
sick man answered him, “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.”
Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well,
and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath.

The Scripture passage before us today is so simple, at least on the surface. It seems
to be just another healing story—healing stories are a dime a dozen in the Gospels,
especially the first three Gospels, but the Gospel of John is different that way. The
healing stories in the Gospel of John, the Fourth Gospel, come few and far between,
and when they do come up, they are so richly layered and textured. This is such a
simple story—and yet it’s not so simple—nothing in the Gospel of John is simple,
really.

John brings us into the story by telling us that the Jesus is back in Jerusalem for a
reason—that he is there to attend a Jewish festival, a festival celebrated by his people,
and while he is there, he and his disciples pass by the Sheep’s Gate, a place that every
resident in Jerusalem would have been able to direct you to. And by that gate was a
pool of water, perhaps where animals and humans came to get the water they needed
for the coming hours and days, women perhaps with jugs to be refilled and to be taken
back home. But also crowded around that pool, surely making it hard for folks to get to
the water, were people challenged by disease and illness—people who were paralyzed,
who were blind, people who could barely move.

And whatever strength they had within them was reserved for the moment when the
water was disturbed, when the ripples on the surface of the pool of water were clearly
made by no one but an invisible visitor. You see, the legend around that pool was that
an angel was known to haunt its surface, and when the angel touched the water, the
first person to immerse themselves in that water would be healed of whatever disease
they were suffering from. We’re not told how often the angel disturbed the water, but I
can only imagine when the moment came, and the water stirred, the panicked and
frantic chaos and the rush towards the water must have been frightening to those folks
just passing by. Whatever the scene must have looked like, I don’t think anyone could
have blamed these folks for their desperation—with no medical help, no social help,
their plight was heartbreaking, something Jesus sees that day, as he passes by the
pool.

But I think Jesus saw something else as well, something that was deeper than any
particular physical affliction—I think he saw a deeper wound in some of them, a wound
that went into the spiritual marrow of some of those folks waiting for their healing by that
pool. This wound, this illness had nothing to do with the disease or challenge they
were facing—it was, I think, a simple forgetfulness about what had drawn them to that
pool in the first place. It was a wound that started with their physical affliction, but now
had seeped into their whole being—their physical wound had become them, it had
defined them, it became their story and I think they had forgotten why they had found
themselves at the pool in the first place. They had come to the pool to be healed, but I
wonder how many of them would have known what to do without their pain and
challenge. It had become the way they identified themselves to the world.

Have you ever meet folks like that? I know I have—and I know I’ve been there before. I’
ve been at a place that my emotional pain became my story—and I couldn’t imagine
who I would have been without my anger and pain. Have you met people who carried
their emotional or spiritual or even physical wounds with almost a sense of pride?
People who carried their wounds—their stories about what injustices have been done
to them, what pain they have experienced, how they have been wronged by the
universe or others, and they wouldn’t let go of it—they couldn’t let go of it, because if
they did, they wouldn’t have a story left to tell anymore, they wouldn’t have a way of
defining themselves to themselves or to the world. I’ve been there—and I’ve done
that! Sometimes we can get stuck in our spiritual and emotional and physical illness—
and it becomes who we are and we can’t imagine what life would be without it. We
become our wounds and they then become our story, our story of woe and pain and
injustice—our story of what has been done to us by fate, or God, or other people.

Now, I don’t want you think I am dismissing the pain of these folks around that pool
some two thousand years ago—or that I am dismissing my own pain or your own pain.
Crucifixion just seems to be a part of the story of our lives—it seems to be built into the
fabric of the universe, at least for right now—but it’s never the whole story. It was never
the whole story of the people around that pool some two thousand years ago—and its
never our whole story either.

Now, I’ll tell you why I think a few people around that pool were suffering from something
deeper than their physical affliction, that they had become their pain and didn’t know
how else to define themselves to the world. Jesus, when he passes by this pool, stops
and he seeks out someone, someone special, I think. I suspect that the man he
approaches is somewhat legendary in Jerusalem, that people had talked for years
about this man who stayed by the pool, and been so faithful to it for 38 years, and yet
sadly he could never get to the water in time to be healed. I bet you he had become as
legendary as the pool that he sat around, night and day.

Now, Jesus goes to this man, and he asks a very simple question, something that
doesn’t make sense, really. Jesus simply asks this man whether or not he wants to be
made well. Now, why in the world would you ask this man, this guy who has been here
for 38 years such a stupid question?! Well, of course he does! He’s been waiting for
38 years to be healed! The interesting thing is that the word that Jesus uses here for
“made well” is very different from the words he usually uses for healing. The Greek
word used here is much more holistic than simply just physical healing—he is really
asking this man—“do you want be made healthy, physically and emotionally and
spiritually?” I think the question makes sense only if Jesus recognizes that this man
had forgotten why he was even at the pool in the first place. He had forgotten that he
was there to be healed.

And I think you get a sense of this when he replies to Jesus’ question—you get the
sense that he too had become his wounds, that he too had forgotten why he was even
at that healing pool in the first place, that he had done what so many of us have done—
we’ve simply become the story of what has been done to us, rather than the story of
our own healing, our own resurrection. Jesus asks this question—“do you want to be
healthy, my friend?” and the man replies not with a yes—or even a no. He replies with
his struggle of not being able to get into the water, of being pushed aside as people
rushed to the step into the pool.

It’s a truly sad story and painful to hear, but that wasn’t the question Jesus asking, was
it? He asked this man whether he wanted wholeness, whether he wanted resurrection,
whether he wanted health, and he was given the story of this man’s disappointment,
this man’s pain, a story about what hadn’t been done for him and what had been done
to him. All of it was sadly true, of course, but that wasn’t the reply Jesus was looking
for—a yes or no would have done—and yet I suspect that the answer the man gave
was the answer Jesus was expecting from him. The story of this man’s crucifixion, of his
personal pain, became the only story he knew how to tell and he had forgotten what
had driven him to the pool in the first place—his deep desire to be well and healthy.

And Jesus, incredible, generous Jesus, replies with, ironically enough, with a
command. “Stand up, take your mat, and walk.” Simple enough. Nothing too fancy.
Just get up and go, he says to this man who has sat by a pool for 38 years waiting for
such a miracle. Jesus healed him physically, but I think that a deeper, more important
healing took place when he heard Christ calling him to do what he had spent a lifetime
hoping he would one day be able to do. He listened to the Christ and did as he was
told—he didn’t reply with, “I can’t. What would I be without my pain? WHO would I be
without my wounds?” We too have the challenge of listening to the Christ, who calls us
to stand up and walk and go towards our health and healing.

The scary thing is that some of us, certainly me at times, feel more comfortable with our
pain than we would with our health. There is a scene in the Monty Python film LIFE OF
BRIAN, which is the funny story of a man who continually gets confused with Jesus in
first century Palestine. In that movie, there is a scene where Brian passes by a group
of begging lepers, one of which Jesus who has just passed and healed only a few
moments earlier. Someone comments that this healed leper is “not quite well” and that
is certainly the truth—he went back to the sickness because he was more comfortable
there than he was being well. But the man that Jesus healed that day in our story was
made well, was made whole, because the health he received had burrowed deep in his
marrow and he didn’t want be by that pool any longer.

Christ says to us “stand up, take your mat, and walk.” Whether we choose to listen to
the command is our business, really. I suspect, I think that this man could have not
listened, that he could have launched into another story of woe, or told another story of
the injustices he had experienced. Stand up, take your mat, and walk—its time to go
home, and home is wholeness, it is hope made real, it is resurrection out of the grave,
your grave and my grave. You and I, we really are created to be God’s people of
resurrection.

On the morning of June 24, 1993, a professor of computer science at Yale University
by the name of David Gelernter opened a package he'd received in the mail. Suddenly
it blew up and nearly killed him. Gelernter was the 23rd victim of the Unabomber, the
man we now believe is Theodore Kaczynski. Like this madman's other victims,
Gelernter had never even met Kaczynski.

Bleeding profusely, Gelernter managed to drag himself to the university clinic. When he
arrived, his blood pressure was nearly zero. The bomb had blasted away much of
Gelernter's right hand and shattered the wrist, broken his left hand, inflicted deep
wounds on his chest and right leg, and permanently damaged his right eye so that his
vision on that side is constantly blurred. He endured months of reconstructive surgery
but will carry severe scars on his body from the bomb for the rest of his life.

Gelernter is an observant Jew. He grew up on those Bible stories that recount how God
delivered those faithful ones who suffered. He learned that faith is not the absence of
doubt, but the presence of courage. He shares with us Christians an unwavering belief
in the God who is able.

Here's what he writes: So: What's the scoop on surviving a mail bomb? What do you
learn? You learn that, at first, the past will seem only like a cause for mourning, but
your job is to twist it around and make it a cause to rejoice. At the end of meals every
Sabbath, observant Jews sing a psalm [126] ... 'Those that sow in tears will reap
shouting with joy. Weeping as he goes, he carries the seed bag -- and returns with
shouts of joy .... If you focus the big sweep of history on a single lifetime, the [psalmist]
says, you see life as a stubborn return from sorrow again and again.
-- Time, September 22, 1997 (Homileticsonline.com)

The choice is always before us—do we tell the same story we’ve always told, the one
filled with our woe and bitterness? Or do we do as the psalmist does, and we listen to
the Christ who commands us, gently, gently, and yet he still commands us, “Stand up,
take your mat, and walk with me and I will show you a new life.“ I say we begin the
process of releasing the wounds in our lives and the ones we have held hostage with
our pain. I say we listen, I say we choose health, emotional and physical and spiritual. I
say we choose the life we have been created for, the wholeness that has always been
available, even as we experience the crucifixion that comes to us in our lives. We were
created for life, not death, wholeness, not woundeness. Listen, choose to listen, and
then, like that man some two thousand years ago, come off your mat, out of your grave,
and become the person you and I were always created to be, the people we were
destined to be. Amen.