JOHN 5:1-9a HELPLESS BUT STILL RESPONSIBLE

1 Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. 2 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. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. 5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 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?”

7 “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.”

8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

In a certain way this man is all of us. The more helpless and desperate we are the more likely it is that we will put our trust in anything that gives the promise of deliverance. We will take a chance on this or that diet, therapy or medicine. Often we place our hopes on something we read about in a magazine, see on the internet, or hear on Oprah. Here the man is brought to the pool because he has heard that if you can be the first in when its water is disturbed you can be healed. He is desperately placing his hope of wholeness on the altar of chance; the chance that what people say is true, the chance that the water will be stirred, and the chance that he can get in first, even though he is an invalid.

The man can no more help himself be physically healed than we can make ourselves spiritually whole. We can wander from church to church, attend one Bible study after another or seek the adrenaline rush of a spiritual experience, but the effect of those healing modalities never seems to last long enough for us to feel whole. We end up lying back down and waiting for the next chance. “Maybe next time…”

The underlying question that Jesus presents to us is, “Do you really want to be healed?” He probes beneath the superficial to the root of our dis-ease. We all want the untoward effects of our circumstances or malaise to be taken away, but are we willing to be made totally whole and take on the responsibility for a new life? In Family Systems Therapy, the late Rabbi Edwin Friedman taught that if one would be successful in treating a family, she had to concentrate on the family member who had the greatest motivation for healing. Likewise, Jesus comes to each of us and asks us if we want to get well. Are we willing to take responsibility for being whole? After all, it will mean that we will have to pack up our familiar but dysfunctional role and walk the way Jesus would have us walk.

Lord Jesus, your healing is sure, help me be sure that I want to be healed. Give me the courage to face the responsibilities of a new life. Empower me to live a life of complete obedience to you and with absolute integrity in my relationships with my neighbors. Help me not settle for the balm of soothing the consequences of my sin, but be ruthless in rooting out the cause. Amen.