Do You Want to Be Healed?

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. - John 5:1-9

The healing pool must have been a popular place. Its name, Beth-zatha (or Bethesda in Aramaic) means House of Grace. Lots of people took themselves there. There are five porticoes, which, according to Wikipedia, is "a porch that is leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls." Having five of these suggests a rather large structure. There were the blind, lame and paralyzed, all waiting to have a shot at a rare opportunity. They are all carefully watching the water for an angel to appear, a sign of God's healing grace. First one in gets their dearest wish, it would seem.

The man in our story has been coming to this place for 38 years. Jesus probably knows this because of talk in town. Look at this guy, the hopeless case. Everyone feels sorry for him or decides he's probably not been healed because of his own sin, God has judged him unworthy. Interesting that Jesus picks this man to talk to, out of everyone. He asks kind of a dumb question, "Do you want to be made well?" Well, Duh. The gospels tend to leave out the eye-rolling that meets so many of Jesus' questions. Why else would he be there? Why does anybody go there? He gives Jesus the spiel he probably gives everyone. Well of course, but I'm lame, and no one will help me. I always miss my chance. Seems pretty reasonable, actually. And yet he returns, day after day.

He is in that awful, middle place I know so well. You know what is wrong with you. You see the cure, and there is always something that blocks you. Maybe you don't really want to be healed. Maybe you are used to the way things are. Healing requires so much courage.

Notice that Jesus doesn't offer to jump in the water and give the man the chance he's been waiting for. This would also be a reasonable expectation from a healer, a model of compassion. Jesus asks him to do something much harder. To give up on the impossible conditions he has put around his healing and go for broke: Take up your mat and walk. More eye-rolling, I suspect. Don't you think I would do that if I could? But something shifts in him. What the hell, he thinks, what do I have to lose? That's when you do it, isn't it? When you've tried everything else, when the thing you've ruled out as impossible gets put in front of you, and you have to make a choice between trying and staying stuck. And when someone has the nerve to ask.