Editor’s Note: This month, we continue a series of For Your Soul columns based on Keri Wyatt Kent’s devotional book Oxygen: Deep Breathing for the Soul. Read through the Bible passage slowly, noticing words or phrases that strike you. As you read this story of attitude toward healing, pay attention to areas of your life that run parallel to what happens to the disabled man. After you’ve read the passage and the insightful reflection that follows it, spend time praying or journaling your response to God’s word. You will find it very difficult to have no response.
John 5:1-15
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.” The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
“Do you want to get well?”
It seems an odd question at first. This man is lying by a pool, which was alleged to have healing powers. Some texts say that an angel would occasionally stir the water, and the first one to scramble to the water would be healed. Imagine it—it almost seems like a scene from a Monty Python movie as blind, paralyzed, and otherwise afflicted people trip over each other in an effort to dive into a pool they believe will heal them. It’s almost comic, in a pathetic kind of way.
So this guy’s been by the pool for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight! Little wonder, then, that Jesus asks, “Um, do you really want to get well? If so, why are you still here?” Of course, that also seems a little cruel. After all, we have to assume the man has tried. In fact, he’s full of excuses: “No one is helping me; everyone else always gets there first.”
But you have to wonder, did this guy ask for help? This pool wasn’t in some remote area on the outskirts of town; it was in the middle of Jerusalem, with lots of people around.
Instead of answering Jesus directly, he makes excuses. He doesn’t say, “Oh, yes, I do want to get well.” He starts moaning and complaining.
From the way Jesus speaks, I wonder if he is a bit fed up with this guy. “Get up!” he says. Quit moaning. When the Jews question the man, again he refuses to take responsibility for himself. “That man who made me well,” he begins, as if to say, “He made me get well; it’s his fault. He told me to pick up my mat.”
I can feel pretty smug about this guy’s issues—until I realize Jesus’ word to me is, “Do you want to get well?” Patterns of sin, which are my responsibility, have been hanging around in my life—some of them for a long time. It’s tempting to complain: “No one is helping me.” To blame my struggles on other people, who make me behave the way I do. But do I really want to be healthy? Do I want to give up my sinful patterns, my addiction to other people’s approval, my attempts to control? Complaining about the people who are not helping me has become a sort of comforting habit. Do I really, really want to be well? If I do, I have to listen to Jesus, who says, “Get up! It’s a new day, and you need to carry your own burdens and walk on your own two feet.”
It’s not an easy thing for me to hear, but it’s ultimately the kindest thing he could say.
Adapted from Oxygen: Deep Breathing for the Soul, (Revell, 2006) by Keri Wyatt Kent.
Keri Wyatt Kent is an author, speaker, and children’s ministry volunteer. Learn more at www.keriwyattkent.com
Copyright © 2007 Promiseland.
