Well
John 5:1-9
Click here to view the full sermon video for Sunday, May 22, 2022 entitled, "Well."
Thirty-eight years ago I was 13-years-old. The summer of 1984 was almost upon us. That was the summer I snuck out with a friend while sleeping over at his house to go visit his girlfriend. I cut my knee when we jumped over her fence and I told my mom I had cut it on a sprinkler head in my friends backyard. The stitches came out right before my brother and I left on our epic road trip out west to my grandfather’s house in Santa Barbara, where our parents would join us so that we could drive down to Los Angeles to see a couple of events at the Olympic games that the city was hosting that summer. 1984 was the year that the band Van Halen’s album named 1984 came out and it was the summer I went to see another band, The Cars, on their Heartbeat City tour at the long gone McNichols arena in Denver. It was the summer I customized my own t-shirt that read, “showbiz is my life,” with my childhood nickname on the back, like my own personal theater jersey. No number. Just, “showbiz is my life.” All of which is to say, thirty-eight years is a lonnnnnng time. I went from puberty to middle age in the span of those thirty-eight years. I went from a full head of hair to, well you get the picture. I went from “showbiz is my life,” to a vocation as a church pastor. A lot can happen in thirty-eight years. Unless, that is, you are the man in our reading this morning. We’re told that the man Jesus encounters at the pool of Bethesda while visiting Jerusalem for the festival had been there for thirty-eight years. To be honest I’m not sure how that worked. Did he live there, in one of the porticoes by the pool? Or did he simply come there each and every day for thirty-eight years hoping for the same thing, only to be disappointed? Regardless, given the length of time that he’d been a fixture around the pool, no doubt known to anyone who spent any time there on a regular basis, the simple fact of all those years makes Jesus question to the man a little curious. “Do you want to be made well,” he asks the man. I mean, what kind of question is that? No, really, I wonder what kind of question that is. Because from one angle it definitely could be heard as having an edge to it, and a sharp one at that. It has more than a hint of judgment. If you’ve been trying to do something for thirty-eight years and you have nothing to show for it. If you show up each and every day for thirty-eight years and are no closer to it than you were when you first arrived, it begs the question, “do you want to be made well?” Surely if he wanted it badly enough he would have found some way to the water in those thirty-eight years. But if that’s the question Jesus is asking, if Jesus is couching an incredulous sort of judgment in the form of this question, then that sort of makes him sound like kind of a jerk. Like he’s not just kicking someone when they’re down, but kicking someone who has been down most of their life. And if it sounds that way to us, then it’s probably because this what we’re often guilty of. We see someone whose life looks nothing like our own, someone who has faced their share of challenges, who has struggled day in and day out to no effect and we begin wondering how hard they’re trying. We look at the person stuck in the abusive relationship and ask, do you want to be safe? Or the person who can’t stay on the wagon. Do you want to be sober? Or the person who is experiencing homelessness. Do you want a stable life? Our failure of imagination cannot comprehend why someone doesn’t just leave, or go to the meetings, or stay on their meds.
The conclusion of this encounter sounds like a story that we hear the other three gospel writers tell about Jesus instructing a paralyzed man to miraculously take up his mat and walk. But by prefacing the encounter with this question, John raises so many more. The way John tells the story of Jesus, each of the people he encounters feels like they could be a stand in for us. The Samaritan woman at the well, Nicodemus at night, the man born blind, Lazarus. In this case most of us haven’t spent thirty-eight years in a portico just steps from a healing pool. But many of us have spent just as much time, if not more, longing to be made well in one way or another, desperately wanting for something to be put right in our lives that feels just beyond our reach. And what ends up happening over time is that we don’t just fall into despair, we take that despair on as our identity, as just who we are. We become our hurts. We become the trauma that we carry. We assume the role assigned to us by circumstances beyond our control- by our family, by where we were born, or when we were born- until we cannot always distinguish between the essential nature of who we are, who we were always created to be, and whatever it is that has happened to us. What afflicts us, what affirms us, what we have come to believe about ourselves because it’s been said over and over.
I was listening to a woman talk recently about her childhood and the conflicted relationship she had with her mother. She was her mother’s sunshine girl, such a good baby, always the sunshine in her mother’s life. Her mother had been a free spirit. Moving her children from New York, to Paris, then London, then back to New York. Then to Germany, but no she didn’t like it so back to England. It was a hard way to grow up. They once spent two years living out of a camper van with a man who looked like Jesus with the beard and the long hair. But when you’re the sunshine girl, when you’ve been told over and over that is who you are, it becomes hard to be anything else. It’s hard to have a negative feeling, let alone feel safe expressing it; to say, “no, I don’t like that,” or “I don’t want to do that.” Because that isn’t who your mother says you are, that isn’t who you are supposed to be. Once you get stuck in that role, or any other role you’ve learned to play it can be difficult to get unstuck. Getting to that pool at the moment when the water is stirred and healing is promised isn’t as easy as it sounds. These patterns aren’t always bad. Maybe you’re the funny one, or the responsible one, the drama queen or the screwup. You’re known as someone’s mom, or someone’s kid, this person’s friend, or that person’s right hand man, or woman. It has been observed that we often play our role in the families we come from long past their usefulness.
So, when Jesus asks the man in that portico who has been waiting thirty-eight years for the right moment to enter the pool, “do you want to be made well,” maybe instead of asking it with an edge of judgement, perhaps he is asking with the promise of an invitation. Do you want to stay where you are, in a role you know well, with what you’re striving for always out of reach? The healing, the love, the approval, the importance, the peace that you just can’t seem to attain for yourself. The man can’t even bring himself to say, “yes, I want to be made well.” He has so resigned himself to the unchangeable nature of his situation that his answer is the well-rehearsed excuses that he has almost certainly taken to heart for why things will never change for him. He’s alone. He hasn’t got someone to put him in the pool. Even so, when he tries on his own to make his way down someone always gets in the way.
And here is the good news of this story. Here is the BEST news of this story. Jesus does not wait for him to get it. Jesus does not coax him into asking for something he isn’t even sure is possible for him anymore. The world would have us believe that we can have and do anything we imagine if we just want it badly enough. Work hard enough. And if we don’t have it, if all we have to show for our thirty-eight years of trying is a handful of excuses, well then isn’t that really our own fault. But then Jesus shows up. Jesus shows up to let us know that our wellness, our wholeness, is never dependent on whether we do all the right things, put ourselves in the right position. Friends, we were never expected to save ourselves. If we were, we wouldn’t need Jesus. And we do. More than anything we need Jesus to show us that the way things are are never the way they have to be. That our lives, our whole selves are more than the sum of our what we have done or what’s been done to us, the trauma we carry or whatever else has us paralyzed and left us unable to move forward. And that none of those things, or the roles we have come to play as a result of them, are the end of our story. We need Jesus, who believes we can stand when we’re all but certain we cannot and never will. We need Jesus to cut through our excuses and our blame, to free us from them so that we can in fact stand up, take up our mats and walk; walk in the way of the one in whom we find ourselves made well, made whole.