A Sermon Preached on May 22nd, 2022 based upon John 5:1-9a entitled, “Inward Wholeness: the Grace to Overcome the ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Debate.”
This is a healing story, but it is unlike any other healing story found in the Gospels.
After Jesus healed the son of the official in Capernaum, 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.
So, in those days there was in Jerusalem – and archeologists have confirmed this – a pool of water with five porticoes where people would come to seek healing. Apparently, there was an underground spring that fed this pool intermittently. Legend had it that when bubbles appeared from this underground spring, it was a sign that an angel had arrived, and that the person who was able to enter the water first would receive healing for their affliction.
We could ask, did the bubbles really indicate the presence of an angel who would give healing to the first one in the water? And I think we can answer, “Probably not.” Most likely the legend points to the power of what is known as the “placebo effect” – the fact that if we believe some medicine or treatment will help us heal, our belief itself will likely ease pain and boost our immune system.
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?”
Initially, this question might seem surprising. The man has been ill for 38 years – imagine all the suffering his illness has caused him throughout his life. The answer would seem obvious – of course the man wants to be made well! But listen to his answer and see what you think.
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.”
It is peculiar, is it not that the man doesn’t give a straight forward answer – “Yes, I want to be healed” — to a straight forward question. Instead, the man responds in a way that suggests that Jesus’ question leads him to be defensive. He gives excuses for why he was never able to get into the water in time. He complains about how no one cares enough to help him, and about the lack of consideration of others who always put their needs ahead of his.
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.
Thus ends the reading. May God bless our hearing of the Word.
Though the healing stories in the Gospels vary greatly, one theme is consistent throughout and that is the message that Jesus whole-heartedly wants people to be made whole. There is not a single story in which someone asks for healing from Jesus and he turns them down. We can take it as a given that Jesus loves us, and that Jesus wants us to be made whole.
There is something distinguishes this healing story which is expressed in Jesus’ question to the man, “Do you want to be made well?” Jesus wants this man to be made whole, and yet the man’s response to Jesus’ question suggests he’s not so sure he wants to be healed – that he is inwardly conflicted on the subject. A part of him wants to be healed, wants to be set free from the suffering his sickness has caused him. But another part would prefer things stay the way they are.
Why would there be a part of the man that doesn’t want to be healed? We can only speculate, but there are a variety of different possible reasons, and as I present some, I invite you to consider whether there might be something similar going on inside you, because the truth is, there are inner conflicts inside all of us – it’s a part of what it means to be a “fallen creature” living in bondage to the power of sin – which to some extent we all are. Jesus’ question, “Do you want to be made well?” comes to all of us.
As I said in a recent sermon, there is a war going on inside us. There are a variety of forms in which this war is expressed, and some of which can seem to contradict one another, and yet it is not uncommon for them to exist together inside us because we are complex, often confounding creatures.
Maybe the man in this story views being healed as in some ways harder than remaining sick and unable to walk. If you can’t walk, little can be expected of you. If you start walking around there will be expectations — you own and the expectations of others — and ample opportunity to disappoint.
Another way to put this is that if the man starts walking around, he opens himself up to the possibility of falling. You can’t suffer the humiliation of falling if you never stand up.
Maybe there is a part of the man that is simply ready to give up on life. Life has worn him down, and on an unconscious level he welcomes death. Removing his illness will take him further away from death. It is the inner conflict famously expressed by Hamlet when he says, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” For Hamlet, to die is to sleep – it means not having to keep up the fight. Death represents rest.
Maybe the man feels unworthy of being healed. He carries some guilt that leads him to judge himself undeserving of being made whole. Or maybe he has internalized the message from others that deep down he is fundamentally unworthy.
Maybe all of this and more: perhaps the man has attached himself to the identity of a victim, helpless in the face of the self-centered failure of others to care. Maybe he’s grown attached to his resentment — to what he views as his righteous anger at the world for giving him such a raw deal in life. The problem with being made whole is that he would be obliged to let that all go.
So, Jesus asks the man if he wants to be made well, and the man sidesteps the question and instead blames the lack of care and self-centeredness of others for his suffering. Perhaps there is a taunt in the man’s words: “Nobody else cared enough to carry me to the water in time – no one was willing to save me from my affliction. I bet you won’t either.” The twisted thing about such a taunt is this: if this stranger who has suddenly appeared at his side refuses to rescue him, the man will receive the perverse satisfaction of having been proved right in his belief that nobody cares. His chronic resentment will seem all the more righteous.
It a seductive taunt by the man, one that many of us who are attached to an image of ourselves as “people who care” can easily be seduced by: “Let me show you that I’m not like those heartless others. I’ll be your rescuer.”
Here’s the thing: Jesus does truly care about the man, cares deeply — but it is striking that Jesus is unwilling to respond to the man in the way he demands. Jesus doesn’t say, “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get to the water first the next time the bubbles appear.”
The man wants to remain totally passive – if he is to be fixed, somebody has got to come and rescue him. But Jesus’ response cuts through his passivity, requiring that the man participate in his own healing. “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” And that is what the man does.
The healing remains quite mysterious, because somehow the Spirit of God has suddenly moved in a way that overcomes the man’s inner conflict which for 38 years had kept him so stuck. Powerful grace arrives in the form of an authoritative command from Jesus that pierces the man’s soul. Unexpectedly an inward wholeness emerges that allows him to take a step towards outward wholeness.
One of the ways this inner war I’ve been talking about gets expressed is the difficulty we have breaking bad habits. We identify some behavior that keep us from being healthier and happier and make a New Year’s resolution or a Lenten promise to break the habit. We succeed for a few days, but something inside us liked the familiarity of that bad habit, and eventually we lose our resolve.
The story of Jesus’ interaction with the man by the pool of Siloam reminded me of an experience a man from our congregation told me about that had a similar quality. It happened during a period of time when he was aware of feeling very blessed. New love with a woman had recently entered his life — a love centered in a shared desire to follow Jesus. He was feeling a profound sense of gratitude, and at one point as he was pouring his heart out to God in thanksgiving, he asked the Lord what he could do to express his gratitude – what did God want him to do? And immediately it came to him with such clarity that he laughed.
Ever since he’d been a teenager he’d been addicted to cigarettes, and he suddenly recognized that God wanted him to leave cigarettes behind. And that is what he did.
He’d been at least a pack a day smoker, and hasn’t touched a cigarette since. As is the case with most smokers the man had tried multiple times to quit smoking, but he’d never been able to carry it out. But this time it felt easy and that was because on this front at least, the grace of God had overcome the war inside him. He no longer had a divided will.
Wholeness is a funny thing. Our bodies can be free of disease, free of disability, allowing us to project to the world the very image of health and wholeness, and yet inwardly we can be severely broken, inwardly deeply conflicted.
In contrast, some people discover inward wholeness through confronting an outward brokenness. They receive a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness or suddenly find themselves living with some kind of serious disability. As they face the crisis of their diagnosis or disability, they find their will power strengthening in life-giving ways.
Talk to such a person and they may tell you how in facing the crisis they resolved the internal “to be or not to be” debate, coming down decidedly on the side of “I want to be!”
They may describe how they underwent a major reevaluation of their life’s priorities. They began making healthier choices about the food they ate and the routines that shaped their days — all for the purpose of mobilizing their energy to wholeheartedly seek healing from their disease, or to learn how to live life fully and creatively in the face of their disability.
They recognized the need to make sure they got enough rest, because when they didn’t, their exhaustion gave space for all the life-killing voices to rise up inside them — the “let’s not be” voices.
They may tell you how they got clarity about where in their lives they should focus their energy: realizing they were hemorrhaging their life energy in places that weren’t worthy of such an investment, and places they hadn’t given enough of their life energy to — activities that bring them joy. Perhaps time spent with friends or family. Perhaps activities that expressed their God-given gifts. They realized as Jesus said that they’d been “hiding their light under a bushel.”
And talk to such people and they will describe some kind of spiritual awakening that took place – how prayer became something they began to take seriously.
To go back to the point I was making in the children’s sermon: we get tripped up because our capacity to love ourselves in healthy ways in compromised. We can’t love others very well because there’s a hung jury inside us regarding whether we deserve to be loved.
Which is why we need to hang out with Jesus. He is our greatest advocate. As it says elsewhere in John’s Gospel, Jesus wants to give us “abundant life” – not just “getting by life.” He wants to forgive our sins that leave us feeling guilty. He wants to heal our toxic shame.
Where we are conflicted in regards to whether we really want to be made whole, Jesus has no such conflict – he utterly, unabashedly desires that we be made whole. Jesus knows us infinitely better than we know ourselves, and knowing all there is to know, he loves us whole-heartedly.