Pool of Bethesda.

Scripture: John 5: 1-19

 This story of the man waiting for a miraculous cure in the Pool of Bethesda is short and easily passed over. Jesus talks to someone with a long-term disability, has a short conversation with him, a healing takes place, and within seconds the man is walking away carrying his bed.

Is this just another healing to add to the many Jesus performed? Jesus performed many healing miracles during his life.

No: this one's different. There's a lot more going on here but we have to really think about it. As David Frost would say on ‘Through the Keyhole’ “The clues are there.”

First clue, why does John tell us specifically that the pool is near the Sheep Gate? Later in his gospel, John will tells us that Jesus is the gate of the sheepfold. one of the characteristics of John's gospel is that it is full of symbolism which the Christian reader of his day would have understood. Do these symbols John uses give us the feel of Jesus being a very practical shepherd of the lost sheep - the one who brings safety and security to those whom the old law of the Jews had failed, leaving them in a kind of helpless prison beneath the porches of the Bethesda pool?

Second clue. What about those porches. Is it important to John and his readers that there are five of them? If John goes to the trouble to tell us there are five of them, it probably has some significance. Numbers are crucially important in the Jewish tradition. If you said to a first-century Jew on the streets of Jerusalem: 'Complete this phrase - The five…', they would almost certainly say: 'The five books of the Law' - the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures which told of God's law and covenant with God's chosen people.

John describes 'a great number of disabled people' who used to lie, day in day out, beneath these five porches, with the minutest hope of being healed when the waters of the pool are miraculously stirred. Many commentators believe that John wants us to see that while the old law of the Jewish faith, symbolised by the five porches, could not offer true healing for those who had nowhere else to turn, the new covenant of love, represented in Jesus, could say to a sufferer "Get up. Pick up your mat and walk" and he would be healed.

Third clue. Sometimes we ask such silly questions, my mum used to ask when she phoned me “Is that you?” to which I replied “No it’s someone else.” The question Jesus asks the man seems silly. The man has been coming here for 38 years to this place, hoping to capture that rare and precious moment when the waters of the pool would bubble and he might be magically cured of his disability; and Jesus says to him, 'Do you want to get well'! Doesn't that seem rather a silly question? This man hasn’t been coming here for the last 38 years not wanting to get well.

At work a favourite saying of a colleague is, “God helps those who help themselves. That’s right isn’t it Paul?”  I actually believe that it is both un-Biblical and dishonest to say anything like the fact that God helps those who help themselves. It’s simply not true. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite. One of the great principles of God’s word, is that God, the High and the Holy One, helps the helpless. The hymnist got it right in that familiar hymn.

Abide with me fast falls the even tided.
The darkness thickens Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail, and comfort flee,
Help of the helpless, abide with me.

God’s Word tells us that God’s strength is perfected in our weakness. It is not perfected in our strength, or our cleverness, or our innovative ways of thinking. It is when we come to a point in our lives when we are willing and ready to confess our failures, our weakness, and our helplessness, that we are able to recognize the work of God within our lives. It’s when you recognize your failure as a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter, a friend or a colleague, a pastor or a parishioner, that you open yourself to the wonder of God in your life. This goes against everything society teaches us, and that this is not the way that things are done. This is God’s way! For example, when we recognize that we’ve not lived up to the high expectations that we set for ourselves in Christian living, we are, ironically, in a place where God can most use us. Therefore, God does not take for granted the answer to the question that He asked the man who lay by the pool for thirty-eight years. He doesn’t take for granted your answer.

Do you really want to be made well? Do you really want to be healed? Do you really want to be better? Do you really want to be a new person? Do you really want to have the beauty and strength of Jesus Christ flow through your body and mind? The question comes across to our helplessness. It breaks through traditions, denominations and Creeds. “Do you really want to be made well?”

Fourth clue. Did Jesus know something about this man that we don't?  In the original Greek translation the word that John uses, which we translate as 'get well', has much deeper meanings. It really has the sense of 'being made whole'.

I have a friend who practices ‘alternative medicine’ to her the act of curing a specific condition doesn’t necessarily make somebody whole again. The way she works is ‘Holistically’, treating the body as a whole (mind, body and spirit). Sometimes, being healed of our physical disease doesn’t necessarily restore to wholeness of life and involves more than chasing away our physical disease. Wholeness of life can often involve less tangible dis-eases in our lives: it can require that we truly forgive others, or that we are forgiven by others for past hurts; it can require letting go of baggage which weighs us down; it almost certainly requires us to be at peace with ourselves and with others at some deeply significant levels.

 In my teens I had the privilege of meeting a lady, Alice. She had numerous illnesses and disabilities. It was through talking to her that I came across the Jewish word ‘Shalom’. Even though Alice’s body had many sicknesses she had found a profound wholeness of life. 'Wholeness' doesn't always equate simply with 'cure'. We might look to the doctor for a cure; but we might look to our values, our beliefs, and our relationships with others, for wholeness.

It seems that Jesus was saying to the man, 'Do you want to be made whole' rather than 'Do you want to be cured of your outward infirmities'. 

     Fifth Clue. Later in the Temple, Jesus meets the man and he says to him, 'Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.' People at this time believed that illness was caused by sins  committed previously. This wasn’t Jesus’ teaching. So why does John put these words in Jesus' mouth, unless it's to strengthen the idea in the story that there were things this disabled man needed to sort out around the wholeness of his life before receiving a cure for his disability.

You have read all this now what has this to do with us? What wholeness of life do we seek from Jesus as he walks among us? How many porches does the church have beneath which we all sit, week after week, waiting for a meeting with the mysterious? And what do we say to Jesus when he finds us and asks us the question: "Do you want to be made whole"?

We can choose not to! We can choose to stay where we are clinging to the old laws – ideas no longer believed about our place in society, living our lives, to laws made by others, which are often unfair and unjust. We often turn a ‘blind eye’ and don’t live our lives to God's truth but choose one of the many flawed human interpretations of it. We need to realise that Jesus invites us to move towards greater wholeness, we can stay on our mats beneath the porches of old, familiar, yet life-draining traditions.

We can also choose to cling on to mythologies about who we are and what our lives are for. One mythology I heard recently is that God has turned his back on man and that as lost people we shall experience a God of destruction and vengeance, rather than a God of love who blesses our lives and our relationships. Another mythology I have heard says that God's love is rationed, and that we are in competition with others for our share of it. Some people hold the belief that there are absolute rights and absolute wrongs. Some will be blessed and be in the pool at the right time, when the waters move, and others will not. Do we really believe that God's love is such a brutal lottery?

We believe as followers of Jesus, that when we are in difficulties, or unwell, distressed or hurt, our faith has a part to play in restoring us to wholeness again. This story about the man at the Pool of Bethesda reminds us that, when, in faith, we turn to Jesus for healing, he may very well look deep into our soul and ask: 'Do you want to be made whole'?

Our challenge, perhaps, is to think about what changes we might make, what redundant ideas we can relinquish, what baggage we can ditch, and what mythologies we can abandon, to help us fully see what wholeness of life can mean if we truly seek it.

Are we ready to hear Jesus say to us: 'Get up! Pick up your mat, and walk'?

Amen.