Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Easter 4
April 29, 2007
W. Gregory Pope
NOT JUST ANOTHER DAY BY THE POOL
John 5:1-9
It is Derby Week in Jerusalem. A big festival of parades and parties. People have come from all around to celebrate. And you are sick. You and many others - the blind, the lame, the sick, the wounded, the paralyzed, the grieving, the depressed, the weary - all of you lying at the gates of Churchill Downs, helpless. And all these healthy, dolled-up people are walking by on their way to a party.
You’ve been lying there for quite some time.
Thirty-eight years for the man in our story. Probably most of his adult life, he has been sitting by this public gate, unable to move, hoping to make his way into this pool of water some say has magical healing power.
What about you? How long have you been suffering through your sickness, paralysis, anguish, disease? Two weeks and it seems like two years? Five years and it seems like twenty? Twenty years and seems like a lifetime? Are you finding it hard to remember a time when you were not sick?
Have you been sick for so long people have forgotten about you? Is there anything worse than to feel forgotten?
The sick one in our gospel story this morning discovers there is One who has not forgotten. It is a saving line we read. It simply says, “Jesus saw him lying there.”
Jesus notices. When it seems as if everyone else has forgotten, Jesus notices. You may have been sick for so long people no longer take notice. Hopefully, you have friends who have not forgotten and remember to tend to the needs of your body and soul. But many who are sick are not so fortunate. It’s not that their friends don’t care. It’s just that they have lives of their own to tend to. And there are days, seasons perhaps, when it seems you have been forgotten. But not by Jesus. “Jesus sees you lying there.”
Not only did Jesus see this man lying there. The text says Jesus knew that he had been there a long time. Not only does Jesus see, Jesus knows. Jesus knows your whole story. He knows the many doctors. He knows about all the times hopes for healing were dashed. He knows all about the painful treatments. He knows all about the loneliness and fear. He knows all about the embarrassment. Jesus knows all about your trouble. Jesus knows.
He knows even more than we know about our own lives. And that leads him to ask this man a perplexing question: “Do you want to be made well?”
It is a disturbing question. On the surface it seems a ludicrous question. Who doesn’t want to be made well?
Do you know what he’s getting at here? Maybe you do.
This question does two things. One, it respects the freedom of the sick man. Jesus doesn’t want to give what someone does not want to receive. Second, the asking of the question reveals how much Jesus knows about the human spirit and the effect illness can have upon us.
Most of us know people who we suspect do not want to be made well. They may bemoan their illness and say they want to be made well, but you can tell by the way they say it and by other things they do that they really do not want to be made well.
Why would someone not want to be made well?
It could be that sometimes we can be sick for so long we have come to define our lives by our sickness. And to be made well would require that we see ourselves in a whole new way. To be well would change our lives. And change, no matter what the circumstance, can be frightening and difficult. Because change is always uncertain. To be made well could redefine us. To move beyond our grief, our sickness, our paralysis of body or spirit, would require a change we are not sure we are ready to make.
Or we may be afraid that if we lose our sickness we will lose the love and care of those who have been tending to us. It could be that we do not feel forgotten in our sickness. But we are afraid we will be forgotten in our wellness.
Or it could be that our sickness has become our companion, our friend even. As odd as it may sound, our sickness might be the one thing keeping us from feeling absolutely alone. In a strange way it has become our friend. And how we hate to say goodbye to friends.
In 1984, Duke University professor and novelist, Reynolds Price, was told by doctors he had a cancerous tumor ten inches long from the hair line at his neck running down his back that has since left him bound to a wheelchair. In his powerful memoir of this painful journey, it never appears that he wants to remain sick. Price does say he felt, in his words, “[the tumor’s] large existence within me; but I was never driven, like others I’ve known, by a constant passion to tear its repulsive life from my body. Maybe again its long presence had let me accept it as a virtual twin.” Price became convinced of its presence within since the womb, since conception. He describes his tumor as “as much a part of me as my liver or lungs and could call for its needs of space and food. I only hoped that it wouldn’t need all of me.”[1]
Our sickness can become our companion, a part of us without which we would feel desperately alone.
Before we go further, let me interject a word of caution here: It is never appropriate to assume that we know who wants to be well and who doesn’t. It is a cruel judgment on someone who is ill. Any confrontation of this kind must be made with great care and after much prayer.
Jesus asked the man with his 38 year old infirmity: Do you want to be made well?
And the sick man responded, “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.”
Some later biblical manuscripts and some translations include a legendary word about an angel coming to stir the waters and that the first one in the pool gets healed. This is not in our best or earliest biblical manuscripts. The legend itself, however, sounds like the magical miracle cures touted today that end up a cruel joke to those desperate to be made well.
But as Reynolds Price says when facing his own dark battle with cancer: Everyone “may be excused in a storm for grasping at whatever looks remotely like help.”[2] We will follow whatever hope we can find when we have nothing to lose.
Whether legendary, farfetched, or real, this man has heard that there are methods available for healing, but he doesn’t have the means to acquire them. Others get to the healing waters before him.
Apart from legend, this is very real for many in our world. Treatments are available, but obstacles of poverty and politics stand in the way of vaccinations, surgeries, and medications that can bring healing and wholeness. As the healing body of Christ, we are called to remove those obstacles to wellness.
But notice something else in the response of this man to Jesus: There is no clear indication that he does indeed want to be healed. He just explains to Jesus why he cannot get to the water that is reported to have healed others.
Could it be an excuse, or does he truly want to be made well? Is he clinging to his role as victim, afraid of what healing might bring?
What about us with our illness of body, mind, soul, spirit? We can all play our games as to why we cannot do something. Do we really want to be made well? Or are we clinging to our role as victim, afraid of what healing might mean?
It could be that both are at work. We want to be freed from the prison of our illness and yet we are afraid of the different life healing would bring. It is not the coward within. It’s just good old fashioned fear. And who among us has not been there?
Victim or not, excuse or reality, this man soon realizes this will not be just another day by the pool. Today will be a turning point in the life of this man. If you are familiar with the gospels you are aware that Jesus often speaks in riddles, stories, and parables that leave us searching for understanding. But here, Jesus doesn’t play any games. He get directly to the point. He says to the man, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”
It is a call to do something. It is an invitation to new life. And at once, the text says, the man was made well; he took up his mat and began to walk.
If I can be critical of the text for a moment: This is what we often find so frustrating about the healing stories of Jesus in the gospels. Instant healing seems so foreign to our experience most of the time with few exceptions. We find it difficult to believe that if Jesus could heal instantly in those stories then why doesn’t healing come instantly now. And why, sometimes, does healing never come at all?
Is there some greater purpose to those stories than our frustration? Yes, we can speak metaphorically about the healing of the soul. But if that’s the point of the healing narratives, then why doesn’t Jesus just heal their souls?
What good are these stories for us? I have no easy answers, at least none that fully satisfy me. I doubt they would satisfy you. But we do have a hint that there is a higher purpose to the healing stories than just the healing, especially in John’s Gospel.
Our reading this morning concludes with the words: “Now that day was a sabbath.” It lets us know that something else is going on here other than just a healing. As the story continues a debate ensues because this healing was done on the sabbath. And as a result, the healed man is arrested and the religious leaders set out to kill Jesus.
As is often the case in John’s Gospel, miracles are signs that focus not on the one healed, sometimes not even on the healing itself, but on God’s grace and truth revealed in Jesus.
Where do we find the glory of God’s grace revealed in this story?
We find grace in the assurance that Jesus knows about us. We have not been forgotten. Jesus knows all about our troubles and is present with us even when we feel so all alone. Jesus is the assurance of God’s grace and presence with us.
We find grace in the awareness that healing is possible. God is always mysteriously at work in our world. We simply do not know what will happen. There is hope for life beyond our suffering.
Reynolds Price occasionally had moments when through dream or vision he was given glimpses of hope beyond his suffering. One day while lying in bed he entered into a dream-like vision that was so very real for him. He found himself by the Sea of Galilee surrounded by the sleeping disciples. Jesus awoke and walked toward him and beckoned him to follow. The two of them walked into the water. Jesus silently took up handfuls of water and poured them over his head and back, running down the large scar where surgery had sought to remove the tumor. Then Jesus said to him, “Your sins are forgiven.” Reynolds thought to himself, “It’s not my sins I’m worried about.” He finally mustered the courage to ask Jesus, “Am I also cured.” And Jesus said, “That too.”[3]
There are moments through story and vision and dream where hope is born and nurtured. Those gifts are themselves wrapped in mystery. But even when the healing is not immediate or complete, those moments of grace can carry us through to another day.
This story in John’s Gospel reveals to us that the greatest gifts of life, even healing, are not earned, but are moments of pure grace, gifts we did nothing to deserve. God’s glory is revealed in this story through pure grace. This man does absolutely nothing. There is no evidence of good deeds. No affirmation of his faith that has made him well, as in other miracle stories. Just pure grace. Price calls it the “now appalling, now astonishing grace of God.” And that it is.
Stories of suffering and healing also serve to remind us that life is beyond our control. It is a great mystery beyond all rationalizations and reasonable explanations. As Price so forcefully puts it: “Only a blissed-out TV Bible hustler would dare reduce that weight of mystery to a trail of tea-leaves spelling a readable usable message.”[4]
We don’t want “the lesson learned,” the “usable message” told us. In the end, we are held by presence, the mysterious presence of The One Who Holds Our Tomorrows, the Companion who comes to us by the seashore, sometimes known, sometimes unknown.
Price describes those moments of sustenance, those moments “of what felt like prayer [that] worked itself out (for him) in the predawn hours.” He writes: “I’d lie alone in my bed in the dark and sense the presence, just to the right in my mind’s eye . . . It - he, she or whatever - never spoke a sound but only heard me out as I worked at discovering my minimal needs and feasible hopes. . . Its reliable presence seemed only to say that I had somehow to build my life on radical uncertainty, knowing only that I was heard by something more than the loyal but powerless humans near me.”[5]
Most of us long to be made well. We are often embarrassed by our sickness. We know we are more than our sickness. And we are more than our sickness. Deep down we are God’s beloved child, created for fullness of life. Every life knows some dis-ease and suffering. But we are more than our suffering. We are those whose every moment is seen and known by The One Who Made Us. And that “reliable presence” sustains us with gifts of grace for the living of our days. Gifts of pure grace, grace you can never earn, grace none of us deserve, but grace for us nonetheless. In grace, Jesus tells us this day, “Rise and live into tomorrow. There is more for you than your sickness and grief. There is grace and presence to carry you through whatever tomorrow may hold. But know this: You are not alone. And you have not been forgotten.”
_______________
1. Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing, Atheneum, 1994, 36
2. Ibid., 22
3. Ibid., 42-44
4. Ibid., 176
5. Ibid., 54
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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