Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
August 22, 2004
John 5: 1-15
Another story told by preacher Fred Craddock: “When I was in Cincinnati, I met a lot of people I was glad to see, and a few I really didn’t care to see again, but there they were. One of them was a grumpy fellow, a member of one of the local churches. A grumpy sort; a controlling man – that was the problem I had with him. I gave Bible studies and preached a number of times in his church. As I said, he was a controlling man, one of those people who act like they’re in the background – ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know’ – but they’re really in charge. They do know.
“One day I met him on the street. There was nowhere to go, so I shook hands with him and said, ‘How are you doing?’
“He said, ‘I’m doing all right.’
“I said, ‘How’s the church?’
“’Better than we’ve ever been! God is at work in our church.’
“’Really?’ I had never heard him say anything like that; I had only heard him criticize.
“‘God is at work in our church,’ he said, ‘We’re in better shape spiritually and every way than we have ever been in my memory.’
“‘That is wonderful,’ I said. ‘Who is you minister?’
“’We have a woman minister.’
“I said, ‘You do?’
”’Yeah,’ he said, ‘Actually, I voted against her, and all my family voted against her (he was also controlling with his family), but we got outnumbered.’ Then he added, ‘But I was wrong. I was wrong in my estimation of women.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Brother Fred, if I was wrong about her, I was probably wrong about a lot of other stuff.’”
Says Craddock, “Isn’t that great? Finally, he met the gospel, broke the pattern, and he was making a new way.” Breaking the pattern and making a new way.
“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?’” “Do I want to be made well? Duh! Jesus, I have been lying here for weeks, I have been crippled and begging for thirty-eight years, crawling through the dirt and dust and God knows what else. I wake up poor and hungry; I go to sleep poor and hungry.” And Jesus says simply, “Yes, I know all that, but do you really want to be made well? Do you really want to break the comfortable, familiar pattern, and make a new way? Think about it. For once you are healed, there is no turning back. Healing can bring radical change. It can be difficult, frightening, challenging. Do you want to be healed? Do you really want that much change in your life? Do you really want to meet the Gospel, break old patterns and make a new way?”
I think of the old joke… How many UCC members does it take to change a light bulb? It doesn’t really matter. First the bulb has to want to change. How many Methodists does it take to change a light bulb? It takes twelve. One to put in the new bulb, and eleven to stand around and talk about how much better they liked the old bulb. “Brother Fred, I was wrong about her and if I was wrong about her I was probably wrong about a lot of other stuff.” Change does not come easily. “Do you want to be made well?”
Reflecting on this text, Margaret Guenther, spiritual director and author, says this: “It must have been miserable lying beside the pool. (My imagination always adds swarms of flies to the scene.) At the very least, the sick man must endure tedium and isolation in the midst of the crowd. After a few days, weeks or years of trying to get into the pool, perhaps he has stopped trying and accepted defeat. Perhaps a ritual of going through the motions has become his daily routine. No one can criticize him for not trying; things just aren’t going his way. Yet, however uncomfortable and bleak the wait, it may be safer and more attractive than accepting healing.” She concludes, “These Gospel accounts of healings are not ‘happily-ever-after stories’, ending with the restoration of health and wholeness. It is easy to forget that healing brings radical changes. The man is both shielded and depleted by his illness. No one expects anything of him and there are no surprises. Why should he risk losing this security? Why should he change?”
Why indeed? In fact, after he is healed, his troubles just begin. He attracts the attention of the Pharisees. They would have never noticed him before. They have questions: who did this and why are you carrying your mat on the Sabbath? He has been healed only five minutes and already he is in trouble. Suddenly his anonymous days of lying by the pool may not seem so bad. “Do you want to be made well?”
New Testament professor, Thomas Long, shares a story from early in his ministry. One of the families in his church had a young child who had cerebral palsy. Long says that when he entered that home, it was as if the child was invisible. The family went about its business, talked, ate and lived, with this child standing in the shadows, merely looking on. But one day Long received a call from the mother. Could he come by their home? She wanted to tell him about an experience she had had the day before.
When Long arrived, she shared her experience. She had been in the same room, either knitting or sewing. It was late in the afternoon, as the sun’s light was beginning to fail. Her son with cerebral palsy was down the hallway in the shadows, watching her. Suddenly she felt a shift in the room. Something was different. She looked down the hallway and, in her words, “I saw Jesus with his arms around my son, John. I looked away, and when I looked again, there was only John. But I’ll tell you, for the first time in my life, I began to understand that my son is already healed in the power of God.”
Long says, “I don’t know what happened there. But I do know what the two of us did. What I did, I did fortunately only internally. I had just finished a course in counseling. I began to interpret what she told me psychologically: she’s feeling guilty about this kid; she is rejecting him; she uses the symbols of religion to express her psychological distress…I was reducing her religious experience into the more socially acceptable language of psychology.”
“That’s what I did. What she did was to turn that personal, religious experience into something large, something ethical, something almost cosmic. If you go into the town in which she lives today, you would find programs in place for handicapped and disabled kids which she founded because of that experience. She turned that experience into a changed world.”
Oh, it’s so tempting to react like Thomas Long. How tempting it is to want to tame Jesus, to render him into a comforting, therapeutic friend who always affirms, always comforts and never demands, never suggests changes. But this is not the Jesus we meet next to that pool in Jerusalem. This is not the Jesus encountered by that mother in her home. Thomas Long had lots of good, sound, psychological explanations for what happened. She had only one. She had encountered the Lord and he wanted to know if she was interested in making a new way, if she was interested in being part of a whole new world, indeed in helping to bring that world into being. Did she want to be healed? Did she want to be made well? Her answer changed everything.
Preaching professor, David Buttrick, never one to mince words, suggests that the contemporary church looks rather pitiful now that hospitals, schools and everybody else has the slogan, “We Care.” The church thought that was our slogan, so now we say, “We Care More!”
Says Buttrick, “This is wrong. The church doesn’t say ‘We Care,’ rather the church is supposed to say something about the newness that has come into the world in Jesus Christ. We don’t simply care more about the same old things that everybody else cares about. Rather, we promise to attach people to new things. Jesus is not our personal therapist. Our need is greater than want of a positive self-image. We need a new heaven and a new earth; we need to know that a force for good flung the planets in their courses and moves the world even today.”
I can’t help myself. I have to tell this old story once again: A man says to his friend, “We aren’t sure what to do about my brother. He thinks he’s a chicken.” The friend responds, “Have you taken him to a good therapist? There are new medications, new methods, he could probably be helped.” “I know,” says the first man, “we should get him some help. Trouble is, we need the eggs.”
Suppose that could be said of all of us. To be human is to need the eggs; which is to say to be human is to be ambivalent: we can want and not want at the same time, we can seek healing and resist it, we can drag ourselves right to the edge of the healing pool and then find a million good excuses for not getting in.
“Do you want to made well?” The good news is that Jesus doesn’t seem to care much about the man’s excuses – would have, could have, should have; isn’t interested in his whining and blaming. Jesus isn’t into playing games. He wastes no words: “Stand up, take your mat, and walk.” And, no doubt much to his own amazement, the man does just that, and in spite of the changes and challenges he will now face, he never has to go back to that pool again.
Frederick Buechner captures the spirit of this text when he writes, “Heaven knows terrible things happen to people in this world. The good die young, and the wicked prosper, and in any one town, anywhere, there is grief enough to freeze the blood. But from deep within whatever the hidden spring is that life wells up from, there wells up into our lives, even at their darkest and maybe especially then, a power to heal, to breathe new life into us…I do not believe that it matters greatly what name you call this power – the Spirit of God is only one of its names – but what I think does matter, vastly, is that we open ourselves to receive it; that we address it and let ourselves be addressed by it; that we move in the direction that it seeks to move us, the direction of fuller communion with itself and with one another.”
Ah, do you want to be made well? Because a new heaven and a new earth… wholeness… healing – may be so much closer than we ever dare to allow ourselves to believe or hope. But dare to hope still.