The day dawned like any other day ... a little chillier, maybe, than you might have expected this time of year. But still, about as gray and bleak and unpromising as any other day.
After all, every day was about like every other day. What reason did he have to expect anything different? For 38 years now he had done about the same thing every day, and by now it was comfortable. Cold, but comfortable. Foolish, but familiar. No reason to imagine that this day would be unlike every other day, long hours filled with boredom, long hours filled with waiting, long hours inching by, filled with frustration. To tell the truth, long hours filled with, well, long hours.
He scraped together a few crusts of bread and a little fish that someone had left him the day before and stretched to look out the window of his little room: sure enough, gray. Chilly, bland, boring gray.
It was a slow business, this thing of getting ready to go out on the streets when there was nothing to go out to. Why hurry, after all? This day would be like all other days. During the earlier years he had on occasion thought that something would come of it. When they first told him about the pool of Bethesda and its healing powers, well, he thought, this is worth trying. Nothing else has healed these diseased legs .. so off to the pool he went to see if as they claimed, an angel troubled the waters from time to time and you could be healed if you were to step in the waters at those times.
At first it bothered him that he never seemed to get it right. When the waters bubbled, for one reason or another he never got there at the right moment. And it angered him at first ... for a week or two or maybe a month it angered him to think that he was so close and yet so far. He wanted to be healed, but he just couldn’t quite pull it off.
But slowly, imperceptibly, after a month or so, he began not to expect to be healed, not to expect to get in the pool. Somewhere – and he himself could not have dated it – somewhere in those first few months he began to stop expecting healing and to begin enjoying ill health.
He began to stop expecting healing and to begin enjoying ill health. And after year a few more months, maybe a year, the business of going out to the pool every day to lie there and wait and miss the angel – that business had become a habit, a routine, even a part of his identity. They knew him now as the guy who always missed the waters; he was known in the street as the fellow who spent his days at Bethesda and could never get the timing right. It was just him, it was his thing … and, though he would never have admitted it to you out loud, he didn’t want it to change. It was just his thing.
Thirty-eight years. Why, what would he do now if somehow the healing were to work? Who would he be? It was just his thing, to be the cripple, the sick man of Bethesda, the professional beggar and sicko.
No reason to imagine that this day would be different from any other day. No reason even to want it to be. Slowly he drew on his old wool coat; with pain that he had long since learned to endure he tugged at his raggedy sandals. No, he could not really walk, but in order to impress or just to play the part you needed a certain look, a certain routine. A day once again to feel the futility of it all, but to respond with the same numbed feelings: “I can’t help myself, I can’t change anything, I’m trapped, so I may as well go out and do my thing, crazy as it is.”
But this day as he propped himself up in his favorite spot on the center colonnade, the place where you can see and be seen more easily, and where the regular crowd knew he would be – this day he saw coming toward him a tall bearded man with an air of authority and with a band of followers. It wasn’t hard to pick out who was in charge of this little crowd, because the tall bearded one had a commanding presence and a deliberate stride, and he was leading the pack, walking quickly toward the porticoes.
He reorganized himself around the colonnade just a little. Something made him want to square his shoulders and get his little pallet in order; something about this stranger that made him want to look at least a little together. And now the stranger was stopping, right in front of him ... was looking at him and was asking questions about him. Who is this man ... and what is his problem?
One of the fellows who spent a fair amount of time just hanging around the pool selling souvenirs and offering advice about how to take the waters offered an answer, “Why, Jesus, don’t worry about him; he comes out here every day ... doesn’t do a thing but sit here all day long. How long has it been now – thirty-five, forty years?
The cripple shifted on his pallet and croaked, “Thirty-eight .. thlrty-eight years as of the Feast of Lights last year” When you have made a career out of waiting, you know, statistics become very important to you. You like to wear your vital signs like a badge that says, “Poor Me”, so that everybody can see how bad it is.
"Whoever you are … Jesus, is that your name? … I’ve been here thirty-eight years, waiting to be healed. That ’s what I do; I wait. Some folks work and some folks play, some folks invest in business and some folks pray … me, I wait."
There was a silence ... a silence so loud it was deafening … the tall stranger was looking at him, no, through him ... and then came the thunderbolt question: “Do you want to be healed?”
He felt his throat going dry, his pulse racing; he had the awful feeling that he was about to be discovered, about to be disrobed right there in front of everybody he had waited with for thirty-eight years. He had to answer -- but what? "Do you want to be healed?" There was the question again.
But Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is disturbed. That’s it: I will plead that I can get no help. Nobody helps me. I will argue that I cannot be responsible for myself, but that somebody out there ought to do for me. That’s it: I’ll argue that I am a victim of history, a victim of prejudice, a victim of neglect and discrimination. That’s it. “Sir, I’d like to be healed but I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is disturbed.”
The teacher Jesus looked, and it seemed there was something of a smile crossing his face, just for an instant, but then he spoke again, "I say, ’Do you want to be healed?"
How could he know? How could he get inside so easily? How could he see that the man’s real lameness was not in his legs but in his mind? How could he fathom that as much as his limbs ached his heart ached all the more? But he had to save face, he couldn’t abandon his thing, not now, could he? After thirty-eight years. After you’ve spent a lifetime waiting for somebody else to come along and do for you, how do you turn that around? And so out of his dry throat and out of his racking mind, so blurred and numbed by years of passive inaction, comes another crippled excuse, "Well, sir, when I do get moving, someone else gets in the pool before me". “Others get there first, Sir; you know other people are faster than I am, other people have more pull and clout than I have, others are seated in more favorable spots than I am"
Out of a lifetime of sitting back and waiting for somebody else to come along, and out of a lifetime of thinking that everybody else is better and more agile and more endowed, out of a lifetime of low self-esteem comes a pattern, now crystallized, in which no healing is really expected and no health is really anticipated.
"Do you want to be healed?" Jesus goes on .. "Rise up. Do you want to be healed? Rise up, get on your feet, take up your bed and walk.”
It was as if the façade of a 1ifetime had been penetrated in one terrible but powerful moment. Every assumption on which his routines had been built was now exposed, and destroyed, and yet he was empowered to be something new, something he had not thought possible. He had forgotten how to think of himself as a whole human being, but this Jesus in a word or two had brought it all back.
Rise to your feet, take up your bed, and walk. And in that critical moment he knew that either he would in fact rise and walk and stand tall as a man with no excuses, or else that he would reject his one best chance and would cower here in these shadow forever. Either he would rise to become what Jesus called him to become or else he would reject his only real hope of healing. Rising or rejecting, which would it be?
Legs not used to stretching now flexed. Muscles which had carried little or no load for a generation now grew strong, and a back which had stiffened under the weight of years and which had been propped up only by the cold marble colonnade now straightened to its full height. “Do you want to be healed? When Jesus cuts out from under you your excuse that nobody helps you and reminds you that you can do all things through Him who will strengthen you, then you rise and you do not reject him.
Do you want to be healed? When Jesus takes away the excuse that everybody else is better than you are or more favored or more privileged, when Jesus touches you ... not just those other people, but you ... and says, I will heal you ... then you rise, you rise to your feet and take up your bed of limp excuses and you do not reject his gift.
It was only after a few moments of wonder and excitement that he remembered the pool. Why, he had not been in the pool at all! Thirty-eight years invested in waiting for the right moment in the healing waters, and then at the last the healing had come and he hadn’t even plopped one little piggy in it! All that had been necessary was the word of Jesus, the loving, affirming word of Jesus. The word of this Jesus was enough to heal, and oh how sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him at his word just in simple faith to plunge us ‘neath that healing, cleansing flood!
Do you want to be healed? Rise to your feet, take up your bed, and walk, and do not reject Christ’s offer of healing.
I know that this morning I am speaking to some folks whose lives are like this paralyzed man. For thirty-eight years and more ... or maybe for only thirty-eight days, but it seems like an eternity … you’ve been paralyzed, stuck, unable to get it together, unable to feel whole.
But the danger is that we may have come to the place where we enjoy ill health … spiritual ill health. Maybe some of us have cornered ourselves into a pattern of rejecting all the possibilities that are out there, all the while pretending to wait for the empowering and the wholeness God wants to give us.
Is it possible that if you’re looking for a job and you can’ find one, that you may just be starting out with the assumption that nobody cares whether you live or die and that employers aren’t going to like you anyway? Do you want to be healed?
Is it possible that if you’re a single parent struggling with how you are going to keep food on the table and a growing child satisfied and when is a decent spouse going to come along to rescue … is it possible that you are rejecting the integrity, the wholeness, the sense of accomplishment, that God wants to give you? Are you looking for somebody else to do for you what God has called you first to do? Do you want to be healed?
If you’re in the welfare cycle, and you’ve been there a generation or two, and you don’t even see any way out ... is it possible that you’ve become so encrusted into a pattern of behavior and of low self-esteem that you have not listened when others have extended help or offered possibilities? The Lord Christ says, Rise, get up on your feet, throw away that bed of excuses, and walk.
And if you and I are simply ordinary, middle-class types, who get the bills paid and do our daily work and pitch along from payday to payday, keeping on keeping on, but never dreaming great dreams about what we might do for the world or for the Kingdom ... if you and I are taking care of ourselves but are doing nothing for anybody else, is it not possible that we too have settled for too little?
Is it not possible that we too have become chronically sick, enjoying our incapacities, enjoying being less than what we might be, just waiting for a rescue, just blaming it all on prejudice or discrimination or racism or sexism or something else. Somebody else got in the pool ahead of us, soaked it all up. But guess what: we never even needed the pool!
Rise, listen to this Christ and take him at his word, and do not reject his offer. “Follow me and I will make you to become … to become. Rise to your feet, drop that bed of excuses, and walk, no, run. Do you really want to be healed?
Says Maya Angelou in her poem, Still I Rise
You may write me down in history
with your bitter twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt,
But still, like dust, I’ll rise
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hope springing high,
Still I’ll rise
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear. I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave
I rise, I rise, I rise.
