Rising Or Rejecting? Series

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.