Donald B. Strobe
“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?’” (John 5:6) It sounds like a stupid question, doesn’t it? Jesus meets this fellow at the crowded pool, this poor crippled chap who had been coming there for perhaps thirty-eight years waiting to be healed, and asks him point blank, “Do you want to be made well?” We can imagine the look the crippled man must have given Jesus. We can imagine him saying something like, “Do I want to be made well? What a silly question! What do you think I’ve been coming here for thirty-eight years for...my health? Oops! That’s just what I’ve been coming here for. My health. And now you ask me whether I really want to be made well. What a stupid question!”
Let’s look at the background of this story, which is the record of the “third sign” of Jesus in the Gospel of John. There were three major “festivals” of the Jews which every adult Jewish male who lived within twenty miles of Jerusalem was obliged to attend: they were Pentecost, the Passover, and Tabernacles, (which was sort of like our Thanksgiving). Scholars are divided as to which “festival” John is referring in the fifth chapter of the Gospel. There is also, curiously, no mention of Jesus’ disciples being there with Him, so perhaps He attended this one alone.
As Jesus walked through the Holy City, he came to a certain pool. We don’t know for sure exactly where the pool was, nor even what its name was. If you check the footnotes in your Bibles, you will find it variously referred to as “Beth-zatha” (House of the Olive), or “Bethsaida” (House of the fisherman, not to be confused with Bethsaida in the Galilee, or “Bethesda” (House of Mercy). Josephus refers to a part of the city as “Bezetha,” and so we are in total confusion about what to call the place. Different manuscripts give it different names. The NRSV Bible follows the strongest manuscript source and calls it “Beth-zatha.” John tells us that it was near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, a city gate on the north side, which was restored by Nehemiah during his rebuilding of the city in the 6th century BC. Recent excavations near the Church of St. Anne at the north side of the Old City of Jerusalem near St. Stephen’s gate have uncovered a couple of pools with colonnades which seems to fit the description given by the Fourth gospel, a pool with “five porticoes.” The Greek word indicates that it was not just a shallow pool, but must have been as big and as deep as a swimming pool. Around it were five colonnades with five arches which afforded shelter from inclement weather. These areas were crowded with all kinds of sick people who had come to the pool to be healed, much like modern-day pilgrims visit the shrine at Lourdes.
The footnote in the NRSV Bible which gives us the “missing” 4th verse in this chapter is most interesting, and comes from a later addition where someone who copied down the Gospel wanted to add an explanatory note, telling us something of the healing properties of the pool. The footnote says that the poor man was “waiting for the stirring of the water; for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred up the water’; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had.” This tells us a lot about the beliefs which ancient people had regarding the healing properties of the water. Every now and then the pool bubbled up. There must have been some sort of a subterranean spring beneath it which every now and then sent out a gush of water. Superstitious people, not understanding how such things worked, believed that the bubbling was caused by an angel who troubled the waters. Thornton Wilder wrote a short play titled, The Angel That Troubled the Water, reflecting the ancient belief that the first person who succeeded in scrambling into the water after the surface of the water was disturbed would be cured. He has the invalid in his play cry out:
I shall sit here without ever lifting my eyes from the surface of the pool. I shall be next. Many times ever since I have been here, many times the angel has passed and stirred the water, and hundreds have left the hall leaping and crying for joy. I shall be the next. But it was not to be. Every time he got himself up, pulling his crippled body to a standing position to head toward the pool, somebody else beat him to it, and he was left disappointed again and again. If he had been coming there for thirty-eight years, and the water was troubled an average of once a day, then that would mean that he had been disappointed 13,870 times! That would be enough to make anyone despair! And, to make matters worse, it seems that this pitiful individual had no friends to help him into the pool. Perhaps at first he had some friends who had brought him to this place the first time, but they long since seem to have become weary of him and lost interest in his case. Perhaps they had grown tired of his constant whining and complaining. At any rate, there were no friends left at the time of our Gospel story.
We can understand why Jesus gravitated to him. No doubt there were many spectators about the pool, watching and waiting for that wonderful moment when the angel’s wing would touch the water’s surface. No doubt Jesus had been conversing with some of them. Then it was that this most pathetic case of all was pointed out to Him. There was a fellow who had been there as long as anyone could remember. Thirty-eight years! A lifetime! Longer than our Lord Himself would live! And yet he still came to the pool, day after day. You’d think that he would have given up by now. But no, he was still there, after nearly 14,000 days of disappointment. And he had no friends. And so it was natural that Jesus would gravitate to Him. The old hymn “Abide With Me” says that Jesus, above all others, is the “Help of the helpless.”
James Boswell, the famous biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, one time expressed surprise that the great Dr. Johnson had taken under his wing a man of very bad reputation. He asked Oliver Goldsmith about it, and Goldsmith replied, “He is poor and honest, which is recommendation enough to Johnson. He is now become miserable and that ensures the protection of Johnson.” He was friendless, and that ensured the friendship of Johnson. This man by the poolside was friendless, and that ensured the friendship of Jesus. Indeed, one wonders why Jesus did not heal everybody around the pool that day. John reminds us again and again that Jesus came into the world for another purpose than merely performing signs and wonders. Still, it seems as though from time to time our Lord simply could not help Himself. His heart of compassion went out to the most needy and He healed, almost in an offhand manner, for He disappeared immediately after the healing and did not wait around to take the credit. The lame man did not know, at first, who had spoken to him and who had healed him. I think that John is trying to tell us something deeper in this story about Jesus’ “third sign.” There are a lot of unanswered questions about this story, but John appears to have had another purpose in mind than merely relating the story of a miraculous healing. Do you suppose that the author is trying to tell us that no matter how long you have lived with your problems, no matter whether everyone else on earth has forsaken you, there is still One who will not forsake you, One who cares infinitely for you? I think that is the case. In Robert Browning’s poem “Rabbi ben Ezra” we read these lines:
Thoughts narrowly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God.
Here is a lame and crippled man who had lain unhealed for thirty-eight years. Everybody on earth had given up on him. But Jesus picked him out of a crowd and spoke to him, and all was well.
“Do you want to be made well?” As I said in the beginning, at first glance that seems like a stupid question. But maybe it is not so stupid, after all. Psychologists can give us many examples of people who are ill for no other reason than they want to be, perhaps unconsciously. There are actually some people who, as they used to say, are “enjoying poor health.” Their illness serves some purpose in their lives. In the excellent book Getting Well Again, written by Carl Simonton and Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, (p.107) the writers, who are respectively an oncologist and a psychologist tell us, “Illness includes much pain and anguish, of course, but it also solves problems in people’s lives. It serves as a permission giver’ by allowing people to engage in behavior that they would not normally engage in if they were well. Think for a moment of some of the things that people get when they are sick: increased love and attention, time away from work, reduced responsibility, lessened demands, and so on.”
Of course, we must be careful that we don’t go overboard with this, and imagine that everybody, including ourselves, is unconsciously making themselves sick when illness strikes. But such a thing is always a possibility for any of us. We have all had similar experiences. In the morning before some engagement we do not want to fulfill we wake up with a headache or a cold. Our unconscious produces the condition to avoid the unpleasantness. Illness can be an escape. It is not always the case, but it can be, and we must guard against it. Illness can make us the center of attention. It can give us permission to be unusually grouchy or hard to live with. And using illness as a method of avoiding difficult things is not all bad. A psychologist friend of mine used to say that there come times in the lives of all of us when stress threatens to overwhelm us, and the most important thing any of us can do is to “go home, go to bed, and turn the electric blanket up to mother.’” But we must beware of making such an escape a way of life. When it begins to interfere with our functioning, then it becomes bad. Evidently something like this was the case with the man by the pool.when he met Jesus later in the Temple, Jesus is reported to have told him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” (John 5:14b) I do not think that Jesus meant that all suffering was a punishment for sin. In John 9 he emphatically says that it is not, and I will deal with that question in a later sermon. But Jesus may have known that in this particular person’s case sin was the fact that he had allowed his illness to dominate his life rather than doing something about it. He wallowed in self-pity, and that can be a sin. Jesus knew that anyone who uses sickness as an escape or an attention-getter is someone who is really in need of help. So, without entering into a lengthy theological debate, or arguing with the man about the supposed magical effect of the water in the pool, he told the fellow to get his eyes off of himself and onto Jesus.
One reason that self-pity is so seductive is that it allows us to see ourselves not as persons who are at fault, but rather as the recipients of undeserved misfortune. Everybody else is to blame for our problems; we are not. During one of the periodic periods of recession a few years ago, Dr. Donald Lunde, psychiatrist at Stanford University wrote a book titled Murder and Madness. In it he analyzed the effect that recent recessions seemed to be having on people. In former times such as the Great Depression, the murder rate went down and the suicide rate went up. In more recent times, however, precisely the opposite is the case. Dr. Lunde asked why this is so, and came to the conclusion that today, modern Americans do not blame themselves for their misfortunes. They blame “the System.” And thus they lash out at others, instead of themselves. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s people tended to blame themselves, and jumped out of office windows. Today people blame the system and go on murderous rampages against their families or their neighbors, or even complete strangers. (The tragedy of Oklahoma City may fit into this category.) It is an interesting thesis, and points to the fact that self-pity can be a destructive force in anyone’s life.
“Do you want to be healed?” asked Jesus. And it wasn’t such a stupid question after all. Jesus is trying to get the man’s eyes off of himself and his problems and onto Christ. William Quayle, that eccentric Methodist bishop who lived from 1860 to 1925 was riding on a train one day, and became involved in a discussion with several businessmen who did not know that he was a clergyman.
“What is your line of business? What do you deal in?” they asked him. The bishop replied, with a twinkle in his eyes, “Horizons.” Well, Jesus dealt in horizons, lifting up people’s eyes from what they are to what they might become. Perhaps this is the message that the author of the Fourth gospel wants us to see in this “third sign” which Jesus performed by a poolside in Jerusalem. You and I can become set in our ways, accustomed to our old, unproductive ways of living and doing things, but Jesus came to lift our horizons, to make all things new. He “came that (you) may have life, and have it abundantly,” He said. (John 10:10) Our besetting sin, contrary to what many people think, is not in thinking too highly of ourselves, but in thinking too lowly. Our major sin is not pride, not in trying to become more than we were created to be; but rather sloth, the unwillingness to be all that we are capable of being. Humanity’s besetting sin is shrinking from responsibility. In his book with the provocative title, On Not Leaving it to the Snake, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox said, “the Gospel is first of all a call to leave the past behind and open ourselves to the promise of the future. I believe that a careful examination of the Biblical sources will indicate that man’s most debilitating proclivity is not his pride; it is not his attempt to be more than man, rather it is sloth, his unwillingness to be everything he was intended to be.” (New York: Macmillan Co., 1964, p. ix.)
This fellow by the poolside had all sorts of excuses. “I could be healed, if only I had someone to help me get down to the pool.” We are all experts at “if only.” We can find all sorts of excuses for why we are not as we ought to be, why we can’t do what we ought to do, what God calls us to do. In August of 1961, on the campus of the University of Michigan, two thousand young people gathered together to try to discover what God was calling them to be and do in what was called the “North American Ecumenical Youth Assembly.” At that time they premiered a musical production titled For Heaven’s Sake written by Helen Kromer. In one scene, one of the characters sings a song about excuses. It goes something like this:
As soon as I’m out of college,
And pay all the debts I’ve carried;
As soon as I’ve done my army stint,
As soon as I’ve gotten married;
As soon as I get promoted,
As soon as my house is built;
As soon as my psychiatrist
Says that I’m freed of guilt;
As soon as I’ve paid the mortgage,
As soon as my kids have grown;
As soon as they’ve finished college,
As soon as they’re on their own;
I want you to use me, O Lord,
Use me, O Lord, but not just now!
And then comes the concluding verse:
As soon as I’ve reached retirement,
As soon as they’re getting ahead;
As soon as I draw my pension,
Just as soon as I am dead!
I want you to use me, O Lord,
Use me, O Lord, but not just now!
Through this “third sign” John is saying to all of us, “Quit making excuses. Rise, pick up your bed, and walk. Become what God created you to be: a whole person, wholly committed to God.”
Some have suggested that this story is not so much an account of an actual event, but is, instead, an allegory. After all. in the Fourth gospel many things do have a double meaning, and everything seems to point to something else. Those who would allegorize this story tell us that the helpless man stands for Jesus’ own people, the Jews, trying to live under the Law of Moses. The thirty-eight years stands for the thirty-eight years during which the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness, according to Deuteronomy 2:14. The five porches at the pool then stand for the Law, the Torah, the five books of Moses. The Law could show a person what was wrong, show us our sins, but was powerless to cure us of our sinfulness. Only Christ can do that. The pool stands for the waters of baptism, through which we enter into a new life in Christ and receive new power. It is an intriguing speculation, but it seems rather far-fetched to me. And, after all, the crippled man never made it to the waters. He did not have to. Christ touched his life first. I would suggest that we restrain our imaginations and not try to look for hidden meanings that may not be there. It seems to me that John put this story into this setting for another purpose. He is setting the stage for Jesus’ ultimate arrest and crucifixion. How so? He says that the healing took place on the Sabbath, and that immediately Jesus’ enemies in Jerusalem began to plot against Him. John calls our attention immediately to the two main charges brought against Jesus: (1.) He healed on the Sabbath, thereby doing “work” and (2.) His whole demeanor seemed to suggest that He was putting Himself on a level “equal with God” by doing things that only God can do.
At the end of this chapter of John he tells us of “the Jews” who are starting to persecute Jesus. We must beware of anti-Semitism here. When I come across the phrase “the Jews,” I substitute the phrase “religious establishment,” for it seems to me that Jesus would have trouble in any religious establishment! We must be careful here. Jesus was a Jew. The man he healed was a Jew. The writer of the Fourth Gospel was a Jew. All of Jesus’ disciples were Jews. All of the Gospel writers, save one, (St. Luke) were Jews. In this Gospel the phrase “the Jews” stands for the religious establishment, especially the “fundamentalists,” the religious “nit-pickers” of Jesus’ day, the folks who could not see the wonder of the man’s being healed and made well, but who could only see the infractions of their petty rules and regulations. (Their kind is not all dead yet!)
I have titled this sermon, “Life Begins at Thirty-eight,” obviously a play on the old adage that “Life begins at Forty.” The man that Jesus healed may well have been older than thirty-eight, but he had been ill for that long. And John seems to be saying that life begins whenever and wherever you meet Jesus Christ and open your heart to Him. No matter how long you have been bound, Christ can free you up. With Christ the future is always open. Years ago I came across some wise words written by that crusty old Roman Catholic prelate from Boston, Richard Cardinal Cushing, who said shortly before his physical death:
If all the sleeping folks will wake up,
And all the lukewarm folks will fire up,
And all the dishonest folks will sweeten up,
And all the discouraged folks will cheer up,
And all the depressed folks will look up,
And all the estranged folks will make up,
And all the gossipers will shut up,
And all the dry bones will shake up,
And all the true believers in Christ will stand up,
And all the church members will pray up,
And the Savior for all is lifted up—
Then you can have the world’s greatest renewal!
God grant.
“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?’” (John 5:6) It sounds like a stupid question, doesn’t it? Jesus meets this fellow at the crowded pool, this poor crippled chap who had been coming there for perhaps thirty-eight years waiting to be healed, and asks him point blank, “Do you want to be made well?” We can imagine the look the crippled man must have given Jesus. We can imagine him saying something like, “Do I want to be made well? What a silly question! What do you think I’ve been coming here for thirty-eight years for...my health? Oops! That’s just what I’ve been coming here for. My health. And now you ask me whether I really want to be made well. What a stupid question!”
Let’s look at the background of this story, which is the record of the “third sign” of Jesus in the Gospel of John. There were three major “festivals” of the Jews which every adult Jewish male who lived within twenty miles of Jerusalem was obliged to attend: they were Pentecost, the Passover, and Tabernacles, (which was sort of like our Thanksgiving). Scholars are divided as to which “festival” John is referring in the fifth chapter of the Gospel. There is also, curiously, no mention of Jesus’ disciples being there with Him, so perhaps He attended this one alone.
As Jesus walked through the Holy City, he came to a certain pool. We don’t know for sure exactly where the pool was, nor even what its name was. If you check the footnotes in your Bibles, you will find it variously referred to as “Beth-zatha” (House of the Olive), or “Bethsaida” (House of the fisherman, not to be confused with Bethsaida in the Galilee, or “Bethesda” (House of Mercy). Josephus refers to a part of the city as “Bezetha,” and so we are in total confusion about what to call the place. Different manuscripts give it different names. The NRSV Bible follows the strongest manuscript source and calls it “Beth-zatha.” John tells us that it was near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, a city gate on the north side, which was restored by Nehemiah during his rebuilding of the city in the 6th century BC. Recent excavations near the Church of St. Anne at the north side of the Old City of Jerusalem near St. Stephen’s gate have uncovered a couple of pools with colonnades which seems to fit the description given by the Fourth gospel, a pool with “five porticoes.” The Greek word indicates that it was not just a shallow pool, but must have been as big and as deep as a swimming pool. Around it were five colonnades with five arches which afforded shelter from inclement weather. These areas were crowded with all kinds of sick people who had come to the pool to be healed, much like modern-day pilgrims visit the shrine at Lourdes.
The footnote in the NRSV Bible which gives us the “missing” 4th verse in this chapter is most interesting, and comes from a later addition where someone who copied down the Gospel wanted to add an explanatory note, telling us something of the healing properties of the pool. The footnote says that the poor man was “waiting for the stirring of the water; for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred up the water’; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had.” This tells us a lot about the beliefs which ancient people had regarding the healing properties of the water. Every now and then the pool bubbled up. There must have been some sort of a subterranean spring beneath it which every now and then sent out a gush of water. Superstitious people, not understanding how such things worked, believed that the bubbling was caused by an angel who troubled the waters. Thornton Wilder wrote a short play titled, The Angel That Troubled the Water, reflecting the ancient belief that the first person who succeeded in scrambling into the water after the surface of the water was disturbed would be cured. He has the invalid in his play cry out:
I shall sit here without ever lifting my eyes from the surface of the pool. I shall be next. Many times ever since I have been here, many times the angel has passed and stirred the water, and hundreds have left the hall leaping and crying for joy. I shall be the next. But it was not to be. Every time he got himself up, pulling his crippled body to a standing position to head toward the pool, somebody else beat him to it, and he was left disappointed again and again. If he had been coming there for thirty-eight years, and the water was troubled an average of once a day, then that would mean that he had been disappointed 13,870 times! That would be enough to make anyone despair! And, to make matters worse, it seems that this pitiful individual had no friends to help him into the pool. Perhaps at first he had some friends who had brought him to this place the first time, but they long since seem to have become weary of him and lost interest in his case. Perhaps they had grown tired of his constant whining and complaining. At any rate, there were no friends left at the time of our Gospel story.
We can understand why Jesus gravitated to him. No doubt there were many spectators about the pool, watching and waiting for that wonderful moment when the angel’s wing would touch the water’s surface. No doubt Jesus had been conversing with some of them. Then it was that this most pathetic case of all was pointed out to Him. There was a fellow who had been there as long as anyone could remember. Thirty-eight years! A lifetime! Longer than our Lord Himself would live! And yet he still came to the pool, day after day. You’d think that he would have given up by now. But no, he was still there, after nearly 14,000 days of disappointment. And he had no friends. And so it was natural that Jesus would gravitate to Him. The old hymn “Abide With Me” says that Jesus, above all others, is the “Help of the helpless.”
James Boswell, the famous biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, one time expressed surprise that the great Dr. Johnson had taken under his wing a man of very bad reputation. He asked Oliver Goldsmith about it, and Goldsmith replied, “He is poor and honest, which is recommendation enough to Johnson. He is now become miserable and that ensures the protection of Johnson.” He was friendless, and that ensured the friendship of Johnson. This man by the poolside was friendless, and that ensured the friendship of Jesus. Indeed, one wonders why Jesus did not heal everybody around the pool that day. John reminds us again and again that Jesus came into the world for another purpose than merely performing signs and wonders. Still, it seems as though from time to time our Lord simply could not help Himself. His heart of compassion went out to the most needy and He healed, almost in an offhand manner, for He disappeared immediately after the healing and did not wait around to take the credit. The lame man did not know, at first, who had spoken to him and who had healed him. I think that John is trying to tell us something deeper in this story about Jesus’ “third sign.” There are a lot of unanswered questions about this story, but John appears to have had another purpose in mind than merely relating the story of a miraculous healing. Do you suppose that the author is trying to tell us that no matter how long you have lived with your problems, no matter whether everyone else on earth has forsaken you, there is still One who will not forsake you, One who cares infinitely for you? I think that is the case. In Robert Browning’s poem “Rabbi ben Ezra” we read these lines:
Thoughts narrowly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God.
Here is a lame and crippled man who had lain unhealed for thirty-eight years. Everybody on earth had given up on him. But Jesus picked him out of a crowd and spoke to him, and all was well.
“Do you want to be made well?” As I said in the beginning, at first glance that seems like a stupid question. But maybe it is not so stupid, after all. Psychologists can give us many examples of people who are ill for no other reason than they want to be, perhaps unconsciously. There are actually some people who, as they used to say, are “enjoying poor health.” Their illness serves some purpose in their lives. In the excellent book Getting Well Again, written by Carl Simonton and Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, (p.107) the writers, who are respectively an oncologist and a psychologist tell us, “Illness includes much pain and anguish, of course, but it also solves problems in people’s lives. It serves as a permission giver’ by allowing people to engage in behavior that they would not normally engage in if they were well. Think for a moment of some of the things that people get when they are sick: increased love and attention, time away from work, reduced responsibility, lessened demands, and so on.”
Of course, we must be careful that we don’t go overboard with this, and imagine that everybody, including ourselves, is unconsciously making themselves sick when illness strikes. But such a thing is always a possibility for any of us. We have all had similar experiences. In the morning before some engagement we do not want to fulfill we wake up with a headache or a cold. Our unconscious produces the condition to avoid the unpleasantness. Illness can be an escape. It is not always the case, but it can be, and we must guard against it. Illness can make us the center of attention. It can give us permission to be unusually grouchy or hard to live with. And using illness as a method of avoiding difficult things is not all bad. A psychologist friend of mine used to say that there come times in the lives of all of us when stress threatens to overwhelm us, and the most important thing any of us can do is to “go home, go to bed, and turn the electric blanket up to mother.’” But we must beware of making such an escape a way of life. When it begins to interfere with our functioning, then it becomes bad. Evidently something like this was the case with the man by the pool.when he met Jesus later in the Temple, Jesus is reported to have told him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” (John 5:14b) I do not think that Jesus meant that all suffering was a punishment for sin. In John 9 he emphatically says that it is not, and I will deal with that question in a later sermon. But Jesus may have known that in this particular person’s case sin was the fact that he had allowed his illness to dominate his life rather than doing something about it. He wallowed in self-pity, and that can be a sin. Jesus knew that anyone who uses sickness as an escape or an attention-getter is someone who is really in need of help. So, without entering into a lengthy theological debate, or arguing with the man about the supposed magical effect of the water in the pool, he told the fellow to get his eyes off of himself and onto Jesus.
One reason that self-pity is so seductive is that it allows us to see ourselves not as persons who are at fault, but rather as the recipients of undeserved misfortune. Everybody else is to blame for our problems; we are not. During one of the periodic periods of recession a few years ago, Dr. Donald Lunde, psychiatrist at Stanford University wrote a book titled Murder and Madness. In it he analyzed the effect that recent recessions seemed to be having on people. In former times such as the Great Depression, the murder rate went down and the suicide rate went up. In more recent times, however, precisely the opposite is the case. Dr. Lunde asked why this is so, and came to the conclusion that today, modern Americans do not blame themselves for their misfortunes. They blame “the System.” And thus they lash out at others, instead of themselves. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s people tended to blame themselves, and jumped out of office windows. Today people blame the system and go on murderous rampages against their families or their neighbors, or even complete strangers. (The tragedy of Oklahoma City may fit into this category.) It is an interesting thesis, and points to the fact that self-pity can be a destructive force in anyone’s life.
“Do you want to be healed?” asked Jesus. And it wasn’t such a stupid question after all. Jesus is trying to get the man’s eyes off of himself and his problems and onto Christ. William Quayle, that eccentric Methodist bishop who lived from 1860 to 1925 was riding on a train one day, and became involved in a discussion with several businessmen who did not know that he was a clergyman.
“What is your line of business? What do you deal in?” they asked him. The bishop replied, with a twinkle in his eyes, “Horizons.” Well, Jesus dealt in horizons, lifting up people’s eyes from what they are to what they might become. Perhaps this is the message that the author of the Fourth gospel wants us to see in this “third sign” which Jesus performed by a poolside in Jerusalem. You and I can become set in our ways, accustomed to our old, unproductive ways of living and doing things, but Jesus came to lift our horizons, to make all things new. He “came that (you) may have life, and have it abundantly,” He said. (John 10:10) Our besetting sin, contrary to what many people think, is not in thinking too highly of ourselves, but in thinking too lowly. Our major sin is not pride, not in trying to become more than we were created to be; but rather sloth, the unwillingness to be all that we are capable of being. Humanity’s besetting sin is shrinking from responsibility. In his book with the provocative title, On Not Leaving it to the Snake, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox said, “the Gospel is first of all a call to leave the past behind and open ourselves to the promise of the future. I believe that a careful examination of the Biblical sources will indicate that man’s most debilitating proclivity is not his pride; it is not his attempt to be more than man, rather it is sloth, his unwillingness to be everything he was intended to be.” (New York: Macmillan Co., 1964, p. ix.)
This fellow by the poolside had all sorts of excuses. “I could be healed, if only I had someone to help me get down to the pool.” We are all experts at “if only.” We can find all sorts of excuses for why we are not as we ought to be, why we can’t do what we ought to do, what God calls us to do. In August of 1961, on the campus of the University of Michigan, two thousand young people gathered together to try to discover what God was calling them to be and do in what was called the “North American Ecumenical Youth Assembly.” At that time they premiered a musical production titled For Heaven’s Sake written by Helen Kromer. In one scene, one of the characters sings a song about excuses. It goes something like this:
As soon as I’m out of college,
And pay all the debts I’ve carried;
As soon as I’ve done my army stint,
As soon as I’ve gotten married;
As soon as I get promoted,
As soon as my house is built;
As soon as my psychiatrist
Says that I’m freed of guilt;
As soon as I’ve paid the mortgage,
As soon as my kids have grown;
As soon as they’ve finished college,
As soon as they’re on their own;
I want you to use me, O Lord,
Use me, O Lord, but not just now!
And then comes the concluding verse:
As soon as I’ve reached retirement,
As soon as they’re getting ahead;
As soon as I draw my pension,
Just as soon as I am dead!
I want you to use me, O Lord,
Use me, O Lord, but not just now!
Through this “third sign” John is saying to all of us, “Quit making excuses. Rise, pick up your bed, and walk. Become what God created you to be: a whole person, wholly committed to God.”
Some have suggested that this story is not so much an account of an actual event, but is, instead, an allegory. After all. in the Fourth gospel many things do have a double meaning, and everything seems to point to something else. Those who would allegorize this story tell us that the helpless man stands for Jesus’ own people, the Jews, trying to live under the Law of Moses. The thirty-eight years stands for the thirty-eight years during which the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness, according to Deuteronomy 2:14. The five porches at the pool then stand for the Law, the Torah, the five books of Moses. The Law could show a person what was wrong, show us our sins, but was powerless to cure us of our sinfulness. Only Christ can do that. The pool stands for the waters of baptism, through which we enter into a new life in Christ and receive new power. It is an intriguing speculation, but it seems rather far-fetched to me. And, after all, the crippled man never made it to the waters. He did not have to. Christ touched his life first. I would suggest that we restrain our imaginations and not try to look for hidden meanings that may not be there. It seems to me that John put this story into this setting for another purpose. He is setting the stage for Jesus’ ultimate arrest and crucifixion. How so? He says that the healing took place on the Sabbath, and that immediately Jesus’ enemies in Jerusalem began to plot against Him. John calls our attention immediately to the two main charges brought against Jesus: (1.) He healed on the Sabbath, thereby doing “work” and (2.) His whole demeanor seemed to suggest that He was putting Himself on a level “equal with God” by doing things that only God can do.
At the end of this chapter of John he tells us of “the Jews” who are starting to persecute Jesus. We must beware of anti-Semitism here. When I come across the phrase “the Jews,” I substitute the phrase “religious establishment,” for it seems to me that Jesus would have trouble in any religious establishment! We must be careful here. Jesus was a Jew. The man he healed was a Jew. The writer of the Fourth Gospel was a Jew. All of Jesus’ disciples were Jews. All of the Gospel writers, save one, (St. Luke) were Jews. In this Gospel the phrase “the Jews” stands for the religious establishment, especially the “fundamentalists,” the religious “nit-pickers” of Jesus’ day, the folks who could not see the wonder of the man’s being healed and made well, but who could only see the infractions of their petty rules and regulations. (Their kind is not all dead yet!)
I have titled this sermon, “Life Begins at Thirty-eight,” obviously a play on the old adage that “Life begins at Forty.” The man that Jesus healed may well have been older than thirty-eight, but he had been ill for that long. And John seems to be saying that life begins whenever and wherever you meet Jesus Christ and open your heart to Him. No matter how long you have been bound, Christ can free you up. With Christ the future is always open. Years ago I came across some wise words written by that crusty old Roman Catholic prelate from Boston, Richard Cardinal Cushing, who said shortly before his physical death:
If all the sleeping folks will wake up,
And all the lukewarm folks will fire up,
And all the dishonest folks will sweeten up,
And all the discouraged folks will cheer up,
And all the depressed folks will look up,
And all the estranged folks will make up,
And all the gossipers will shut up,
And all the dry bones will shake up,
And all the true believers in Christ will stand up,
And all the church members will pray up,
And the Savior for all is lifted up—
Then you can have the world’s greatest renewal!
God grant.
