Do You Want to be Made Well?
By Rev. Dan Smith
May 09, 2010
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
“Do you want to be made well?”
This question that Jesus asks in today’s text has been haunting me at different times and for different reasons all week.
“Do you want to be made well?”
Take Monday morning for example, when I left my house without coffee to go to an early morning appointment at the Dunkin Donuts in Watertown. You know where this is going, right? I went up to the counter and they said they had no coffee. I was shocked at first, and then dumbfounded throughout the entire meeting at how much I and our culture have come to take for granted clean running water, let alone hot running coffee. “Do you want to be made well?” For starters, try waking up, without the caffeine, to the recognition that 1.1 billion people around the world live every day without access to safe drinking water. 2 million people inconvenienced for 3 days in one of the richest parts of the world? Not even a drop in the bucket in comparison. “Do you want to be made well?” Try gratitude for starters and perhaps some voluntary exercises in under-consumption, if not of water, then of other readily available so-called commodities on which our lives have come to depend.
Or, take this past Tuesday morning when I was told by a physical therapist that the reason people sometimes ask me if I’m limping is because I have a “neurological foot.” True back-story -- 30 years ago, I suffered a stroke when I was seven and my foot in particular has never been the same. It was a freak occurrence for someone so young. The docs have no idea why it happened. I was aphasiac which means I couldn’t talk. I was for a time fully paralyzed on my right side. It was scary for me and no doubt scarier for parents who did not have the benefit of all the drug-induced fog that I was in. I could go on but long story short, I was young and I was fortunate to bounce almost completely back within a few months. The only lasting symptoms have been that my right foot has since been curled up. I can’t wiggle the toes on my right foot and my right side gets more readily fatigued than my left (I also wonder if it has something to do with the way I can’t always form sentences correctly or tell my right side from my left, but I think that’s stretching it). In any case, now, 30 years later, I finally get around to telling a doctor that my ankle and right leg and lower back have been bothering me some lately, especially after I exercise. It’s all very mild and far from life-threatening. I’ve just grown worried about where I’ll be in another 30 years if I don’t do something now.
Do you know what my doctor had the nerve to ask me? He said, “Do you want to be made well?” Okay…he didn’t say those words exactly but he said something very much like it. Then he said, “Go lie on that mat and let’s try stretching you out.” He then told me…get this...”Get off that mat and now let me see you walk!” I’m not joking. All this….on a Tuesday morning!
Meanwhile, I’ve got Jesus still rattling inside my brain with the “do you want to be made well” question. I wonder what experiences the question brings to mind for you. Truth to tell, I’m less concerned about our physical ailments, mine or others, almost all of which are far more serious. I’m more concerned with the ways that you and I might otherwise resemble the man in the story or the “many invalid – blind, lame, and paralyzed” who gather in those porticoes.
Putting ourselves in their positions for a moment, the first thing we might wonder is if Jesus somehow checked his compassion at the gate here. “Do you want to be made well?” What kind of question is that. The text tells us Jesus knew the man had been for a long time! 38 years! It would have been a cruel affront, a real slap in the face, to ask someone such a thing, unless….unless Jesus knew something else about this man!
To give Jesus the benefit of the doubt here --always a wise choice -- maybe Jesus did know something else. Maybe he knew that a part of this man did not want to be made well! Maybe Jesus knew that a part of him preferred his poolside position.
Maybe he had grown so used sitting in the shadow of that portico. Maybe he was unwilling to give up that free cup of coffee he always got from the vendor next door. Maybe he had lost the imagination for anything different let alone better. Maybe he had already befriended his despair and resigned himself to being well enough!
To be fair to the man and to the all those who were around him the text does make a point of saying they were all standing, sitting, lying and limping in a doorway. They were standing at the edge of a pool of great promise, waiting for their chance to get in. This adds a nice touch to the narrative if you ask me. They were all at some threshold, apparently waiting to cross over, or to cross into and yet somehow Jesus’ question has that poke-you-in-the-eye power to bring every one of them up short!
Are you with me yet? Are you thinking yet of those places in your own life where you are standing at the threshold, ready, willing yet decidedly unable to make a move from doing or being “well enough”? Do you know that feeling, if not of physical paralysis, then perhaps of emotional, spiritual or perhaps even moral paralysis! I think Jesus’ question is asking about all of the above! Another translation sheds a helpful light. In the King James Version, the question is this: Wilt thou be made whole? Do you want to be made whole?
Nancy and I were talking about this recently when I confessed I wasn’t so sure I wanted. She agreed immediately…“you do have a way of hanging onto to those un-whole parts, sometimes fiercely’, she said! I thanked her very much. But we all do, don’t we? The good news is that Jesus knows this and he loves us all the same which means that he will not always be patient with our 38 year old excuses. He doesn’t ask us “Do you want to be made well enough?” He asks, “Do you want to be healed? Do you want to be whole? Do you want to be restored to the wholeness that is your right as a child of God?
Physical limps and ailments and diseases are one thing. I so wish Jesus were here today to perform miracles of physical healing. I can’t and won’t try to explain that part of the story. But our emotional brokenness and especially our moral limping along, that’s another story. It’s as hard as stretching muscle that hasn’t been used for 30 years. It’s as hard for me at least as wiggling my right toes. Excuses will come fast and furious about leaving well enough alone especially when it comes to our moral and spiritual lives. But here’s the theological rub, that poke between the eyes of Jesus’ question. When we do so, we take for granted the very grace of God! We take for granted those living waters of our baptism, those promises of the grace-filled and powerful partnership through which we can heal ourselves and the world! What Jesus is saying in this passage is that God’s grace sometimes comes to us completely unprovoked! God comes to us, wherever we are lying and wherever we are limping. A doorway opens. A light is turned on. A friend calls on the phone. Someone asks us are we ready to come out of the shadows. What’s more, Jesus is saying it’s not okay to say in these moments “No thanks. I’m fine!” The reality is that none of us are ever fine and if we think we are then we need to be spending more time in places like that Pool of Bethzatha, or the Port of Haiti, or the Gulf of Mexico where our addiction to fossil fuel is washing up on beaches in filthy, black waves.
I’m thinking now especially of the kind of physical if not moral therapy we could all use to stretch us toward wholeness when it comes to the ways we take for granted the precious resources of God’s creation. I’m thinking of the ways that each of us can be taking even one more step out of our paralysis of analysis and towards some lasting change in our behavior that could lead to increased individual and collective well being. Do you want to be made well? Just let this line of Jesus’ rattle around in your heads this week and see what it stirs up in you. Whether we say “yes” or “no” or “not now” or “not yet”, his reponse is unwavering: “Stand up. Pick up your mat! And walk!”
If that’s the hard news of this passage, then here’s the good news. By virtue of his even having the conversation with the man and with us, Jesus is assuring us that we don’t have walk the way alone. By virtue of his reaching out to this man without the man saying a word or asking a thing, by virtue of his coming to and finding him and us standing by the edge, standing in that threshold, God’s unprovoked love and mercy and grace is always ready and willing and able to poke us in the eye whenever we are leaving well enough alone before at least trying to change ourselves or the world! Furthermore, by virtue of our being gathered here together, as Christ’s body, we can know that we really don’t have to walk, limp or hobble alone. We have an ever-growing number of brothers and sisters with whom to share the struggle, who can stretch us and tell us “let me see you walk.” Sarah was just the other day saying as much of Leo! And it’s now all of ours to say “let me see you walk, little brother!” and to show him how it’s done, to tell him to start stretching now so that 30 years later he doesn’t look back and realize that he’s got a limp that he could have avoided if he didn’t leave well enough alone!
For the rest of us, if you think you might have a limp, even a practically imperceptible moral one, try talking to someone else about it, tell a doctor, or tell one of the many gifted lay and ordained “physicians of the soul” in this congregation –it’s what they used to call ministers around here. Better still, try talking, even praying, to Jesus, or at least letting him say these words to you. “Do you want to be healed?” “Do you want to be made whole?” And by all means, receive the question gratefully, like a refreshing glass of clean water, as a gift of God’s unprovoked grace! Even if you are not ready, even if you are not willing, receive this gift and know that our God is always ready, willing and able to walk with you, no matter who you are or where you are on the journey. Start stretching now if you have to, and with God as our guide and Jesus as our companion, take it up! Take up your mat! Take up your excuses! Take a step from being well enough on your own into the well being of life in relationship with God’s amazing and able and life-giving grace! Amen!