Sixth Sunday of Easter

May 13, 2007

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. John. (John 5:1-13)

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethzatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 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?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

Now that day was a Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Grace to you and peace from God, our Father, from our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.

One good way to approach the scripture is to read until something strikes you, something arrests you, something happens between you and what you’re reading; something strikes you as curious, or maybe odd, or inspiring, perhaps funny, illuminating, sad, disturbing, or surprising. At that point, you can be sure that you are being spoken to.

Well, in this text today, where was that moment of arrest for you? What caught me was Jesus’ question to the man sitting by the pool, who had been sick for so long, and the man’s response. Jesus asks this man, “Do you want to be made well?” What kind of a question is that? What kind of a question is that—“Do you want to be made well?” Could you imagine walking into a hospital and asking somebody who was sick, in bed, “Do you want to be made well?” Who wouldn’t want to be made well? But the man’s response is equally strange. He doesn’t answer Jesus’ question. He says instead, “Sir, I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up. And while I’m making my way, someone else always steps in front of me.”

There is something disturbing about this exchange, about this story of healing in our Gospel today. The word for the “stirring of the water” that the man uses is the same word for disturbance, or trouble. So we’re led this morning to consider “trouble,” or “disturbance,” as well as healing, and our relationship to it.

The man has been there for thirty-eight years, we are told. Just take that in for a moment. He’s been sick and beside this pool for thirty-eight years. We don’t know what he is sick from; we don’t know what his illness is. But we do know that it’s chronic and that it’s crippling. And we know that it is an illness that he has learned somehow to live with. It’s not a terminal illness. We can assume, I think safely, that he’s had this illness for most of his life; that he’s lived at the side of this pool, whose waters are associated by tradition with healing. It was said of that pool that an angel of the Lord periodically comes and “troubles the water,” and when that happens, the first person into the pool would be made well.

So here, gathered around this pool, this healing pool, a community has grown. People with various kinds of illnesses, diseases, blindness, crippling diseases, have gathered and they live together. They have formed for each other a kind of comfort and support system. And they’re all gathered there with the hope, the possibility, of healing.

And the name of the pool is interesting. Literally, it’s Bethzada; the older translations of the Bible transliterated Beth-esda, Bethesda. It’s no surprise that many of our hospitals are named Bethesda. Our Bethesda Hospital here in St. Paul has become a long-term rehabilitation facility, interestingly enough.

Note, too, that this is not a young man. Bethesda has become his home. The people here are his family. He and they live off the generosity of people in the city who give them alms. Nothing is expected of them. He’s never had a job, and he’s never had a family of his own. All of this, I think, is important as Jesus walks into that place. He sees, it says, that the man has been there for a long time. Perhaps now we can see why the question Jesus asks the man is not crazy and why it’s in fact a disturbing question. He asks him, “Do you want to be made well?”

Some time ago I had the privilege of meeting a few survivors, elderly people, who, in their childhood, had contracted tuberculosis here in St. Paul. In those days part of the prescription, when you were found to have that disease, was strict quarantine. They were sealed off, cut off from the rest of society, including their families. These particular children were sent down to the tuberculosis wing of the old Anker Hospital, and there they lived. Their only contact with the outside world was a once a week visit with immediate family. You can imagine that these people grew very close to one another. They formed, in essence, their own family among each other, becoming virtually brothers and sisters to one another, hoping to be healed, but also worrying about what their fate would be and the fate of their friends. Many of them died, nearly half of them. But those who survived told me this: that when it came time to leave, it was very difficult to reenter the world that they had become unfamiliar with. To reenter life outside the hospital was quite a difficult step.

So Jesus’ question is disturbing, but reasonable: “Do you want to be made well?” Can you see life on the outside as a well person might be frightening for this man? He will have to enter a world he does not know. What would you have said in response? The man’s response suggests, I think, that he is disturbed by the question. He doesn’t answer Jesus’ question at all. He instead answers with an excuse about why he has been there so long, which isn’t what Jesus asked him at all. He says, “No one helps me get into the water when it’s troubled. Someone always gets in in front of me.”

What do we do when something we are facing is just a bit too difficult or troubling to face or to contemplate? If at all possible, we avoid it. Making excuses is a good indication that we are avoiding something.

Well, Jesus responds to the man. He says, “Get up. Take your mat, and walk.” And he does; he’s able to. He is healed. His legs are healed; he’s able to walk. But notice, it’s a mixed blessing for him, because now he is no longer part of the Bethesda family. He must leave; he must leave and make his way in a world completely unknown to him. And how does he do in that world? Well, immediately, our text says, he’s confronted by some religious people who stop him and say, “Why are you carrying your mat on the Sabbath?” Well, this is a problem he never had to deal with before. Work on the Sabbath? He never had to worry about what that meant. He makes another excuse. He says, “The man who made me well told me to pick up the mat and walk.” “Well, who was that?” they asked. He said, “I don’t know.”

How well is this man going to be on the outside? How well is he going to function away from the pool? It’s not clear, but there is no going back. It’s significant, I think, that the healing at the Bethesda pool is associated with troubled water. Jesus didn’t put the man in the pool, but he did bring the man both healing and more trouble. He did not, by healing this man, make his life easier. Perhaps in some ways he made it more difficult.

I wonder how, in light of this story, we imagine wellness. Probably most of us think of wellness as the easing of our troubles, if not the elimination of our troubles, particularly those ones most disturbing to us.

But here we have a more complex picture of wellness, one in which troubles are not removed. Could it be that our troubles themselves are, in some way, God’s messengers to us; that our troubles are not the opposite of wellness, but are, in fact, our particular path to wellness?

“Trouble” is literally “dis-ease,” the root of our word “disease.” Those who are sick have their own kinds of “dis-ease,” but so do those that we call well. I have never met anyone who wouldn’t rather avoid “dis-ease.” But, also, I’ve never met anyone who has succeeded in avoiding “dis-ease.” To be human is to live with “dis-ease.” And Jesus offers no way out, only a way through.

There’s a line in one of my favorite movies, “A River Runs Through It“—a movie that is based on the personal life story of Norman Maclean, the author. In that movie the father tells his young son, he says, “Grace does not come easy.” As the story unfolds, the writer, Norman, loses his brother to a gambling and alcohol addiction, a brother that he loved and admired dearly; but he was powerless to help.

What was the grace that did not come easy? The grace for Norman, by the end of the story, was a coming to peace with the trouble that he had had to endure; and coming to peace also with his failure to be able to understand it; and how it was that the trouble he didn’t want nevertheless shaped who he became. Healing in this picture is not the elimination of trouble. And wellness is not the avoidance of trouble.

God doesn’t save us from our trouble; God saves us through our trouble. This grace is not easy to accept, but when we do, there is healing.

Amen.