A sermon on John 5:1-9 by Nathan Nettleton

A few months ago, I caused a bit of anxiety among some members of the church, because I cleaned up my desk in the church office. My desk had been so messy for so long that when I cleaned it up, some people thought I must be leaving. I wasn’t. I don’t think Margie and Acacia thought I was leaving them, but around the same time, I had cleaned up my desk at home to. That wasn’t quite as unusual, because I use it more often and sometimes it gets so cluttered that it is unusable, and I’m forced to clean it up, but what is unusual is that it has stayed reasonably tidy ever since. And that has never happened before in my whole life.

Actually, I was as confused about this as everyone else. I had no idea why I had suddenly tidied up both my desks. What I did know is that the psychologists and spiritual directors are fond of saying that a sudden burst of external spring cleaning is often mirroring some internal spring cleaning, some psychological and spiritual spring cleaning. So I was trying to work out what was going on inside me that was being mirrored on my desk. I was baffled enough to spend at least two sessions with my spiritual director trying to work it out. I eventually managed to join the dots with some other seemingly unrelated things that were happening for me and I realised that it was about a subtle but quite significant change of perspective. I realised that for most of my life, I had thought that real life, life as it was supposed to be lived in all its fullness, was something that would happen one day in the future when a whole bunch of other things were sorted out and taken care of. Life up until then was some kind of project of trying to get everything right so that one day I’d be able to get on with living properly. I thought I first had to sort out various aspects of my work and my health and my prayer and my study and my marriage and my parenting etc etc, and then one day if I got it all right, life would really begin. And then one day last year, almost without really noticing it myself, I stopped thinking that and stopped waiting. I just got on with living, and a whole bunch of things freed up and ceased hobbling me, and one of the little symptoms was that a bunch of things stopped being put off, and cleaning up my desks was just one of them.

There was a bloke in tonight’s gospel reading who had been waiting for life to begin for thirty eight years. I think I waited for forty eight, but this guy was even more obviously crippled and even more obviously doing nothing but waiting than I was. At first glance, one might wonder why this story is set for reading during the Paschal season when we are celebrating the resurrection, because it takes place well before the death and resurrection of Jesus and unlike some of the other stories set at this time of the year, it is not one of those ones that has Jesus explicitly preparing the disciples for life after his departure. But as I reflected on it and began to see these connections to my own recent growth and to some of the sorts of things I’m often facing with other people in the course of pastoral conversation, I realised that this is very much a story about resurrection, and whether we are really willing and ready to rise up and live with and in Christ.

Let’s look at the story a bit more closely so you can see what I mean. This story takes place at the Pool of Bethzatha which was a man made pool near one of the gates through the Jerusalem city wall. This pool had acquired a reputation for having healing powers, and much like places like Lourdes today where people flock believing that God is more likely to heal them if they go there, this pool was a place that sick and crippled people went in the hope of experiencing its reputed healing powers. The reputation of the Pool of Bethzatha was not only known to the Jews of that day. Many pagan people also believed that the pool had special healing powers and indeed it later became a pagan healing shrine associated with Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. The water in this pool was occasionally churned up, presumably due to an influx of water from the underground sources that fed it, but the legend that is alluded to in this story was that an invisible angel was responsible for stirring up the water, and when the water churned, the first person into the pool would get healed and everyone else would miss out. So this sick man in the story has been waiting there, year after year, trying to be first in when the water is churned up, but because he is crippled and can’t move very easily, he’s never going to be first.

Well, along comes Jesus, and we are told that Jesus knew that the man had been there for a long time. So Jesus sees him lying there, as usual, and says to him, “Do you want to be made well?” Now it is possible that this was not a loaded question, and that Jesus was doing nothing more than asking permission instead of scaring someone half to death by just randomly healing them without warning, but I don’t think so. I think there is more to it than that. Because as a pastor, I know, and most doctors and psychologists and social workers and the like can tell you the same thing, that with an awful lot of people, perhaps even most people, whether we really want to be made well is a rather complicated question, and the simple answer may not always be the most honest answer.

You see, many of us have gotten so used to dealing with things the way they are — so used to living with our wounds and our limitations and our dysfunctions — that we have built the whole structure of our lives around them and the thought of suddenly being without them can be more terrifying than the thought of accommodating ourselves to them for the rest of our lives. We’ve often learned to make them work for us, and we’ve grown comfortable with our own sense of ourselves as the tragic victims of life’s great injustices. I know, if I’m honest about it, that there were parts of my supposed quest to get my life ready to be fully lived that were more about consoling myself that it was someone else’s fault and that the reason that I wasn’t where I should be was because I was a victim of other people’s failures to do the right thing. And it was easier and sometimes more appealing to take some morbid pride in my own feelings of martyrdom and victimhood than it was to let go of them and take the risk of living without anyone else to blame for any future failures to be who I should be. So when Jesus says, “Do you really want to be made well?”, it is not an easy question to answer fully and honestly.

And indeed, did you notice that the sick man at the Pool of Bethzatha doesn’t manage to give a direct answer? Instead he begins to whinge. He rehearses his litany of woes, as so many of us do when faced with the curly question of whether we really want to be fully and truly and deeply healed. “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.” “And it’s really not my fault, and I’m always left behind because I’m a no one and nobody cares about me and there’s really nothing I can do about it, and so I just lay here and make my living as best I can by accepting the charity of passersby who see how sick I am and feel sorry for me and spare a few coins and I guess that’s just my lot isn’t it and I’ll just have make do.”

And perhaps his failure to directly answer the question is a whole lot more honest than he realised and a whole lot more honest than many of us often manage to be.

But Jesus came into this world to show us what real life lived to the full really looks like, and Jesus didn’t even let being denied and betrayed by his friends and tortured to death by his enemies reduce him to a martyred victim just feeling sorry for himself and nursing resentments and taking cold comfort in the injustice of it all. Jesus showed us that there is no misfortune and no horror and no tragedy from which life cannot be reborn to be lived in all its fullness. Christ is risen, and he has blazed a trail for us to follow him, leaving behind the comfortable familiarity of the crippling wounds that keep us from ever being first into the pool and so give us our justification for being stuck where we are.

Christ is risen, and he stands before us, like he stood before that rather non-committal man at the Pool of Bethzatha, and says, “Arise. Get up from your mat. Rise up from your grave. Life in all its fullness lies open before you, waiting to be embraced and lived to the full. Get to your feet, gather up your things, and get on with living it. There isn’t anything you need to wait for or sort out first. Get up and live, now.”

I’m not pretending for a moment that that is easy. Simple enough to say, but needing lots of courage to actually do. I know I took a new step along that road last year, and I’m not really sure that I even meant it. I just woke up and my tired old comfortable mat was gone from under me. But if you poke me in some other old wounds, I’ll still curl up into a foetal position and cling to my pain rather than stand to my feet and follow Jesus. But I can tell you that every time you make such a break through, you will soon be looking back and wondering why you lay there on your mat for so long when it wasn’t really some miraculous pool you needed, but just the willingness to take the wounded hand of the risen one who was inviting you to your feet all along. Most of you have made it into the pool. Some of you were helped into the baptismal pool right here among us, and for others of you it was someplace else, but wherever it was, you will know by now that it makes no difference whether you are first or last into the pool; getting into the pool will not, by itself, ensure that everything changes for you. The real question, and it is an ongoing question, is what will you leave behind on one side of the pool and how far will you follow the Messiah who rises with you from the water and leads you forward on the other side of the pool. In a few minutes that question will be being asked of you again as Jesus reaches out to you in the broken bread and outpoured wine saying, “Arise, eat, and go forth, and let us not let our shared brokenness anchor us to a half life, but come follow me and let our brokenness be for the healing of the world and for the nourishment of life in all its fulness.”

I pray that you will have the courage to take that hand and say “yes” and go forth into the fulness of life. Pray for me, that I might go forth with you.