A sermon on John 5:1-9 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

I don’t know how many of us, other than me and James and the Filippi household, will have been aware of it this past week, but there was a very big story in the world of international soccer. A London club called Tottenham Hotspur, coached by Australia’s Ange Postecoglou, won the Europa League final. It was Tottenham’s first trophy in many many years, and the highest profile win ever by an Australian soccer coach. And yet Postecoglou may still lose his job in the next few weeks, because the club has had a poor season in the domestic Premier League and some people are panicking.

I raise this because, in a funny kind of way, I think it connects with the gospel reading we heard a few minutes ago. You see, Postecoglou has two attributes that often upset the soccer establishment and his employers. He is unorthodox, and he has extraordinary self-belief. He walks into a mediocre club like Tottenham, and says, “I can put this club back on its feet, back on the winners list, but we are going to do it differently and it won’t be instantly successful, so you need to really want to change and you need to be willing to back me and see it through.”

In most places he has coached, the first year has looked like a mess, and fans and administrators have started grumbling about him, before he takes them on to win a trophy in his second year. Postecoglou’s view, and there’s a fair amount of evidence to support it, is that a lot of people are more comfortable with familiar mediocrity than with taking big risks for real change and a chance of glory.

Now I’m not suggesting that Ange Postecoglou is any sort of a Jesus figure – he’s far to sullen and grumpy for a start – but that uncomfortable question that he confronts football clubs with is not unlike a question that Jesus asked in tonight’s gospel reading. And, of course, this is far from the only story in which Jesus asks uncomfortable questions. You might even say that the whole Jesus story is one of him insistently asking the Hebrew nation whether they were willing to change and take the risk of truly following God, and them responding by killing him for daring to challenge them.

Tonight’s story with its uncomfortable question was on a much smaller scale. It’s an interaction between Jesus and one chronically ill man. 

It takes place at a pool called Beth-zatha or Bethesda. It was an elaborate public baths, and you can still visit the ruins of it if you go to Jerusalem. I was there two years ago, and it took me by surprise just how big and grand it had obviously been.

Now back in Jesus’ day, legend had it that at occasional unpredictable times, an angel would visit the pool and stir up the water, and that the first person to step into the pool after the angel stirred it up would be healed of whatever ailed them. And so, many of the city’s inhabitants who suffered from chronic illnesses or disabilities would lie in wait in the five porticoes that surrounded the pool, watching the water for unexpected signs of movement, and would then rush, as best they could, to try to be first in. 

When I go for a swim at the public pool up the road from my place, those lying around the pool are usually the young and beautiful showing off their carefully sculpted bodies. The scene at the Pool of Beth-zatha was nothing like that. Debie Thomas describes it as being more like an “outdoor nursing home”.

So Jesus walks into this outdoor nursing home and up to this bloke who has been chronically ill for thirty-eight years. We don’t know how many of those years he had spent lying by the pool, waiting his chance, but we are told that Jesus realised that he had been there a long time. Maybe it was written all over his face.

Jesus walks up to this bloke and asks, “Do you want to be made well?”

Now, depending on the tone of voice, that isn’t necessarily an uncomfortable or difficult question. It could be just like, “Do you want a coffee? Do you want to stay for dinner? Do you want help with that? Do you want to be made well?” 

But from what happens next, we can tell that that was not the way Jesus asked it, and not the way it was heard. Instead it was “Do you want to be made well? How much do you want it? Are you sure you really want it?”

And that’s a very confronting question. Because the implication is that maybe you don’t really want it. Maybe you only say you want it, only pretend you want it. And maybe the reason you are still sick is that you are not truly committed to getting well, that you are a bit half hearted about it. Maybe you’ve learned to make being sick work for you.

Do you squirm uncomfortably when confronted with that question? I know I do. I do on several levels. I squirm partly because it hits a bit close to home, and I’ll come back to that, but I also squirm because – and maybe this is a defence mechanism – because I want to object to it theologically and pastorally. It sounds a bit like blaming the victim in a way that I have seen a bit too often in some churches, especially some Pentecostal churches that promote themselves as having successful prayer healing ministries. 

Maybe you’ve encountered this too. There are churches that are so over-confident in their guarantees of providing healing by faith and prayer, that if anyone is not healed, they callously declare that it is the person’s own fault – they didn’t have enough faith. And so now, not only is the poor person still sick, but they have been publicly humiliated for their allegedly inadequate faith. 

You also sometimes encounter a larger scale version, where in the face of a disaster like the horrendous floods in northern New South Wales at present, some preacher will exploit the situation by alleging that it has come about because of God’s anger over the population’s failure to live up to the preacher’s favourite moral hobby-horse. You know, “This is happening because the nation has permitted same-sex marriage,” or some such crap. Desperate and traumatised people are told that the disaster they are facing is their own fault, despite the flood’s inability to distinguish between the righteous and the allegedly unrighteous.

Surely Jesus is not doing anything like that, is he?

Well, I think we can be confident that he’s not, because not only does Jesus actually heal the bloke at the end of the story, regardless of his faith or lack of it, but Jesus has a consistent record of not buying into the socially normalised patterns of blaming the victim. There are multiple stories of people around Jesus wanting him to affirm their victim-blaming, and Jesus instead refuting such beliefs and arguing that illness, accident and disaster are mostly random and indiscriminate and hit the deserving and undeserving alike.

So if blaming the victim is not what Jesus is doing here, what is he doing? What is he saying?

One thing we can say about Jesus, in addition to saying that he doesn’t routinely blame the victim, is that he does treat every person as an individual and respond to what is going on for them personally. Jesus is not a one-size-fits-all cookie cutter pastor or healer. So what Jesus is saying in this story is being said to a particular person with his own particular issues. You and I may, at times, have some similar issues, and that’s why this story continues to be told, but one thing the story is telling us is that Jesus will respond to our particular issues in a particular way.

When Jesus sees this man, he doesn’t just see a man who is sick. And I don’t mean simply that the man is not defined by his illness, because actually, that may be precisely the problem that Jesus is seeing here. He is not just seeing a sick man. He is seeing a defeated man. He is seeing a man who is so resigned to his condition, so accommodated to it, that he can no longer imagine himself any other way.

How do we know that? Well, look at how the bloke responds to Jesus’s question. You’d think he could have given an eager “yes” to that question; “Do you want to be made well?”. It shouldn’t be a hard one, should it? But he doesn’t say yes. He umms and ahh and prevaricates, and kind of avoids the question. He offers up a list of excuses, and a bunch of reasons to feel sorry for him, all of which might be perfectly valid, but they are not answers to Jesus’s question.

“It’s not fair. The whole system is stacked against me. There’s not enough healing to go around, and the more incapacitated you are, the less chance you’ve got of being first in to get the healing. So unfair.”

His analysis is undoubtedly on the money, but it is not an answer to the simple question he’s being asked. “Do you want to be made well? Really want it?”

I have a somewhat trivial personal example. A couple of months ago I was talking with a mate of mine when something he said made me realise that I was a bit like the bloke in this story. You see, I had been bothered by a minor knee injury for about eighteen months, and I’d been using it as an excuse to avoid all sorts of exercise, and I’d stacked on the kilos due to moving a lot less but eating no less. My mate was telling me about the various forms of exercise he’d taken up, and how much better he was feeling, and suddenly it hit me. He has a debilitating back injury that makes my sore knee look about as crippling as a broken fingernail. And if he was not letting his crook back define his life and shut down his exercise program, what the hell was my excuse? Why was I looking at myself as an injured person who couldn’t really do anything when it so obviously wasn’t true? Why was I letting it defeat me? Did I really want to be fit and healthy, or didn’t I?

Now obviously that is a very minor example. Just as my little knee injury was nothing compared to his back injury, there are also lots of people dealing with conditions that are even more debilitating than his back injury. But we still see huge differences in the extent to which different people allow themselves to be defined as the sum of their illness, injuries, traumas, or emotional scars.

We can do it just as much with emotional and relational issues as with physical health ones. I know that there have been some times when I’ve felt aggrieved by a perceived unfairness about some aspect of my relationship with Margie, and I’ve had quite a fight within myself about whether to address it calmly and appropriately with her, because there was a part of me that preferred to hold onto my grievance and take a perverse pleasure in seeing myself as hard done by. Did I want things to be made well? Did I really want it?

Maybe you’ve been there too. I don’t reckon me and the bloke by the pool are alone in this. What about you? Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be healed and set free from all that drags you down, from all that cripples you, limits you, diminishes you? Do you really want to be well, to be whole, to be all you could be?

You might have noticed that in this story, the bloke by the pool never even asks for healing, let alone gets to the point of being able to convincingly affirm that he really wants it, and yet surprisingly Jesus heals him anyway. There is no indication that he had any real faith, or even that he knew who Jesus was. Jesus doesn’t say anything like “Your faith has made you well,” because clearly it hadn’t. This bloke couldn’t even begin to imagine himself well. But Jesus healed him anyway. 

So this is certainly not a story that buys into the idea that, in order to receive healing, you have to have a real desire to be healed and a genuine deep faith in Jesus as the healer. The arrival of healing can be as random and undeserved as the onset of illness or disaster.

But what is clear from Jesus’s question is that he wants us to want healing, to want wholeness. He wants us to resist defining ourselves by our wounds and our present inadequacies. He wants us to imagine ourselves healed and whole and to lean into that imagining. He wants us to thereby cooperate with his desire to heal us and make us whole. He wants us to not just pay lip service to a desire for change, but to want it fiercely and reach for it insistently. 

The story doesn’t tell us what became of this man after he took up his mat and began to walk. Perhaps he was able to embrace a new vision of himself as a healthy and well person and begin to live with joy and passion and creativity. Perhaps he walked away from the pool but allowed his past to continue to weigh him down and hold him locked in his sense of being a victim of unfairness, a wounded no-hoper. And sometimes for some of us, the opposite might be true. We might still have the illness, and yet be set free from its crippling power to define us and diminish us.

This is not a resurrection story, so you might wonder why we are telling it now, during the Paschal season. Well, it might not be about the resurrection of Jesus, but it just might be about Jesus calling you and me to resurrection life. And the resurrection life lived by Jesus epitomises the invitation to transcend our wounds and live free of their power to diminish us. The risen Jesus is still very obviously one who has been killed. He greets us with wounded hands and there is a gaping hole in his side. Yet even being dead cannot diminish him or hold him down. He is so utterly defined by life in all its fullness, that even being dead cannot extinguish that overflowing aliveness. 

And it is into that overflowing aliveness, that unlimited wellness, that Jesus calls us to follow him in this season and always. He calls us to leave behind mediocrity and resignation, and to take the big risk of following him into the overflowing joyous aliveness that no illness or injury, not even death, can diminish. 

“Do you want to be made well? Do you want to live to the full? Do you really want it?”