The story of the invalid waiting for a miraculous cure in the Pool of Bethesda is short and easily passed over. Jesus just picks out someone with long-term disability, exchanges a few words with him, a healing takes place, and within seconds the man is walking away carrying his bedding with him.
Just another healing to add to the list which we call to mind when we think about Jesus performing miracles during his earthly ministry? - after all, there are so many!
No: this one's different. There's a lot more going on here when we dig more deeply into the clues in the story.
We are hearing part of the Gospel of John. John was writing his gospel around 70-80 years after the events it describes. Much of what he wrote reflects 70 years of tradition within the newly-formed Christian community and speaks of what they had come to believe about Jesus, not just what they knew as fact. Consequently, John's gospel is full of symbolism which the clued-up Christian reader of his day would have latched on to.
For a start, why does John tell us specifically that the pool is near the Sheep Gate? Later in his gospel, John will describe Jesus as saying that he is the gate of the sheepfold. Does John want this story to have the feel about it of Jesus being a very practical shepherd of the lost sheep - the one who brings safety and security to those whom the old law of the Jews had failed, leaving them in a kind of helpless asylum beneath the colonnades of the Bethesda pool.
And what about those colonnades or porticoes (as some translations call them). Is it important to John and his readers that there are five of them? If John goes to the trouble to tell us there are five of them, it probably has some significance. Numbers are crucially important in the Jewish tradition. If you said to a first-century Jew on the streets of Jerusalem: 'Complete this phrase - The five…', s/he would almost certainly say: 'The five books of the Law' - the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures which enshrined God's law and covenant with God's chosen people.
John describes 'a great number of disabled people' who used to lie, day in day out, beneath these five porticoes, with the slimmest hope of healing based on a random miracle associated with a disturbance of the waters of the pool. Many commentators believe that John wants us to see that while the old law of the Jewish faith, symbolised by the five porticoes, could not offer true healing for those who had nowhere else to turn, the new covenant of love, represented in Jesus, could say to a sufferer "Get up. Pick up your mat and walk" and he would be healed.
In some manuscripts of this Gospel, and in some of the early translations into English, an extra verse is added to explain why the waters of the pool sometimes bubbled. The extra verse explains that it was believed that an angel used to come down to the pool to trouble the waters and so give a sign that a healing miracle was about to happen. In fact, archaeologists have uncovered an area in Jerusalem, near the Sheep Gate, with five colonnades, which actually held two pools - a large lower pool and a smaller upper pool. And it's thought that there was pipework connecting the two pools so that water could be exchanged between them. So, it seems very likely that the movement of the waters in the pools had more of a hydraulic than an angelic explanation. So, sadly, it seems that the hopes and expectations of those who believed in the miraculous angelic healing of the bubbling waters had been placed in just another mythology which had grown up around the facts of what was actually happening in the pool.
Then we come to the conversation between the invalid and Jesus. Jesus asks a rather odd question. He is faced with someone who has been coming for 38 years to this place, hoping to capture that rare and precious moment when the waters of the pool would bubble and he might be magically cured of his disability; and Jesus says to him, 'Do you want to get well'! Doesn't that seem rather a stupid question? What has this man been doing for the last 38 years if not wanting to get well.
And yet: perhaps we need to ask ourselves what Jesus knew about this man that we don't. And perhaps our English translation of the conversation serves us badly here. The Greek word that John uses, which we translate as 'get well', has much deeper meanings in the Greek. It really has the sense of 'being made whole'.
I think we can all recall experiences when the simple act of curing a specific condition has not made someone whole again. Sometimes, being restored to wholeness of life involves more than chasing away our physical disease. Wholeness of life can often involve less tangible dis-eases in our lives: it can require that we truly forgive others, or that we are forgiven by others for past hurts; it can require letting go of baggage which weighs us down; it almost certainly requires us to be at peace with ourselves and with others at some deeply significant levels. I suspect we have all known people who have found profound wholeness of life even though their bodies may have been riddled with sickness. 'Wholeness' doesn't always equate simply with 'cure'. We might look to medicine for a cure; but we might look to our values, our beliefs, and our relationships with others, for wholeness.
And so it seems that Jesus was saying to the invalid, 'Do you want to be made whole' rather than 'Do you want to be cured of your outward infirmities'.
And, as a final clue to this exchange between them, when Jesus meets the man a little later in the Temple, he says to him, 'Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.' Now, we know that the prevailing belief at the time was that all illness was a payback for sins previously committed. But we also know that this was not what Jesus taught. So why does John put these words in Jesus's mouth, unless it's to strengthen the idea in the story that there were things this disabled man needed to address around the wholeness of his life before receiving a cure for his disability.
And what about us? What wholeness of life do we seek from Jesus as he walks among us? How many porticoes does this church have beneath which we all sit, week after week, waiting for our encounter with the mysterious? And what do we say to Jesus when he finds us and asks us the question: "Do you want to be made whole"?
We can choose not to! We can choose to stay bound to the old laws - ideas long since discredited about our place and status in this world; living lives made powerless by the bigotry and injustice of others; unwilling to separate God's truth from so many flawed human interpretations of it. If we do not realise that Jesus invites us to move towards greater wholeness, we can stay on our mats beneath the porticoes of old, familiar, yet life-draining traditions.
We can also choose to cling on to totems, talismans and mythologies about who we are and what our lives are for. One of those most dangerous mythologies is that God has turned God's face against our particular gift to God's creation, and that as lgbt people we shall experience a God of destruction and vengeance, rather than a God of love who blesses our lives and our relationships. Or we can buy into the mythology which says that God's love is rationed, and that we are in competition with others for our share of it. This is often expressed by the belief that there are absolute rights and absolute wrongs. Some will be blessed and be in the pool at the right time, when the waters move, and others will not. Do we really believe that God's love is such a brutal lottery?
We believe as followers of Jesus, that when we are in difficulties, or unwell, distressed or hurt, our faith has a part to play in restoring us to wholeness again. This story about the man at the Pool of Bethesda reminds us that, when, in faith, we turn to Jesus for healing, he may very well look deep into our soul and ask: 'Do you want to be made whole'?
Our challenge, perhaps, is to think about what changes we might make, what redundant ideas we can relinquish, what baggage we can ditch, and what mythologies we can abandon, to help us fully see what wholeness of life can mean if we truly seek it.
Are we ready to hear Jesus say to us: 'Get up! Pick up your mat, and walk'?
Amen.
(Philip Jones)
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.