John 5:1-18
May 12, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
A pastor knows of a person who, like the man in today’s scripture, sought God to heal her of a debilitating muscular disorder. She earnestly prayed for healing. Healing was not given to her. Because her prayer for healing was not answered, she became embittered and vowed, “I’ll never come to church again.” She kept her vow.
There’s a man who descended into the depths of alcoholism. Many people tried to help him, to submit to the healing work of Alcoholics Anonymous. But he just couldn’t seem, despite all the encouragement, to help himself. But today, that man is no longer in the grip of alcoholism. He has been healed. When his pastor summoned up the courage to ask him about his healing, “Did you pray? Did you decide to turn over a new leaf in your life? Did you at last go to AA?” he replied, “I think God just healed me. I didn’t know enough to ask God to help me. I didn’t know how to ask. But one day I woke up and I just no longer had this need, no longer had this craving. I think I was delivered.”
We live in a world of self-help. We say that in the Bible it says, “God helps those who help themselves.” The problem is, it’s not in the Bible! We see that there are times when we pray for healing, it doesn’t happen as we hoped. And there are times when we are not even conscious of asking God for healing, healing happens.
The popularity of Dr. Phil is that after he has lambasted people that their problems are their fault, he goes on to tell them that if they really want a better life, then they have to make it happen. A better life is mostly up to you. If you want to have a better life, the way is completely in your hands. God helps those who help themselves according to Dr. Phil.
Bethzatha Pool
Our story today takes place at a festival when it was a time to celebrate the miraculous intervention of God into the life of Israel. At this pool, by the Sheep Gate, called Bethzatha, lie many of those who are sick—the blind, the lame, and paralyzed. They were the invalids. The older King James Version of the Bible said that an angel stirred the waters at the pool, and the first to enter the waters would be healed. When the waters were stirred, everyone had to rush down to the waters and the first one into the water of the pool was cured. First come, first healed; first come, first served. It’s like when we go to the food buffet line—first come, first to eat.
Among those gathered at the pool hoping for healing was a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years. In these biblical times, a generation is just about forty years.
In other words, this man had been there for an entire lifetime. He was literally at the end of his life, at the end of his rope, at the end of hope!
Jesus approaches this man and asks, “Do you want to be made well?” Now what kind of question is that? After 38 years being sick, was Jesus just asking a rhetorical question? We might say, “Of course, he wants to be made well!” The man might have said, “Why yes, in thirty-eight years of lying here, waiting for the waters to be stirred, it has crossed my mind just once or twice!”
But the man didn’t answer Jesus with a resounding, “Yes.” Rather, he said, “I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Whether this man is whining and complaining or using the “poor me” for this life attitude, we do not know. We don’t know why he did not respond to Jesus with a simple, “Yes!”
It sounds like Jesus met a rather crotchety old man whose grumbling appears to have become more important to him than his being healed. Jesus’ question, “Do you want to be healed?” shows that Jesus has seen into the heart of the man. Perhaps after waiting for 38 long years implies that after all these years, the man has gotten so used to his infirmity or dysfunction that the thought of actually being healed is more distressing than remaining in his familiar condition. To be healed would change everything. It would be too much to handle. He knew where to receive the welfare checks. He knew the best place to beg and get a handout. Why after 38 years would he want to change his way of living?
Do We Want to Be Healed?
Let’s turn from this poor man at the pool and look back to ourselves, here in church. Do we really want to be healed of our illnesses?
We all know about the danger of smoking but smoking among young people today and especially people in countries like China is skyrocketing. When we were in Germany and especially in Munch this past week, the smoking was at an epidemic level; they still have cigarette vending machines. When the tobacco companies can’t sell their products here, they make their profits elsewhere. Every Sunday morning, I sweep up countless cigarette butts off our front sidewalk.
We all know about the dangers of alcohol but bars are doing a great business around the city that they want to extend their hours later in the night.
We all know about the evils of drugs and pharmaceuticals but living in such affluent communities in Northern California where access to such addictive drugs continues to generate the senseless and terrible drug wars by drug suppliers and dealers in Mexico. Yet, millions use drugs.
We all know about eating too much and too well that have caused heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, and other life-compromising diseases but we have this carefree attitude of since we only live once so why not live it up today.
Every child in America is told about the evils of smoking, drinking, drugs, and eating poorly in educational campaigns as if our problem is that we simply do not have the correct information that could lead to better health. But better information doesn’t seem to be the problem. We say that the problem is one of will but do we really want to be healed? Do you really want to solve the problem of smoking, drug use, obesity, and alcoholism in our society? There was a story in the paper this past week about high schools in LA that let their students leave their campuses where they can get healthy food in the cafeteria and they end up choosing to eat hamburgers and fries in local fast-food places.
But is the lack of education the problem to this man’s illness? Is the lack of education our problem too to be made well? In our society today, we believe that our health is our responsibility, a matter of what I eat, and my personal habits, and the way I live my life and my going to the doctor, getting a pill, and getting “fixed.”
The problem with this understanding is that we have moralized illness by saying that if we just summoned up the resolve to do all of these good things, we will never be sick. It’s like our Men’s Fellowship making a commitment to avoid eating gluten thinking that it would give us better health. I believe I have preached a few of these sermons to you before.
This is all well and good. But as a pastor I have visited people in the hospital who have cancer, and they immediately, and quite defensively, start saying things like, “I just don’t understand this. You know that I stopped eating red meat ten years ago. And of course, I have never smoked. I drink only bottled water.”
Not only is this poor person afflicted with the physical disease, the illness of cancer, but she now has to feel guilty that she did something irresponsible that caused this illness; now it’s all up to us to solve the problem.
When asked, “Do you really want to be made well?” by Jesus, we might be conditioned to expect the man at last to throw off his rags, and say “Yes! Yes! I have at last overcome my mental block to healing and I am going to be well. I am going to be well”
But in reading this story, I don’t think self-help is the point of this passage. I don’t think the point of the story is that we need to get ourselves in a better frame of mind in order to have a better life. Nothing this man says or does seems to be a precondition for his healing. This man wasn’t healed because he helped himself.
Undeserving
Rather, this man was whining. He had a bad attitude and wasn’t even grateful. The healing of this man at this pool is a miraculous undeserved, unearned gift of God.
We might want to say in defense of the man that maybe he had a right attitude in his heart. Maybe he really did have faith in Jesus, even though he did not know how to express it. Admittedly, there are some healing stories in the Bible when it does seem as if somebody is healed because they believe that Jesus can heal them. In Mark 5:34, Jesus says to the woman who is bleeding, “Your faith has made you well.” But this man doesn’t ever seem to show any evidence of faith, either before or after he is healed!
In fact, after he is healed, and a crowd gathers to criticize Jesus, the man seems to feel absolutely no gratitude or loyalty to Jesus. When questioned, he responds, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” When the authorities questioned him, he blamed Jesus!
This man is not only a whiner—“Nobody will ever help me to get down to the pool in time,” but he is also a snitch—“That man Jesus, over there, he’s the one who broke the rules about healing on the Sabbath.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m sorry that this man has been crippled for the majority of his life, I’m sorry that he is so afflicted, but I have to tell you, he is certainly not a very nice person! Combining his complaining and ingratitude, he is just not a very good character. And yet, this man is healed by Jesus.
We all know of people whom we think are not as proper or faithful or committed or as good as we are and in some mysterious and divine way, they are blessed with healing and the restoration of good health.
Jesus said this about our gracious God, God “causes the sun to shine on the righteous and the unrighteous.” On this day the sun shined on a man who was unrighteous. God, in Jesus, reached out in this story to heal and save the sinners. And when we read the Bible truthfully, that is what God always seems to do—reaching out to heal and save the sinners.
So this story is not so much about something that we are to see in ourselves or that we are to do, but it is rather a story that helps us see something about Jesus and something that Jesus does. It is a story about an amazing grace that graciously shines upon people in need, despite faith or lack of faith of people in need.
Invalids
Honestly, we would rather see good things happen to mostly good people. We would like to believe that, in our faith, we have found a key whereby we have a technique to ensure that God gives good things to us in our time of need. We all have said, “If you have faith, if you really believe, God will heal you!” But none of that is here.
The man is not asked to have faith. He is not asked to have determined inner resources of self-help. Rather, he simply receives the gift of healing.
And that’s why the gospel is good news. It is not the good news that we have found the correct technique for self-help. It is good news because God comes to sinners, to the crippled, and the terribly needy, including those who don’t even know enough to know that they are in need, who wouldn’t have the vaguest idea how to help themselves, who maybe couldn’t help themselves even if they had an idea how to go about it. We call it grace. It is truly good news.
The invalid is you, the invalid is me. This man is all of humanity struggling wearily towards the healing waters, though perhaps he’s grown so accustomed to his rut in life that there’s not much struggle left in him.
The invalid is everyone who lives resigned to a disappointing job, or no job at all.
The invalid is everyone who stoically goes through the motions of a disappointing marriage, or tries to keep hope alive in the face of actual debilitating illness.
The invalid is everyone who yearns to be thin but finds that dieting makes you fatter in the long run, and everyone who tries to be attractive and popular but isn’t ever able to connect.
The invalid is everyone who struggles to keep at it in face of life’s long haul, as the thirties accelerate faster and faster towards the fifties, the seventies and beyond.
The invalid is everyone who naively relies on the triumphs of the human spirit thinking that it’s enough because we believe that “God helps those who help themselves.”
As invalids that we are, the good news is that like the man who was healed at the pool, we receive a miraculous undeserved, unearned gift of God. We call it grace. And it is truly amazing.
Do you really want to be made well?
Whether you do or you don’t, the good news is, God has come among us in the loving presence of Jesus Christ, to do for us that which we could never do for ourselves.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, come to us in our need. Give us grace to receive you when you graciously come to us. Help us to allow you to have your way with us and then to follow where you lead.
And if you do not heal us of what ails us, and do not fully meet our need, enable us to follow you anyway, to love you not for what you will do for us but for what you can do through us. In Christ, our Healer, we pray. Amen.