“When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, ‘Do you want to get well?'” – John 5:6 (NIV)
Thirty-eight years. He had been lying by the pool of Bethesda for thirty-eight years. Around him, other sick people waited for the stirring of the water, which tradition held was the moment an angel came and activated a healing for whoever got in first. He never got in first. Every time the water was stirred, someone else got there ahead of him. He had no one to help him. His condition had outlasted every realistic expectation of change.
Jesus walked into that scene, saw him lying there, and asked: do you want to get well? It is a question that sounds almost insulting in its obviousness. Of course he wants to get well. He has been lying here for thirty-eight years. But Jesus is not being obtuse. He is asking a question that is more genuinely searching than it first appears, because thirty-eight years of waiting can do something to a person’s relationship with the possibility of change. When a condition has been present for so long that it has organised the entire life around itself, the prospect of its removal can be genuinely disorienting. The healing would require a complete reorganisation of the only existence the man had known for nearly four decades.
The man’s answer does not say yes. It explains why he has not been healed: sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me. He is describing the mechanism by which he expected healing to come and explaining why the mechanism has not worked for him. Jesus does not engage the mechanism at all. He bypasses it entirely. Get up, pick up your mat, and walk. Not get into the pool. Not find someone to help you. Get up.
Think about the person whose condition has been present for so long that it has become, in some ways, a kind of identity. The chronic illness that has reorganised every relationship and every plan. The grief that has lasted so long that people around you have stopped asking. The financial condition that has been the frame for so many years that imagining its removal feels more disorienting than familiar. Jesus’s question is for them: do you want to get well? Not as an accusation but as a genuine, personal invitation to say yes to the change that the long waiting may have made it harder to fully desire.
He picked up his mat and walked. The man who had been lying there for thirty-eight years walked out of the place that had defined him, carrying the mat that had been carrying him. The same man. A different relationship to the ground beneath him.
Today, answer the question Jesus asked: do you want to get well? Say yes out loud. Then get up, pick up your mat, and take the first step that the healing makes possible.
Father, I answer the question: yes. I want to get well. I have been here a long time and the mechanism I expected has not worked and I have no one to help me in. But I receive your command today: get up, pick up my mat, and walk. I stand up from the place that has been holding me. What was carrying me, I now carry. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Twelve years. She had been bleeding for twelve years, and in that time she had…
He came with horses and chariots and a letter from a king. He had gold,…
She was an orphan who had become a queen, and she was the only person…
The trap was elegant in its specificity. The administrators and satraps who wanted Daniel removed…
The furnace was heated seven times hotter than normal. The soldiers who threw them in…