John 5:1-8; 14
1 Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie–the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. 5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.
6 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?”
7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “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.”
8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
14 Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”
On First Reading: Wait, Jesus Said WHAT?!
Admittedly, this Bible story used to bother me when I was younger and read the Bible more shallowly. First off, Jesus’ final words to the man sound harsh, especially when you think about how long the man had been disabled (38 years). Secondly, it always seemed like Jesus was actually blaming the man for being disabled, because of his sin (mentioned in the second half of verse 14), as well as threatening him with “worse” punishment. As a younger reader, I didn’t understand why Jesus was saying this when the man had obviously had a hard life already.
Reading Again: The Invalid Needed This Wake-Up Call
But as I read over this Bible story again for this post, I realized something: this man had been disabled a long time. In all that time, he had never once reached out to God for help; Jesus even asks him in verse 6, “Do you want to get well?” Jesus didn’t really need to know the answer, but He asked because it would make the man think differently about his problem. For all those years, the disabled man had been focusing on self-pity (“oh, poor me, nobody around me will help me”), and he had forgotten (or ignored) God, Who stands ready to help when we finally quit trying to do it all ourselves.
Now, when Jesus asks, “Do you want to get well?”, the man realizes Jesus is reaching out to him for help, and he finally defines in verse 7 exactly what he needs help with. He has finally asked the right person! He has finally quit ignoring Jesus and quit wallowing in self-pity long enough to actually ask for help.
Ignoring Jesus and choosing to wallow in self-pity are both sins, which Jesus addresses in verse 14. When we sin, we cut ourselves off from God, either consciously or unconsciously, and it makes it much more frustrating for God to try to communicate with us. Jesus’ final words, then, are a firm disciplinary admonishment for the man to keep in better contact with God from here on out. He has been shown, personally and powerfully, what God can do in his life; it’s now up to him to turn to God and stop living in a mental prison of his own making.
We Need This Wake-Up Call, Too!
We often do the same thing to God, especially these days when we think we have our lives completely together and we are perfectly fine without God helping. Fact is, we all need God, and for some of us, God has been waiting a very long time for us to realize that. God even allows struggles to happen to us, to teach us that we do need Him when our own strength fails (and actually, we need Him every hour, as the old hymn goes). It’s not that God is doing evil things to us, but that He uses the bad things in our lives as teachable moments, to show us that we can’t do it all alone, and we don’t have to, because He is there. We just have to stop pridefully ignoring Him first!