To Bathe in the Sheep Gate Pool
Robert
J. Elder, Pastor
First
Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Washington
Ash
Wednesday: 2-13-2013
John 5:1-9 (NRSV)
After this there was a festival of
the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in
Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which
has five porticoes. In these
lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man
was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and
knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be
made well?” The sick
man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is
stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”
Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take
your mat and walk.” At once
the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day
was a Sabbath.
Everyone
who reads the papers knows what an “unprovoked attack” is. Among the anxieties
of modern life there is the fear that we may be walking alone one night, or
resting quietly in our own home, and suddenly, out of the darkness, a stranger
attacks us with malevolent intentions. Scoundrels have always been able to use
the element of surprise to accomplish evil ends.
But what about an act of “unprovoked grace”? I recall
a blossoming of bumper stickers years ago calling for a bit of unprovoked
graciousness through “random acts of kindness.” Perhaps you have been on the
receiving end of a randomly kind act, say when struggling to manage two large
full grocery bags and a stranger stepped forward and opened the door for you.
When we are on the receiving end an act of unprovoked
graciousness, we won’t have expected it, that’s the delight of it, isn’t it?
It was so for the man who lounged for 38 years by the
pool called “Beth-zatha” or “Bethesda.” For 38 years, he had in mind one goal
only: to get to the pool any time the waters were stirred and receive the
healing that everyone said would be available only momentarily for the lucky
few who could jump in time. That pool must have been something like those
call-in contests on the radio: “We will offer this prize for the correct answer
from caller number 10!” Caller number 9 and caller number 11 are no closer to
winning than caller number 243. It isn’t fair necessarily, just a random chance
in a dialing sequence. Today could be your lucky day, but very likely it won’t
be. The air stirs, the aroma of fresh water invades the stagnant atmosphere
around the cisterns of the Bethesda pool, and everyone realizes it all at the
very same instant. There is a rush like nobody’s business until that
all-too-brief moment has passed. A missed opportunity means more endless
waiting until a magic moment occurs again.
38 years. Perhaps in that first year the man remained
beside the pool with nerves on edge, waiting, waiting, waiting until, WHAM! the
instant arrived when healing was only a fleeting few ticks of the clock away.
But others were faster. Then, that opportunity having been missed, there
remained only more waiting on edge. But for 38 years? By the time 38 years of
waiting go by, we have spent so much time biding our time that waiting itself
has become our whole life’s work. Day after dreary day, his focus had become
waiting. Hour by hour he waited. Days stretched into weeks and months, until he
could hardly remember a time of his life not characterized by endless waiting.
Then, one day, a voice startled him from his usual
stupor into an unaccustomed state of alertness. He looked up. He was blinded by
the sun silhouetting the stranger’s face. “Do you want to be healed?” the
stranger asked. What a cruel, silly question! Hadn’t he devoted almost his
entire life to waiting for an opportunity to be healed? So his answer sounded
ambivalent, explaining that he had no one to help him. He had almost forgotten
the whole reason behind lying beside the pool. It had been so long since he had
really thought of the effect of the healing waters that he had come to think
only of getting in them.
We have all known the secret pleasure that can
characterize a temporary illness, which requires that we stay home, leaving the
real tasks of life unfinished, unattended for a while, giving us the luxury of
temporary unaccountability. For the man by the pool, means had become ends. Getting into the water had become the
whole life’s goal. Getting a handout from passersby had changed places with the
original target of actually becoming mobile enough to work. What healing meant,
what work is, these had been forgotten, maybe somewhere around the 24th year of
his endless waiting.
Do you want to be healed? What a question! But after
38 years … interim answers, lesser answers offer themselves when our lives
involve waiting. “Perhaps he has never been well. Perhaps he doesn’t know what
it is to be well.”[1] Abraham waited all his life for a son. Job waited
endlessly for an interim answer to his questions about suffering.
It has occurred to me that a lot of us throw away a
pretty good portion of our lives believing that waiting for real life is our
task, when the fact is that real life is only what we have right now. Life
today is not a practice for some future time of real living. Sometimes
chronically ill patients have reported that one of the key adjustments to life
with their disease was to discover who they were called to be now that disease
is a given in their life. The person they had been is gone. A new goal and task
to life need to be discovered, or else the remainder of life could seem only
that: a remainder, a time of endless waiting.
Congregations can do this too. Members of churches
may sit year after year waiting for the church to turn into the church they
really wanted it to be, withholding themselves from real work on behalf of the
church until that far-off time when their vision of what the church should have
been will be realized.
Me? Healed? The man beside the Bethesda pool said,
“No, I want to get into the water,
but no one will help me.” We may respond, saying, “I haven’t had anyone provide
a church for me the way I have really needed a church to be. I know what I’m
looking for in a church, and I’ll just wait to be healed until that comes
along, thanks.”
Jesus bent over, got close enough to the man’s face
that he could smell what he had had for breakfast, looked right into his eyes
and said “Stand up, take up your mat and walk.” Nothing further about pools of
water and a thousand other excuses. Just, “Get up and walk.” Unprovoked grace!
And the man did. And so may we.
