God's Questions - "Do You Want To Get Well?"

I began the sermon with some images on the projector. The first was of a Clootie Well in the Black Isle (a place where people since celtic times would go to look for healing from the 'gods'). I then followed it up with the covers of three books by hypnotist Paul McKenna - "I Can Make You Thin", "I Can Make You Rich" and "I Can Make You Sleep". I pointed out that the last was no great shakes as I seem to manage it with my congregation most Sundays..... 

I show you these as a wee reminder that it wasn’t just folk in the first century who pinned their hopes on things that aren't entirely rational!

We find Jesus this morning walking around, between and over a group of people who have pinned their hopes on the strange goings- on at the pool of Bethzatha.

What he’s picking his way through is an open plan doctors’ waiting room: scores of sick folk waiting under five colonnades with their friends. And all the focus is on this central pool where every now and again, completely unpredictably, some kind of healing is said to take place,

How did it happen, if it happened at all? Well, some ancient Biblical manuscripts said that the waters were troubled by the Angel of the Lord and when folk went down into the pool, the first one in would get healed. That explanation made it into the King James Version of the Bible, but since then older and more reliable copies of the New Testament documents have been found and they don’t have that verse in the text, and it seems likely that this explanation was a later insertion put in by someone other than the gospel writer, John. That’s why most of the new translations don’t include it, other than as a footnote.

Archaeological work in the area suggests that it wasn’t just Jews who thought of this as a sacred place. Pagan artifacts have been found nearby, and at one stage in the pool’s history it seems to have been dedicated to the healing god Asclepius. Perhaps folk felt that what was going on here in this corner of Jerusalem wasn’t strictly kosher, but they were ready to forego their Jewish principles if it meant they could find some healing.

So whether this was a natural phenomeon given divine significance , or a genuine miracle of some sorts, it’s hard to be sure. But judging by the number of folk sprawled around the courtyard we can be pretty sure that whatever it was, it didn’t happen very often.

But on those rare occasions when the first microbubbles started to turn the water cloudy and the surface began to splash and foam, those who’d been paying attention, or were lucky enough to be glancing in the right direction at the right time, launched themselves towards the pool in a desperate bid to be the first one in.

Try and imagine the chaos of that for a moment. The pathos of it. When I tried to get that image in my mind’s eye, it reminded me of the TV pictures you see when a relief truck arrives at a refugee camp and within seconds it’s surrounded by a heaving mass of people trying to get what they need.

But the thing was, at the pool of Bethzatha, it was only ever one person at a time who got what they needed. The rest of the hopeful would retreat, disconsolately, back to the shade of the porches until the next troubling of the waters.

But there was one person there who didn’t even have the comfort of being a nearly man. He never even got close to the poolside.

John tells us:

A man was there who had been ill for 38 years. Jesus saw him lying there and he knew that the man had been ill for such a long time, so he asked him “Do you want to get well”?

I’ve always been intrigued by that question: in the context of this story, but also in the context of our own lives.

Do you want to get well?

On the face of things it’s a crazy question to ask this man. Almost insulting, in fact. For thirty eight years this man had watched, frustrated as others had gone down into the pool before him.

Thirty eight years. What were you doing back in 1973? It’s that long ago.

And in that time, different people would have come and gone from the community of the broken who gathered around that pool; loyalties and enmities would have been formed; the little dramas of everyday life would have been played out among the colonnades and made all the more stressful because the protagonists – the sick and infirm – were all chasing the same prize. But only one could win.

It would have been like living in a Soap Opera you couldn’t escape from. And for this man it had lasted thirty eight years. It was practically all that he knew.

And I guess that’s why Jesus had to ask the question. Do you want to get well? Could he even imagine any other kind of life after all that time?

Did you notice that when Jesus asks him a straight question, he doesn’t get a straight answer? ‘Do you want to get well’ invites a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ in response. But instead the man drops into a well worn groove about how hard it is for him to get into the water and how he doesn’t have anyone to help him. It’s almost like he isn’t even able hear Jesus’ question.

The truth was, he’d constructed his life around his ailment. That pool and those colonnades were his whole world. He had been defined by his limitations and they became the story that he lived out of.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the part of him that needed healed, even more than his legs. The part that was hopeless and stuck.

“Do you want to get well?”. said Jesus.

I wonder how you hear those words this morning.

I’d guess that they’re painful to hear for some of you. Of course you want to get well. There’s nothing more pressing in your life just now. And what gets you is that it all seems so easy in these Bible stories. If it’s that simple, why doesn’t God help you, or that person you love, to get better?

Well I’ve spoken about this before, and I don’t want to go over that ground in the same way again today, but it’s worth remembering that these healing stories we have in the Bible were never meant to be the norm. What we’re seeing in Jesus’ healing ministry is what happened at a particular time and place in history when God entered our world in a particular way. It’s exceptional.

In John’s gospel, Jesus’ miracles are always called ‘signs’ and what they signify is that God the Father is working in a powerful and unique way through his Son. If I come and say I’m the Messiah, why should you believe me? But if I come, and heal someone you know has been paralysed for years, and say I’m the Messiah, then it’s a safe bet that I’ll have your attention.

When we read stories like this, it might help if we realise that Jesus’ miracles are like a foretaste of what things will be like when sickness and sin and death are finally defeated, as they will be when the kingdom finally comes. But for now, that battle is still being fought; and we need to pray and hope, seek treatment and take courage from our friends when we find ourselves facing illness or disease.

But setting aside the issue of sickness for a moment, there’s another way we can hear Jesus’ question, because the well-ness he invites the man to receive is more than physical healing.

The wellness Jesus offers touches the mind, the emotions and the spirit too. And perhaps that’s the level at which Jesus addresses us this morning:

Do you want to get well? he says

And those are life giving words if we hear them correctly, because at times, all of us feel like the man in the story – living a curtailed life that’s far from what we’d hoped for.

All of us have our own internal Bethzatha; places where the air is thick with the ghosts of what might have been. Where the shadow of disappointment hangs over our souls. Where our weaknesses or our habits, or our regrets, or our fears can come to define us if we allow them to. If we spend too long by that pool, the story of why we’re there will become the only story we’re capable of telling.

We’ve all met folk like that. Folk who’ve become stuck in Bethzatha. Somehow the conversation always comes round to that thing that went wrong in their lives – those people who let them down – the cruel hand that fate dealt to them – those poor choices they made, or worse still, that were made for them.

We all know folk like that, and I’d guess in many of us there’s a lurking fear that we might become folk like that if we aren’t there already.

Deep down we long to be well within ourselves. And here is Jesus holding out to us the tantalising hope that that is a real possibility for you and me. Without putting all our hopes in the capricious waters of Bethzatha, or a Clootie Well, or a book by Paul McKenna.

This morning, Christ stands over us in those shadowy places in our lives this and says “Do you want to get well?”

And we might well respond – “Lord, what does well look like?”

I thought about that a lot this week. What does well look like?

I found myself thinking of an image in the Psalms - a tree growing by a river; roots winding deep into the earth and fruit swelling on its branches. Bending in the wind but never broken. The Psalmist says that’s a good image of what the man or woman who stays close to God becomes.

I realised that wellness is about being integrated. About being at home with yourself.

I saw that wellness is about being connected to other people. Part of the paralysed man’s condition was his loneliness. He had no-one to help him in – no connections.

I saw that being well means getting things in the right perspective and not allowing yourself to be possessed by circumstances.

I realised that wellness is hopeful – it has more of an eye on the present and the future than the past.

And as I thought about the people I know who strike me as ‘well’, I realised how full of the fruit of the Spirit they were – the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control that come from God.

And as I held all of that together, I realised that being well actually hasn’t got much to do with physical health.

Just out of interest I asked some of my Facebook friends what being well means. One of them, who has children with learning disabilities, a sister with cerebral palsy, and a mother who’s almost blind said this:

You can be well despite physical disability if you are able to function and enjoy life! Wellness is a state of mind, soul AND body - some of the sickest people I have known are physically "well"


That comment reminded me of a book I read a while back called "Tuesdays With Morrie". The author, Mitch Albom and one of his old professors, Morris Schwartz, had been close friends at college. Morrie had mentored him, but as Mitch’s career progressed, his contact with Morrie lessened, and though he was making it good in the eyes of the world, he knew he was losing something too. Something good within himself was being eaten away – corroded by the pace and the pressures of his work.

By chance he comes to learn that Morrie had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and he goes back to see him. And so begins Mitch’s last class with Morrie, a class that was to change his life. Because the subject under discussion was life, as seen from the perspective of a man who was shortly to die. They met up each Tuesday for three months until Morrie passed away, and they worked their way through a list of topics including death, fear, marriage, family, forgiveness and the meaning of life.

Early on in the account of these meetings, Mitch writes “I was astonished by his complete lack of self-pity. Morrie who could no longer dance, swim, bathe or walk; Morrie who could no longer answer his own door, dry himself after a shower, or even roll over in bed. How could he be so accepting? I watched him struggle with his fork, picking at a piece of tomato, missing it the first two times – a pathetic scene, and yet I could not deny that sitting in his presence was almost magically serene, the same calm breeze that soothed me back in college”.

As the weeks progress, and death approaches, one thing becomes very clear to the reader. It’s Morrie who’s well. It’s Mitch whose life needs healing.

Dying is one thing to be sad about, said Morrie. Living unhappily is something else.

We may not be blessed with a flesh and blood mentor like Morrie, but we have a spiritual mentor in Christ, and he is always with us.

His hand is reaching out to each and every one of us
wanting to draw us out of the collonades of Bethzatha -
our places of unfulfilment -
and into a new way of living
where his adequacy and his presence are the focus;
not our flaws and our failings.

The harsh reality of life is that all of us, in different ways, are broken people.
The good news of the gospel is that our brokenness needn’t be the thing that defines us.

If we place our trust in Christ,
we may find healing.

We may not.
But we shall become well.

Amen, and thanks be to God.

God's Questions - "Can You See Anything?"

For this Sunday, with the kids present for Thinking Day, I tried to take a more dialogical approach to the sermon. We talked our way through the text together, thinking about it as we went along, before I drew things together at the end.

Hard to work this up into something bloggable, so I’d suggest you read the passage for yourself (Mark 8:22-26) and then engage with the questions as I put them to the congregation.

22 They came to Bethsaida, where some people brought a blind man to Jesus and begged him to touch him.

WHO’S ‘THEY’? – (Jesus and his disciples)

WHERE’S BETHSAIDA? – (North eastern corner of Galilee)

“Some people brought a blind man to Jesus”

DO YOU THINK HE CAME WILLINGLY?

(Hard to say. Stigma associated with disability in ancient world, couldn’t work, so possibly very keen.

Then again he might well have been asking “What will this mean? What if it doesn’t work?)

“and they begged him to touch him”.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE AND SOUND LIKE WHEN SOMEONE BEGS FOR SOMETHING?

The kids in the congregation know all about begging for things! The Greek is parakaleo which means ‘along or beside’ and ‘call out’. They would have been imploring Jesus to do something.

WHAT WERE THEY BEGGING JESUS TO DO? Touch him.

WHY? They knew there was healing in his touch.

It could be they were genuine friends with the man, but it’s equally possible they’d just collared the first blind guy they found in the marketplace and brought him to Jesus to see what he’d do. Curiosity value.

WHAT’S THE NEXT THING JESUS DOES?

23 Jesus took the blind man by the hand

SO JESUS TOUCHES HIM! DOES HE GET HEALED STRAIGHT AWAY?

No. And there’s something important for us in this.

For Jesus, it wasn’t all about the healing. It was about the person who needed to be healed.

His power didn’t just spill over like magic on anyone who happened to be close to him.

Plenty of people touched Jesus over his lifetime. They cradled him as a baby, they gave him piggy backs as a child. They shook his hand and embraced him as a man; they punched him in the face and held his arms and legs down as they nailed him to a cross. None of them, to the best of our knowledge, were magically healed.

It didn’t work that way. His power to heal was never impersonal. It always flowed in the context of a relationship of faith. When people came to him, genuinely seeking help and open to God, that’s when things would happen.

Perhaps that’s why he made the next move “and led him out of the village”.

If Jesus were just looking to impress people, to make a name for himself, he’d have stayed there. But he went to the other extreme – tried to get him away from the hungry, inquisitive eyes of the villagers. He didn’t want to turn this poor man into a circus sideshow. This happens a lot in Mark – it’s called the Messianic Secret. It seems at times that Jesus was wanting to keep his identity quiet from the masses.

23 After spitting on the man's eyes,

That’s a strange thing to do– only mentioned three times in gospels.
Sounds weird to us, but it you cut finger in all likelihood the first thing you’d do is stick it in your mouth.

In the ancient world people believed there were healing properties in spittle. Jesus could clearly heal without this, so maybe he was doing it for the blind man’s sake to fulfil his expectations of what a ‘healer’ would do?

23 Jesus placed his hands on him and asked him, “Can you see anything?” 24 The man looked up and said, “Yes, I can see people, but they look like trees walking about.”

NOTICE ANYTHING STRANGE ABOUT THAT? How would he know what trees looked like? This suggests had probably had sight at some point. Maybe it was a cataract-type problem?

25 Jesus again placed his hands on the man's eyes. This time the man looked intently, his eyesight returned, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus then sent him home with the order, “Don't go back into the village.”

Told to avoid village presumably for the same reasons Jesus led him out of the village to perform the healing…….

That’s our story for this morning, as we find it in Mark – and in fact, Mark is the only gospel writer who includes this particular story. None of the others record it, though they would almost certainly have known about it.

So why did Mark keep it in?

Well at this point in his telling of Jesus’ story, this is exactly the story Mark needs. In the chapters leading up to chapter 8, he’s spent a lot of time showing how blind the Pharisees were to who Jesus was, and even how blind the disciples were to who he was. No-one seems to understand.

But in the verses just after the ones we read this morning, Peter finally gets it. He begins to see. “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asks him, and Peter replies “you are the Messiah, the son of the Living God”.

Finally, after weeks and months and years in his company, Peter is beginning to understand just who this man is.

Like Peter; like the man healed of his blindness, the light dawns on us slowly. We move from not seeing, to seeing poorly, to clear-sightedness as we journey with Jesus: but it all takes time. Time, and presence: and anyone who tells you otherwise is pulling your leg.

There’s good news and bad news for us in today’s reading – and that’s the double-edged nature of this thing we call the gospel.

The bad news is that to a greater or lesser degree, we’re all partially blind.

Not pleasant to hear that, is it? But even a moment’s reflection confirms that it’s true.

We’re blind to our own faults most of the time. We can spot a speck of dust in someone else’s eye at twenty paces, but we rarely notice the plank that’s hanging out of our own.

Burns knew what he was on about when he wrote: O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.

We’re partially blind to our faults; but we fail to see to our true nature as well. The Bible tells us some amazing things about who we are – that we’re made in the image of God; that we’re chosen and precious in his sight; that we’re made just a little lower than the angels; that he loved us enough to send his son to the cross for our sake. Things that give each one of us a monumental worth. But we’re blind to it, most of the time, and end up scrabbling around for worth among the scraps that the world has to offer.

We’re partially blind to one another, of course. If we struggle to recognise God’s image in ourselves, how much harder is it to see God in anyone else? We ‘see people moving around’, but they ‘look rather like trees’ sometimes. Objects rather than persons. We find it almost incomprehensible that behind every human face their lives a human consciousness every bit as unique and valuable as our own. Every bit as easily hurt and wounded as we are. And from this blindness comes most of the ills human beings do to one another.

And we’re partially blind to God too. Seeing and yet unseeing, Believing, and at the very same time, filled with unbelief. But enough of the bad news.

There is a healing to be found. Some old friends have brought us to this man, Jesus. Abraham has grabbed one arm, Jacob the other. Moses raises his staff and parts the crowds. Joshua pushes us on, while David makes a few jottings for a Psalm he’ll write about it later. Isaiah promises that it will all turn out for the best.

They stop, mid-flow, and a man’s hand, a carpenter’s hand, grasps ours and leads us away from the hubbub and the noise, beyond the limits of the village. We keep going ‘til even the last of the stragglers falls behind, too embarrassed to keep up the chase, and at last we are alone.

We’ve spoken little, but enough for him to know that this is what we want. We want to be able to see. To see our faults and not be broken by the sight of them. To see our true nature, and aspire to become it. To see our neighbour, and recognise God’s image within them. To see God for ourselves and be able to return his loving gaze.

We know these things take time. Some miracles are slow burners, and this one will take a lifetime and more to run its course. But we want to see – to see things how they really are.

He spits and presses two wet fingers against our clenched eyes, blood pulsing through them as he holds the pressure on and murmurs a prayer.

And then it’s over.

"Can you see anything?" He asks, peeling away his hands. “Yes Lord”, we reply. “Enough to know that we want to see more”.

Amen and thanks be to God for his word.