DO YOU WANT TO GET WELL?
[6-minute read]
(This is the first installment of a new series titled, ‘Questions Jesus Asked’)
HEALTH is not a one-dimensional attribute. Although our body and physical health are more visible than other aspects of our lives, our mental health, emotional health, relational health and spiritual health are equally important.
In John 5:1-5, we saw an unusual conversation Jesus had with one out of several disabled persons who often went to a ‘healing pool’ in Bethesda to just lie out. Jesus was visiting Jerusalem for a Jewish festival, and He felt it important to stop by the Bethesda pool. According to folklore, anyone who got into the pool when it was stirred got healed. In fact, it was a popular hangout for persons with disability; ‘the blind, the lame, the paralyzed’ often made their way there, just to get closer to a place that offered hope. Although Bethesda was architecturally beautiful with impressive colonnades, it was not a place that smelled nice because most of the disabled lacked the help they needed to maintain proper hygiene.
As Jesus walked through different ones lying there, He was told about one who had been incapacitated for 38 years. The man was probably a poolside veteran, a spectator of life, a lifelong bystander.
Right off the bat, Jesus asked the unnamed man with an unnamed disability, “Do you want to get well?” No preambles, no small talk. For someone who had been estranged from the hope of being healed for so long, the question should be a no-brainer. But instead, the man struggled to reply.
In no more than 3 spoken exchanges with the man (v6, 8, 14), Jesus revealed 3 things about trusting Him.
#1 - TRUST JESUS, NOT A KNOWN WAY
Sometimes we can be so stuck within a situation or a health condition that we become masters at coping instead of hoping for a change. We slowly begin to forgo achieving a quality of life that is possible with God because of all the effort to just get on with living it. Over time, we make ourselves immutable to new ways that God will restore quality in our lives. We begin to ask God why He doesn’t make things happen in a particular way, or why we have to wait so long.
After 38 years, the man who had been invalid could only tell Jesus, “I have no one to help me into the pool”. From the beginning, he had heard that healing happened in this pool and he had religiously found his way there in the hope that he would be healed. But days rolled into months that rolled into years, and the reality of being healed seemed to move further and further away. Over time, he stopped telling himself that he wanted to be normal, and began telling himself, ‘I’m incapable of doing anything.
God brought an advantage to the disabled man in the form of Jesus, the Healer, yet he could not take his eyes away from his disability as well as the healing pool that was long on promise short on delivery. He remained rigidly fixated on the disadvantage and the solution that were so familiar to him.
As humans, we too can be so rigid in our thinking about how things should turn out that we overlook the obvious ways that God has set us up for miracles. We show up each day with crippled thinking because we just would not budge in the way we respond to people and opportunities. Our circumstances may limit our choice of action but we victimize ourselves further with inertia.
2 Kings 5:9-12 recounts a story of a high-ranking official, Naaman, who suffered chronic leprosy. Prompted by a lowly servant girl, he approached the prophet Elisha for healing. But when he received the prescription which required him to immerse himself into muddy water, he went ballistic. He expected an effortless Abracadabra wave from the prophet with little effort on his part. ‘Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful.’ (1 Corinthians 1:27).
It may not have been thirty-eight years for what you are experiencing, and it may have been really hard. But don’t give up on all the life-expanding opportunities that God has provisioned for you.
Pause and consider: what are some expectations you impose on God, others and yourself that you need to put aside so you can learn to trust Jesus more for the breakthroughs that you need.
#2 TRUST JESUS AT HIS WORD
When Jesus told the disabled man, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk”, He clearly wasn’t going to elevate the man by divine power. Rather, He gave a simple instruction that required the man to respond with physical effort in faith. The ball was now in the disabled man’s court and it was totally up to him if he would continue to let inertia run his life or do something new!
Today, inertia misguides us into thinking such as ‘time will change things’, ‘nothing will change even if I tried’, or ‘things will change in God’s timing’. It disguises itself as a virtue and persuades us to be contented to just wait for things to happen. Inertia disables initiative and action.
Pause and consider: is there something in you that is making it hard to take God’s lead right now? Perhaps it’s your habitual fear of failure and embarrassment. Is it your need to always have control? Or is it a chronic avoidance of the inner conflict that happens when you obey God?
#3 TRUST JESUS OVER MAN-MADE RULES
After the man was healed, he was immediately confronted by a few fault-finding Jewish leaders. They pointed out that he had violated a Jewish law that forbade work such as healing ministries to be conducted on Sunday. Both the healing and the mere act of carrying his mat were seen as ‘work’ in the eyes of Jewish laws.
It needs to be said that Jesus was not oblivious to Jewish laws when He approached the disabled man on a Sunday and offered to heal him. In fact, He knew only too well how social norms could cripple us with man-made expectations that hold us back from living a full life in Christ. When we conform rigidly to roles in the family and society that are shaped by culture and narrowly defined by our age, gender, ethnicity or marital status, we will live to please people and fail to thrive in the unique purposes that God has created us for.
When the man was confronted by the Jewish leaders, he shrank back in the face of their intimidation and told them he had no idea who healed him. Later, when Jesus reappeared to warn him to stop sinning, he wasted no time to go straight up to those same people to declare that Jesus was his healer. What an about-face!
We can imagine that the man was convicted in his spirit that it was more important to face opposition and defend his faith when intimidated by people who tried to inhibit his progress and growth as a normal person. It can happen when we are surrounded by people who are driven by pragmatism, or who are too protective of us.
Pause and consider: when you face pressure from loved ones, how do you defend your faith in the belief that Jesus alone will give you your personal breakthrough?
We saw that the breakthrough for the disabled man started with one question from Jesus. “Do you want to get well?"
This is a summary and reflection based on a virtual BIR session held on 19 February 2022.
