“Can We Heal Like Jesus?”

Sermon: July 12, 2015   John 5: 1-9a

        What were you doing in 1977?  What have you been doing with your lives for the past 38 years?  Because the man Jesus heals in our passage today, he has been in invalid care for the last 38 years.  He’s been waiting, in our frame of reference, since 1977.

He meets Jesus when Jesus returns from Galilee.  To sum up Jesus’ movements; he was in Jerusalem for a festival; he was a little too much in the public eye; he retreated to Galilee, his home base; he did so thru Samaria, not along the main route.  Normally, the Galileans would dismiss him, he was a local boy, but he received praise because a lot of the locals had seen him at work at the Festival.  He healed the man’s child from afar.  Now, John records, Jesus has gone back to Jerusalem for another festival.

We get a very interesting glimpse into the Social Service structure of ancient Israel.  Jesus goes into Jerusalem through the Sheep Gate.  It is so named for the flocks that enter that way for temple sacrifice.  Down there is the pool of Bethesda-“The House of Outpouring”-where the US Military Hospital gets its name.  There were five roofed colonnades.  “In these lay a multitude of invalids-blind, lame, and paralyzed.”  It is supposed to be a healing place.  When there is a disturbance in the water, the first one there gets healed.

That is the testimony of the man Jesus meets.  It is a bitter testimony.  Jesus asked him if he wants to be healed.  The man’s response is that he’s been trying for 38 years but, first, no one will help him to the pool, and, second, someone always cuts him off.

The man’s response strikes me as a sharp one, between the lines, he’s saying something like, “Do you truly think I want to be here?”

I have heard that comment in various forms throughout my career from people I have gone to visit in nursing home.  Bethesda seems to be a nursing home.  In other places in Scripture, the blind, lame, and paralyzed are also described.  Jesus and his disciples heal any number of them.  Their gainful employment is begging by the side of the road.  Unless, like the man who was lowered through the roof by his friends, they have private means of support.

Do you know what the single greatest fear I have encountered as a pastor in the years of my ministry?  It is not the fear of death.  It is the fear of ‘ending up’ in a nursing home.  It has been known by various names; “The People Warehouse” or “The Land of the Forgotten”.

I live with that.  My mother has ‘ended up’ in a nursing home and she isn’t going to come out.

What is Jesus’ response?  He heals the man.  There is no statement of faith that Jesus has power, there is no mention of a post-healing belief  in Jesus, like with the man whose son Jesus healed.  Jesus told him, “Get up and go.” and the man got up and went.

What is our response?  “Praise the Lord, Jesus healed that man?”  He certainly did.  My response is more like “Why didn’t he heal them all?”  Why didn’t Jesus walk around the pool of Bethesda, leaving a trail of recovered bodies in his wake?

Why didn’t he give all those blind their sight?

Why didn’t all the lame get to walk?

Why didn’t all the paralyzed get unparalyzed?

Why didn’t Jesus just walk on through and empty out the nursing home?

Who here has visited a hospital or an assisted living facility or a nursing home and not come away with the despair that there are far too many people in there for you to help?  Who has had the despair that even your own people, friends or family, are beyond your ability to help?  Except that is exactly the mission that we have chosen for this congregation, the pursuit and provision of pastoral and spiritual care.

The T-shirt for such a ministry might be “Healers Like Jesus”.  Can this passage provide us inspiration?

Let me add fuel to the fire of the impossibility of the task.  The first question was “How on earth could we help everybody in need?”  The second question might be, “Jesus had God’s power to really make a difference.  The lame guy got up and walked away. What on earth do I have to offer that comes close to that? 

There is a powerful sentiment in the faith ‘to be imitators of Christ’.  Sure, that’s great with the small stuff; good morales; loving the neighbor; being polite; saying grace before meals.  But how on earth are we supposed to imitate the phenomenal, cosmic powers being displayed in this passage?

I am not denying the power of miracles here brothers and sisters, I have seen too many in my own life.  But I do not believe I can approach a random individual in the nursing home and tell them to “Rise up and Walk” that will not end with them rising up and falling down.

There are too many people to help and I can’t really help them anyway.  Those are two of the largest stumbling blocks to any healing ministry.  To truly understand, I think we have to take apart this healing of Jesus to see just what he gave to this man.

This man was an invalid on three levels.

The most obvious was on the physical level.  He’d been lying there, an invalid, for 38 years.  In terms of our lives, lying there since 1977.

Again, what were you doing in 1977?

But I would argue that the most superficial damage to him was on the physical level.  What would we do with that today?  Physiological medicine is incredible.  We can fix more things now in the human body than ever before.  And even if he was ‘unfixable’, we live in a culture that does more than ever in the past to make life accessible to even the most broken.  I am thinking Christopher Reeves.  And this man does not seem to be as injured as Christopher Reeves.  He could, by his own means, start the process of getting to the pool.

What psychological damage has been done?  He’s been at the Bethesda Invalid Nursing Pool for 38 years.  No one has ever helped him to the pool.  Makes me think he’s never had a visitor, makes me think that he is alone, makes me think that the staffing levels at the pool are grossly understrength.

He has been forgotten and he knows it.  He is waiting there to die and 38 years is a very long time to wait for death.  At that time, he could only wait.  What can we do now?  First line, call in the Social Worker.  If need be, get a psyche eval., get the patient on medication, monitor and follow up.  This man is awake and aware.  I have come out of a nursing home, silently thankful to the Lord that so many of those people are unaware of their surroundings.

This is today.  Then, that man did not have doctors to care for him, he certainly did not have a therapist, he had nothing, he was not even a number in a ledger or a name on a chart.  His very humanity no longer existed.  He was forgotten, tucked into this little corner of Jerusalem to watch every miracle pass him by.

Now, a brief sidebar.  That is one thing Jesus is never explicitly recorded as healing.  He never explicitly healed someone of Alzheimer’s or some other kind of mental incapacitation.  I think the closest we can come is to provide a close reading of the exorcisms and casting out of demons.  In that time and place, there was no language for mental illness.  Language and explanations from the supernatural were the closest they had.

But this man was completely aware of every slight, of every failed attempt to get the pool, of every day when nobody came to him, until the day Jesus came.  And Jesus restored his humanity.  “Take up your mat and walk” was not simply a physical miracle.  It was not simply the solution to the mental fatigue of enduring for 38 years.  That man was recognized once again as a person.

There is the healing we bring.  Because to recognize someone as a human unleashes tremendous possibility.  First via the Love of God:

A person is created by God

A person is precious to God

A person is protected by God

Second, via the Love of Neighbor

A person is a member of the community of God

They are valuable as creations of our God

They are never, ever alone

Note what we are not doing. 

We are not promising physical healing.  That is not our specialty; And that may not happen.  People are going to die, all of them.  And some of the most peaceful, together people I have ever met are ready to step through that doorway.

We are not promising mental healing.  That is not our specialty.  It may not happen.  Alzheimer’s may take our most precious; depression kills; addiction warps good people into creatures of unfulfillable need.

We are not even promising emotional healing.  You might argue Jesus provided the man with hope.  I would argue the man was not without hope.  After 38 years, he was still trying.  

We might not make people ‘happy’.  Because they may need to grieve.  They may need to rage.

The only thing we are promising is to treat them as humans.  We will offer dignity; we will offer caring; we will offer the sure and certain power of Jesus that embraces all of humanity.  And it may be rejected

But at the end of the day, they will know we have cared.  And that can be the foundation of their healing.  It is us being in imitation of Christ.  Amen