Bethesda

The first part of John 5 is a spectacular excerpt of Scripture. It tells the story of a pool of water with healing properties, called the Pool of Bethesda, and a man who waits 38 years with an infirmity by the poolside, only to be healed by Jesus. The story is spectacular for the following reasons:

- It is mystical. - I think it's easy for us to picture Jesus wandering from city to city, ministering to sinners, binding up the brokenhearted, teaching as no man taught, and making the Pharisees mad. But I think that we spend a lot of time trying to make Jesus very real and accessible to us and to historically validate Him, and thus it's challenging to picture Him in the context of a mysterious Pool with Five Porches outside the Jerusalem Sheep Gate, where an Angel used to go down at certain times, stir the water, and imbue said water with mysterious healing properties that were only good for one person at a time.

- It makes no sense. - So Jesus healed a guy who had been infirm for 38 years, and we get the sense that Jesus chose him because the healing bandwagon had passed him by. But what sets the guy apart? From what John tells us, there were a "great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, and paralyzed, waiting" for their turn at the poolside. It's not like they were healthy and spry, just hopping down the steps to enter the Pool -- they were in the same handicapped rowboat. Why did Jesus pass them by? Why did He walk away and leave them still sick and lame and desperate at the poolside, still trusting in the mysterious angelic healing properties of the Pool? The man Jesus healed didn't even really ask to be healed or even acknowledge Jesus as God until after the fact -- there was no incredible display of faith like there was for the Roman centurion, or woman who touched Jesus's cloak, or the blind man who appealed to Jesus above the scolding of His disciples.

- It makes perfect sense. - The man had been sick for 38 years. That's a long time. And I think God hates to see His children suffer, and it definitely matters to Him if you've been suffering for a long time. And the man had no friends to help him down into the water, and surely that condition of abject loneliness was also moving to the heart of God. And sure, the man didn't explicitly acknowledge Jesus as Lord at the time and didn't ask for His healing -- but I think this is a story about God's compassion, not the duty to repentance. And here's the thing -- the man was ready to be healed. Jesus asked him right off the bat, "Do you want to be made well?" And I think that's not really a cookie-cutter question to ask a sick person because if you stop and think, you probably have dozens of friends who don't want to "be made well," and you definitely have times when you don't want to "be made well." So for Jesus to ask that question and for that man to have responded to the affirmative is no small thing.

- It is relevant. - The man didn't even know it was Jesus who healed him. I think if you or I had planned this miracle, Jesus's name would be all over it, for the purpose of promulgating God's glory. Sometimes we think it is a waste of time to do good things for people without putting Jesus's name on it. During campus ministry meetings in college, we would often discuss how to reach the campus for the glory of God, and community service would always come up as an idea -- but always with a caveat, always with the condition that people would have to know that it was Christians who were doing God's work out of renewed hearts and Christ-centered love -- otherwise, there was no point, we'd just be like any other service organization. And people worry about the fact that Christians don't tip well during after-Sunday lunch, and if people see you're a Christian and see that you're not generous, then you're being a bad ambassador for Christ. But what happens when you go to a new restaurant and people don't know you're a Christian? Freed from the need to represent God, you can tip as little as you like. We marry the work for God's glory with how people perceive God in light of our actions, and it can become a bad thing if we stop acting out of love and compassion and forget that Jesus healed a man who, at the time, didn't even know His name.

At the end of his gospel, John reflects on the fact that there were so many things that Jesus did that the world itself could not contain the books that could've been written to describe it. The story of the Bethesda Pool is not a safe one, but I'm glad John elected to include it anyway.