help me up

I have always been drawn to the story of Jesus’ encounter with a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years and I got to talk about it in my sermon this week.

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Our passage this morning tells an odd story.

It’s odd because of where it takes place. In Jerusalem there was a human-constructed pool called Bethsaida. Both the Romans and the Greeks built baths: pools for relaxation and medicinal purposes. We might think of them as the precursors to day spas, or perhaps a hot spring. The one in our story has been located by archaeologists near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

For reasons we don’t know, the pool in our story had taken on a legend that it had particular healing powers. That story was being told long before Jesus got there. Every day an angel or a spirit stirred the water and whoever made it into the pool first after that was healed. Over time, the area around the pool filled up with people who were debilitated by their conditions. Our passage mentions those who couldn’t see, couldn’t walk, and were paralyzed. They were people who were mostly forgotten by those around them. The pool, it seems, had become their only hope.

The story is also odd because it doesn’t fit the pattern of the way the gospel writers give account of Jesus’ healings. The man didn’t cry out to Jesus for help. No one brought him to Jesus or pointed him out. We don’t know why he caught Jesus’ attention. Neither Jesus nor the man said anything about faith. Often Jesus says something like, “Your faith has made you well.” Not here. We don’t have any indication that the man even knew who Jesus was. Later on in the same chapter when some of the fundamentalist religious leaders stop him and ask why he is carrying his mat on the sabbath (because that was considered “work”) the man said, “The man who healed me told me to do it.”

What we have is an incredibly brief exchange:

Jesus asked, “Do you want to get well?”
The man answered, “I don’t have anyone to help me.”
Jesus said, “Pick up your stuff and walk out of here.”

Once again, the gospel account is full of gaps, of spaces left undefined and undescribed. It feels like there had to be more to the conversation. How, for instance, did Jesus know he had been there for thirty-eight years? I find it hard to imagine Jesus was just walking through this mass of hurting people and sort of randomly stopped and said, “You—do you want to get well?” It feels so abrupt, and even more so because of the nature of the question: Do you want to get well,” which, once again, leads us to trying to discern the tone of Jesus’ voice.

How did he deliver those words?

The man’s response doesn’t offer much of a clue, other than Jesus said it in a way that appeared to make room for a response. Yet the man doesn’t answer the question. Instead, he described his situation, “Sir, I don’t have anyone who can put me in the water when it is stirred up. When I’m trying to get to it, someone else has gotten in ahead of me.”

The Greek word that is translated as “debilitated” or “paralyzed” actually means dried up or withered, painting a picture of a person who limbs were useless to him. Our English word withered shares a root with weathered, which gives us a sense that this man was beaten down by life, that he had been sucked dry by his circumstances, as had many others around the pool. We don’t get a sense from the story that he was even anywhere close to the water. He got as far as his hope could take him, but he didn’t have anyone to move beyond the despair of his circumstance, so he just showed up every day—or maybe he just stayed there—waiting for something that was not going to happen.

For thirty-eight years. We have a clear way to think about how long that is because it is almost the same amount of time Lynda has been our Music Director. For as long as she has shown up here at Mount Carmel to play the organ that man showed up at the pool knowing he wouldn’t get there first.

That’s a long time.

The man spoke truth when he said that he didn’t have any help, but, in an odd way, he was not alone in both his impairment and his desperation. He was surrounded by people in similar circumstances. The pool was surrounded with people dealing with chronic conditions waiting for the waters to be stirred so one person—one person—could be healed. My guess is more than one new person arrived daily, so the odds never improved. Going to the pool to be healed was akin to using the Powerball as a retirement plan. It was hopeless from the start.

And still he felt alone because he saw those around him as competition rather than as community, which makes me think about being stuck in traffic—particularly Boston traffic. To drive in Boston—or certain parts of New Haven, or I-95 and I-91 around the Q Bridge—means knowing what it feels like to be stuck with everyone jockeying for position, trying to get ahead of the cars around you. Ginger and I have always joked that the key is not to make direct eye contact. You look out of the side of your eye to make your move, but if you make direct contact you have to concede and let them in because you realize the person in the next car is not an obstacle but a human being trying to get where they’re going, just like you.

The man had spent thirty-eight years not making eye contact such that more than his limbs had withered. And he sat there surrounded by others doing the same way. They were together all alone because they couldn’t see beyond their circumstance to see each other.

I wonder what might have happened if they had chosen to not make it a competition. What if they talked among themselves and developed a system where they helped each other get to the water. They still would have had to wait, but they would have been able to wait together, and they would have given each other hope.

Maybe the oddest thing we have to come to terms with in this story is the way we as people far too often choose to allow the things that wither and weather us to divide us rather than draw us to one another. Life is a terminal condition. Pain and heartbreak are universal. We know that. And, still, we fall into feeling as though nobody else knows the troubles we have seen. The man in the story is compelling because we know him, we have been him—maybe not for thirty-eight years, but most all of us have spent some time trapped in our despair because we couldn’t get to what we thought would heal us to the point we lost sight of those around us who could help, or that we could help someone else.

It’s like the old story about the person who is walking and falls into a deep hole, so deep that they couldn’t climb out. They cry out for help to no avail until another person stops and offers to help. The one in the hole expected them to get a rope or a ladder, but instead the second person jumps down into the hole.

The first one says, “How does it help for you to be down here with me?”
And the second one replies, “I’ve been here before.”

When Jesus stopped and asked his question, the man at the pool had been there longer than Jesus had been alive. Every step that Jesus took in his life was taken while the man lied withering and waiting for what was never going to happen. Perhaps the man’s response to Jesus’ question doesn’t sound quite as odd in that light.

“Do you want to get well?”
“I don’t have anyone to help me.”

Jesus’ call for the man to get up and walk was a way of saying, “No you’re not. We’re in this together.” When Jesus told him to get up, he wasn’t making demands or discounting the man; he was humanizing him. He was being human with him and inviting the man to see beyond his predicament.

I am willing to guess that most all of us know what it feels like to feel dried up or withered or weathered by life. Perhaps, too, we can remember those who reached out and invited us to get up and walk. I think about when my father-in-law Reuben died and a friend named Laura came to our house and got Rachel, my mother-in-law to get up and go to dinner every Wednesday night for a full year. Rachel and Reuben had been married for twenty years before Laura was born. She had no experiential understanding of what the loss of a spouse felt like, but she knew how to show up and offer healing and grace by getting Rachel to get up.

My friend Kenny is joining a church today in Texas, and that’s a big deal because in another lifetime Kenny was a minister, but he was also an alcoholic and that cost him pretty much everything. He has been sober now for almost thirty years and in the last couple of years found this congregation that has loved him and gotten him to get up and choose to be a part of them. He wrote a song years ago that still rings true today:

and the depth of God’s love reaches down down down
to where we are until we’re found found found
a quiet word or none at all
pursues the heart behind the wall
and to those who wait with darkness all around
the depth of God’s love reaches down

We are all in this together. We can help each other up. Amen.

Peace,
Milton