John 1:1-6: Do You Want to Be Made Well?

INTRODUCTION

When I was a child, we had a front porch. All our friends and relatives had front porches. When we went to visit our grandparents or our uncles and aunts or friends in the summer, we sat on the porch. We played on the porch. That was where you watched the world go by. My father read us stories on the porch.

In John’s gospel we read that in Jerusalem there was a pool that had five porches—my Bible calls them porticoes—around it. They were areas enclosed with columns, with a roof above to offer shade.

People brought their sick and handicapped people to the pool, because every so often the water would bubble up, and, according to John’s gospel, the belief was that whoever stepped into the pool first after the water bubbled up, would be healed from his or her affliction.

We don’t know how many people were actually healed—maybe not many. We don’t know how often the water bubbled up.

This is the story from John’s gospel, chapter 5:

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”

The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”

Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”

At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. (John 5:1-6)

I. This healing story is different from most of the miracle stories in the gospels in several ways.

A. This man didn’t ask to be healed, and Jesus didn’t call attention to his faith, as he did with several others whom he healed.

We read that many invalids were lying in the porches, but it seems that Jesus picked out only one of these disabled people for healing. We don’t even know that anyone else was aware of what Jesus had done, because as soon as Jesus had healed the man and sent him on his way, he slipped away.

But when Jesus’s enemies saw the man carrying his mat, they informed him that it was against God’s Law to carry his mat on the Sabbath.

The healed man made the excuse that the one who had healed him had told him to take up his mat and walk with it.

Another thing that is odd about this miracle is that Jesus had no conversation with the man after he was healed. He didn’t say, “Your faith has made you whole,” as he often did after his healings. We don’t know whether this man’s encounter with Jesus brought him to faith in Jesus as his Savior. He didn’t even know the name of the man who healed him.

B. We do have the information that, after his healing, Jesus looked him up and warned him: “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more so that nothing worse happens to you” (v14).

We suppose that in this case the man may have brought his affliction upon him by his own sin. Jesus warned the healed man to clean up his act or he might be afflicted with something worse even than paralysis.

What Jesus is saying, in effect, is “As you have been healed outwardly, now be healed inwardly.” We don’t know what other conversation Jesus may have had with the man.

But we read that the man went directly to Jesus’s enemies and told them that it was Jesus who had made him well. And that caused a ruckus.

II. As a result of this miracle we see in John the first incidence of the resistance of the Jewish leaders to Jesus. When these religious Jews saw a man carrying his mat on the Sabbath, they challenged him: “It is the Sabbath. It is not lawful for you to carry your mat.”

A. They probably had in mind the saying recorded in Jeremiah 17:21: “Thus says the Lord: For the sake of your lives, take care that you do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem.”

Evidently, Jesus didn’t read the Old Testament with the same eyes as his critics did, and I think that Jesus may have deliberately done this work of power to make the point that his critics had misread the scripture.

I think Jeremiah would have agreed. When he told the people from God that they weren’t to be carrying burdens into Jerusalem on the Sabbath, he was telling them to keep this day special, as a day of rest and blessing, and not to treat it as just another day for labor. Jeremiah wasn’t forbidding acts of mercy—or the carrying a bedroll home after a man who had been an invalid for 38 years had experienced a miracle of mercy from God.

I think we can guess why Jesus told the sick man to stand up, take up his mat, and walk. Jesus’s purpose must have been to elicit faith in the man. When he heard Jesus’s command, he acted on it. Faith is proved by obedience. If the man had just sat there watching the water, he wouldn’t have been healed.

B. In the rest of this chapter Jesus uses the accusation of Sabbath-breaking as a “teaching moment.” He engages his critics in a long discourse in which he offers a more profound interpretation of the meaning of Sabbath. By doing this act of mercy on the Holy Sabbath, Jesus was saying, in effect, “It is I who rightly keep the Sabbath, rather than you.”

Jesus used the occasion to make a claim for himself—that he himself is the Savior of the world. He expounds on his relationship with the Father. Jesus makes the point that his Father shows the him all that he himself is doing and gives the him authority to do same works.

Jesus is God’s representative on earth—is himself Incarnate God—and is the Savior of all who will believe. He also adds that in the last day, he will be the judge.

These things are explained in the rest of this long chapter, which is too long and too deep to explain in the time that we have left. This would be a lesson for another time. But today I want to focus on a little detail in the story. It is Jesus’s question as he met the paralyzed man: “Do you want to be made well?”

III. Jesus was asking this paralyzed man about physical healing. We can imagine how desperately this man who had been paralyzed for 38 years must have longed to be healed.

We also long for physical healing; all of us have something we long to be healed from—maybe several things—and mostly we have resigned ourselves to live with our aches and pains and disabilities for the rest of our lives on earth. That’s one thing that makes us long for Paradise.

Jesus viewed sin as sickness of the soul. And that’s a much bigger problem than physical illnesses we’re so aware of.

Six centuries before Jesus, the prophet Jeremiah lamented the sinfulness of his nation with these words:

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Is there no physician there?

Why then has the health of my poor people

not been restored?

The negro spiritual based on this verse brings the gospel meaning clearly:

There is a balm in Gilead

to make the wounded whole;

there is a balm in Gilead

to heal the sin-sick soul.

The rest of this beautiful hymn brings out the meaning that Jesus is the one who heals the sin-sick soul.

Jesus thought of himself as a physician for the sin-sick soul:

“When the scribes and Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’

“When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners’” (Mark 2:16-17).

The problem is that our sin-sickness isn’t the sickness that bothers most of us. We don’t realize that our anxiety about the future, the feeling that we’ve missed the best that life has to offer, that feeling of discontent—comes from the sickness of sin in our life.

Sin is the disability that separates us from God—from spiritual wholeness—from salvation. Sin is what keeps us from experiencing the goodness of knowing God and facing all that the future holds with confidence.

Jesus addressed the helpless man at the Pool of Bethesda: “Do you want to be healed?” Jesus addresses each of us, “Do you want to be healed from your sin?—Forgiven, cleansed, brought into a relationship of friendship with God?”

This is the question God asks everyone—and the answer isn’t so obvious. Most people seem to be satisfied that they are okay. Some years ago there was a best-selling book with the title: I’m OK, You’re OK. That pretty well sums up the human problem in the sight of God. Most of us think we’re OK.

People generally aren’t interested in the radical cleansing from sin that Jesus offers. It’s scary to think of turning oneself over to God. We don’t naturally trust God to make better choices for us than we can make for ourselves.

But Jesus calls us to faith, and faith means repentance, and repentance means to let God into my life to turn me around and teach me to live in a different way than I have before. Repentance and faith mean to trust Jesus as Savior and obey him as Lord.

Someone who lives here, who is facing the end of life, told me, “I wish I had your faith.” I gave her a New Testament, with the ribbon marker in the gospel of Luke and recommended that she read that gospel. She has never mentioned it to me since, and she has never come to any of our meetings. Wishing isn’t enough. We have to want to be made whole.

Faith in Christ isn’t something we add to an already full life. To follow Jesus means that I am not my own, I am bought with the price, the blood of Jesus, and now I belong to him—my time, my money, my ambitions, and my hopes.

The story is told of a rich miser who was afflicted with cataracts in both eyes. he went to the surgeon, and after examination, was told that they could be removed.

“But what will it cost?” the miser said.

The surgeon told him that it would be so much for each eye. The miser thought of his money and then of his blindness, and then he said, “Just do one eye. That will be enough.”

Too many people just want enough grace from God to get them to heaven. They don’t want the whole cure for their sin-sick souls. But Jesus doesn’t do half-way cures. We need to trust him as the Lord of our life and let him give us the full-treatment.

Several years ago I went to University Hospitals to visit a sick friend. When I arrived my friend was asleep, so I looked over at his roommate, a man named Tom. Tom was sitting beside his bed with his hand on his Bible which was lying on the bedside table in front of him.

I remarked about the Bible and he patted it: “Yes, he said, “I have Doctor Jesus with me.”

From our conversation I learned that Tom was a janitor. He had had his stomach removed. He was gravely ill—but Tom knew and loved God. He knew and loved Jesus and received great comfort and confidence from the knowledge that he was in “Dr. Jesus’s” hands.

He told me, “You know, church membership doesn’t save you; you’ve got to get it into your bloodstream!

It was a pleasure to meet an unsophisticated believer, who, without knowing much theology, knows Jesus. Meeting him strengthened my faith.

The healing Jesus offers is the greatest blessing imaginable. When I know that Jesus is the Lord of my life, I can face death with the assurance that the best is yet to come. I don’t need to keep pushing the thought of death out of my mind, but I can know that someday—someday soon—my life will be more wonderful than I can now imagine. I will “enter into the joy of the Lord.”