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You and I live in the Information Age. It may be more accurate to call it the Age of Information Overload. Information is continuously at our fingertips. Calling for our attention. Bombarding our attention spans. Unlimited access to ideas, statistics and images rides in our back pockets and purses, rarely out of reach.
The upsides are easy to spot. You can learn more with less effort, find what you want in less time, and make fewer bad restaurant choices with just a few taps, swipes or key clicks.
But the downsides are there too. Suddenly, it seems, the truth is harder to nail down. The facts depend on who you are listening to at the moment. Everything has a spin.
Who is to be believed? What can we believe? And how much of it? Whether it’s the direction of our country, police brutality, ISIS on the Mexican border, or Ebola ready to sweep through the nation, whose truth is the truth? What are we to believe? Who or what is believable?
While information overload may be unique to our time, deciding whom and what to believe is not. Jesus told people some pretty unbelievable things and, in that moment, they, like us, had to decide what they should believe… what they would believe.
In John 5:1-17 we find Jesus making his way through a very crowded Jerusalem. A feast was being held and many God-fearing Jews had traveled to the city. As he makes his way toward the temple, He passes by a pool known as the Pool of Bethesda.
It’s a pair of pools actually, walled in with covered porches on four sides. A roofed colonnade divides the two pools. Popular belief states that at certain times an angel of the Lord would go down into the pool and stir the waters. The tradition also holds that the first person to enter the pool after it was stirred would be healed of whatever infirmity he or she had. As a result, the areas around the pools are filled with all manner of disabled people — blind, lame, and paralyzed (Jn 5:3) — waiting for the stirring of the water. A multitude waiting for their opportunity to be well.
And then the focus narrows. We go from a crowded city and a packed scene to a very tight view. From a multitude of people to only two: Jesus and one specific man. A man who had been sick a long time. And waiting a long time. Jesus sees and knows. He approaches. He initiates. Because this is what Jesus does. He finds us among a multitude but always approaches us as individuals. His approach is always personal. It’s the nature of relationship.
After acquiring the man’s attention, He asks: “Do you want to be healed?” It kind of makes you wonder what the man’s first thought was after hearing a question with so obvious an answer. While we don’t have his thoughts, we do have his words: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”
If in Jesus we see God as He really is — and we do — then in the disabled man we see ourselves as we really are. Sick from the effect of sin in our lives. Longing to be well and whole, but lacking the means in and of ourselves. Scratching and clawing our way to the waters, but always coming up short.
And it is into this that Jesus steps. Initiating. Asking. Offering. “Do you want to be healed?” It seems like a silly question, but Jesus wastes neither words nor opportunities. If He asks, there’s a reason.
“Do you want to be healed?” It’s a valid question. Do you? Do I? Really? While our mind and mouth may answer “yes,” our hearts often betray a different reality. We may be more like the lame man than we think — looking right past Jesus to all the reasons we can’t be healed, all the reasons restoration isn’t for us. Our heart, where fear often resides, is well aware what healing might mean. Healing might mean letting go. Letting go of control. Or anger. Or bitterness. Healing might mean beginning to trust again. Trusting others again. Trusting God again. Healing involves change. And change involves the unknown. Pain and brokenness may be an enemy, but at least they are a known enemy. And so we choose to remain where we are rather than trust God with the unknown.
It is precisely in that place right there ^^ that Jesus singles us out and asks again, “Do you want to be healed?” Are you willing to trade pain and heartache for healing, even if it means trusting and some unknowns?
What kind of truth does Jesus desire to speak over you today? What kind of healing is Jesus wanting to bring to you today? What has He been waiting to speak over you and heal within you for a long time now?
The man in John 5 had been suffering this way for 38 years. He never saw Jesus as one who could provide the healing that he so desperately sought. And yet it was to this very man that Jesus speaks words with the power to heal: “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”
At the initial question, faith in Jesus’ ability to restore was optional, but at these words it was required. In that moment, he had to decide. Should he believe it? Could he believe it? He could. He did. For the first time in 38 years he stood. On his own two feet. Only 8 words earlier he had been crippled by the past and trapped in the present. And now he stood. Suddenly. Suddenly freed from the chains of hopelessness.
What is your 38 year thing? What is keeping you from being all that God has created you to be? What is keeping you from believing that healing and restoration from the past are for you? That every good thing that God has for His children applies to you as well? What keeps you from believing that you are a beloved child of God upon whom the Father longs to shower his grace, mercy, forgiveness and kindness? To reveal Himself as the Good Father and Shepherd that He really is?
It’s interesting… A number of scholars believe that John shares the duration of the man’s disability for its symbolic value. You see, 38 years is the length of time that the Hebrew people wandered in the desert, never entering the Promised Land. On the edge of the river, but never crossing over. A generation of people whose purpose and future were lost for one reason: they failed to believe God. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they would not believe that God was willing and able to do all that He had promised. They squandered their purpose and the promise. 38 years of pointless wandering — and a lifetime of regret.
What’s your 38 year thing?
I’ll leave you with Jesus’ final words from this passage: “My father is working until now, and I am working.”
He’s not done with you yet. Can you believe it?
