Start:Stop - Do you want to be made well?

Sunbather, David Hockney (1966)

Hello, my name is Phillip Dawson, welcome to our Start:Stop reflection from St Stephen Walbrook, when we stop for a few minutes and start to reflect on a passage from scripture. During Lent at an informal discussion group, we are exploring the Gospel of John - do join us via Zoom on Thursdays at 7.30pm if you can, all are welcome.

In our Start:Stop reflection this week, we explore how one of the ‘Signs’ from John’s gospel confronts us with questions about the limits we impose on grace, truth and love; and points us towards the limitless love of Jesus, who is full of grace and truth.

Bible Reading – John 5.1-17

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralysed. 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.

Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, ‘It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.’ But he answered them, ‘The man who made me well said to me, “Take up your mat and walk.” ’ They asked him, ‘Who is the man who said to you, “Take it up and walk”?’ Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there. Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, ‘See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.’ The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is still working, and I also am working.’


Reflection

Do we place limits on grace? Ration our graciousness? Perhaps the way we respond to this passage from scripture helps to give us a clue? In the opening scene, at the pool of Bethesda - which has been translated as ‘House of Grace’ - we meet an invalid. We can only guess how many of the past thirty-eight years he has spent trying to make his way down into the healing waters, only to find someone else has beaten him to it. Is your first instinct on encountering him in this text one of compassion, or one of disbelief? Many writers over the centuries have sided with the latter; questioning how physically limited the man really is - seeing deception in the disability, reading into Jesus’s question a sense that the man didn’t really want to be “made well” at all; a man who had grown used to shunning personal responsibility; a workshy, content with earning his living as a beggar while sunbathing by the pool. Others find no sin in the man’s complaint and read into Jesus’s words an invitation to friendship and a life of wholeness. What would people think if Jesus asked you: “Do you want to be made well?”

Jesus’s own grace and power are limitless – examples of which frame this first scene. At the start, we learn that he is on his way to a festival of the Jews - but rather than going straight to the Temple, he visits a pool surrounded by the blind, lame, and paralysed, to heal them. At the end of the first scene, the ‘Word made flesh’ reveals his limitless power in a few simple – and some might say surprisingly un-prayerful – words!

Do we place limits on truth? Constructing our own frame of reference for what is really important, limiting our ability to see the bigger picture? Rather than remarking on the miraculous healing of a man now able to work after half a lifetime being immobile, the first response of the Jews we encounter in the second scene is to chastise him for carrying his mat (working on the sabbath was outlawed and carrying any items was specifically prohibited).

The man explains that he is carrying his mat as he was told to do so, but does not know the name of the person who gave the command. Is your faith in this man limited now? Is he limiting the truth to save himself from the wrath of the religious authorities, or merely stating a fact? Perhaps we can recall times when someone has done us a good turn and we have been unable to thank them? But would a man made well after thirty eight years of disability really not seek out and attempt to find the one responsible? Where does your sympathy for what some have described as this “hard-to-love” man end?

In the third scene, now in the Temple, it is Jesus who again seeks out the man and on revealing his identity, tells the man to sin no more “so that nothing worse” will happen. There are still those today who find in this statement a link between the man’s former disability and sinfulness - Jesus himself makes no such direct link. Rather, his command seem to foreshadow the man’s subsequent actions; instead of giving thanks to Jesus and praising God, he uses his healed limbs to go and tell the Jews that it was Jesus who gave him new life. An act which results in the Jewish authorities to call for Jesus’s death.

This healing story is one of the seven  “Signs” in John’s Gospel - signs that one writer has described as pointing to a hidden reality - beyond the limits of popular perception. It is a story that confronts us with questions about where we place limits on grace, truth and love - and a sign that points us towards the one who is, as the Prologue to the Gospel reminds us, full of grace and truth; whose love for us transcends the limits of time and space.


Prayer

Lord, we want to be made well;
to be healed by the limitless power of your Spirit.
Help us to cast aside the limits we place on ourselves that prevent us from enjoying the fullness of life with you and sharing your love with others;
Turning away from the sin of our prejudices, our excuses, our distortions of the beauty of your creation.
Restore us to wholeness in mind and body
so that we may live our lives as signposts to your Word.
Amen.

Thank you for listening. Due to the lockdown the church remains closed at present but services and events are taking place online by telephone and zoom. Please look at our website www.ststephenwalbrook.net for details. We’ll be back with another Start Stop reflection next week.