Do you want to get well?

DAILY BYTE

The devotions this week will centre on the broad theme of healing. They are being written, appropriately enough, in a hospital ward. Interesting places – hospitals. Here the full-spectrum of the human condition seems to get played out every day. From the rich promise & joyful delight of a new baby entering the world, to the tragedy of life cut cruelly short by injury or disease, or indeed the beauty of a final breath releasing a long earthly life into the wider life that awaits us all beyond this one.

Here the frailty of the human condition is so clearly evident, as is the remarkable capacity of the human spirit for great courage in the face of sometimes incomprehensible suffering.

Here the very heights of intellectual achievement get expressed through the brilliance and expertise of medical doctors, as well as the hubris, the arrogance, the pride that can arise when these same doctors forget the common humanity they share with their patients.

Here compassion and care are seen in those who have devoted their lives to serving the sick, as well as the sometimes cruel and callous indifference of a system that is driven by the profit motive.

Here people either turn to God in desperation, or hope, or trusting faith; or turn away from God in disillusionment, despair or debilitating fear.

Here life and death happens, and everything inbetween.

We don’t have to watch TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy or ER to understand what I’m talking about. Pretty much all of us have some kind of hospital experience of our own to reflect on.

I have a hunch that if there were hospitals in Jesus’ day, he would have been a regular visitor. He cared about the sick, and he also cared about how people treated the sick. He also understood the true nature of healing – healing that isn’t limited by an excessive focus on just physical cure, but recognizes that healing is an ongoing journey into wholeness of body, mind and spirit. It’s not for nothing that he is known as the Great Physician.

The story in John 5 of the healing that happened at the pool of Bethesda is perhaps the closest we get in the gospels to a ‘hospital’ story. We do not know exactly how it worked, but there seemed to be something in the water of this pool that had healing power. Certainly when the water was stirred up, and for whoever was lucky enough to be the first one in. And so a great number of disabled people used to lie there – the blind, the lame, the paralysed – in the hope that someday the miracle would happen for them. Some of them lay there for a very long time.

The man in the gospel passage had been there for 38 years. The tragedy of his story was not just that he was sick, but that he had no one to help him. But then came the wonderful day when he encountered Jesus. We read in the story that when Jesus saw the man and learned how long he had been lying there he asked him this question, “Do you want to get well?”

On the face of it the question seems ridiculous, maybe even rude or downright offensive. Of course the man wanted to get well. Who wouldn’t? And after all he was lying there wasn’t he?

But if we ponder the question a little, we’ll see the sharp insight of Jesus that penetrates to the very heart of this man’s situation, and indeed ours as we think about our own circumstances of sickness, brokenness, paralysis and pain.

Are we willing to allow our very identity to be redefined, not by the painful, broken circumstances that have befallen us, often so unjustly, but by something else? By Someone else? Someone who dares to say with us, with great authority and compassion, “Stand up...and walk!”

PRAY AS YOU GO

Thank you, Great Physician, that as you look at me you see beyond my brokenness & sickness, to the potential for wholeness that is in me. Help me to see myself in the same way, and so trust your healing words that speak newness into my life. Amen.

SCRIPTURE
John 5:6

When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”