One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lying there
and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him,
“Do you want to be well?”
This man probably had high hopes when he first came to Bethesda seeking the remedy promised by the healing waters. The first year he was there it is likely that he wanted to be well, and the second, and perhaps the third. But as time stretched on his hope certainly wore thin. He was still present at the pool after thirty-eight years, frustrating years like those the Jewish people spent wandering in the desert. But did he have any expectation of being healed any longer? Or was he rather just going through the motions?
“Do you want to be well?”
The sort of ritual and routine that the lame man he created for himself was something worse than no longer coming at all. He had completely neutralized himself and cut himself off from any possibility of change. How? He imagined himself to be doing what he could already, but accepted the thoughts of despair that suggested he would never be the one to be healed. The pools themselves would do nothing to unsettle him from this rut for they were lifeless, indifferent to his condition. Those who surrounded him had their own problems. In their eagerness to solve those and find their own healing they were all too ready to ignore and even claw past those around them. Such seemed to the lame man to be the reality of the world, a reality of healing for some, but not for him, a world that was finally indifferent to his suffering. Yet in accepting this and continuing to participate in the system by being present there year after year how could he expect different results? There were any number of alternatives he might have attempted, or, if not, he might at least have found better use for his time than waiting for that which would never come.
“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool
when the water is stirred up;
while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.”
Jesus therefore felt the need to clarify this man's desire, to dig within him to the place that could still hope, to find the place in his heart that was not paralyzed but still willing to reach out for the cure. The pools may have been indifferent and so too may the crowds have been. But Jesus himself saw this man, knew his frustration, and had compassion on him.
Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.”
Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.
Jesus, and not some pools with reputed healing properties, was the true source of living water. He was the river whose flow enabled every sort of living creature that could multiple to live, the water that made the sea fresh, and nourished fruit trees of every kind on its banks. Drinking from that stream alone would generate leaves that would not fade and fruit that would not fail. The man who had been without fruit for thirty-eight years, symbolically all of Israel, needed never again be without fruit, never again without a life of purpose. And neither then need we ourselves ever be without fruit again. For this same stream of living water flows from the sanctuaries of the Catholic Church, not from a lifeless pool, but from the very heart of Christ himself.
But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water (see John 19:34).
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