Scripture: John 5:1–9a
Miss Minnie called out in vain for someone to hear her. It had only been a week since she had been moved to a different health facility, and she still didn’t understand the way things were supposed to work there. She was having tremendous pain in her leg, at the surgical site where she had been operated on for a broken hip. She knew that the doctors had been weaning her off of the pain medication, but they told her if the pain got bad enough to let her nurses know. She had tried! But after pushing her button repeatedly, she had given up and started yelling out the door, hoping someone in the hallway would hear her who could make a difference. She was hurting, afraid, and angry.
She didn’t even know who she was really angry at. If she pointed her anger at anyone, it would be the insurance companies, the health care system itself, and the systemic ways that bodies in our country are treated like capital. How rich bodies receive one standard of care, and poor bodies receive a different standard of care. But who would she yell at to blame the whole system? For now, it would satisfy her to simply get one little pain pill….
Minnie knew that it wasn’t the staff’s fault. They were way overworked and underpaid and did their best to get around to all the patients on the hall. But she was near the end of the hallway, and sometimes she felt like it was “out of sight, out of mind.”
Neither was she mad at her family. Of course, Miss Minnie wished that they could stay with her 24/7, always by her side, but she knew that was unrealistic. But it would be nice to have someone here right now, if just to walk down the hall and ask for a nurse. But she knew that this broken hip had thrown their lives into chaos, too. They were overwhelmed researching if it was even possible for her to relocate, to a place with fewer stairs and less isolated. Even though she was still in love with her home of 38 years. Even if it was the place where she and Michael had treasured for so long.
It was days like this when she most missed Michael. It will be two years ago next month, she thought to herself, though there were days when it felt like it had been a lifetime of grief and pain. And nights. The nights were the worst. And now, in this empty room, with her husband gone, her family overwhelmed, and the staff who might have well been a million miles away, she felt helpless, and hopeless, and soul-crushingly alone.
How many of us know Miss Minnie’s story? Have lived her story? Are currently living some version of her story right now? As I re-read the passage in John this week, it struck me as a narrative with plenty of parallels to today’s world. John 5 still echoes today…into the nursing homes and health care facilities of our world. The Gospel story reverberates today…loud enough for Miss Minnie to throw up her hands in disgust.
Last week, I referenced the work of Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh who approach the Scripture through its social, political, and cultural context. Once again, their wisdom is relevant for today’s passage. They write that anthropologists, who study various and diverse cultures, talk about the difference between “sickness” and “illness.”
Sickness, they suggest, is a “biomedical malfunction afflicting an organism.” When anthropologists talk about sickness, they are referring to a medical, mechanical understanding of health. This is the lens that most of us today, in the Western context, read this story through, even though it is actually rather rare, both globally and historically. But because we see the story through this lens, there have been a million sermons written that reduce the man’s experience to a physical one. They talk about the mechanics of the pool, and how the angel worked, and often interpret the healing that happens there in a similar mechanical way: if we just pray correctly or believe the right tenets of the faith, we can receive that same mechanical healing. So, when we see this man through this lens, he’s kind of a jerk. He is too lazy to get himself some help, misses the point of Jesus’ questions, is evasive in his answers, and we wonder if he isn’t living off the help of others like some kind of leech. We are on board when Jesus asks, “Come on, buddy, do you want to be healed or not?”
But Malina and Rohrbaugh suggest that by contrast, illness is “a disvalued state of being in which a person’s social networks have been disrupted and social significance lost.” They see what is happening in more than just physical terms. Look at today’s story though this lens:
- Compare him to Nicodemus, one of the political leaders that John calls the Judeans, a man of power and privilege who was given a new way to hope through an invitation by Jesus. In comparison, this week we meet a man who doesn’t even get a name in the story. He is known by his illness. Identified by this thing he cannot do.
- Then Jesus asks him if he wants to be healed, but the Greek wording implies a connotation of a more holistic experiegnce: “do you want to be made whole, made sound, made well?”
- So, it is any surprise that when the man responds to Jesus’ question, he defines it in social terms: “I don’t have anyone to help me get to the pool quickly enough.” He is not evading the question but proclaiming the depths of his true pain. He is not only a physical creature, but a social creature who has been marginalized and ignored for 38 years, without even a friend or family member to help him get down to the pool. “Yes, I want to be well,” we imagine him screaming at Jesus, “I want someone to care about me!”
- If we see this man’s true pain through the lens of illness, not just physical sickness, then we see the depths of his hopelessness. His inability to walk is due to a social distance, but it also causes social distance. Instead of being able to work, and socialize, and get married and build a family, he is overwhelmed by isolation, emptiness, and pain.
Until Jesus shows up. This morning, I only read through the end of the healing narrative in verse 9, but there is so much more that happens in this story! It happens on a Sabbath, which means the Judean power-brokers throw a fit because it means that they lose a measure of control. It opens the door to Jesus saying much, much more about his identity and purpose and goals. And there is this fascinating theological interplay between the idea of sin and healing, and how Jesus responds to the man after he heals him. So I want to talk about all of this stuff…next week. This story forms a cool parallel with the story that we will read next week from John 9, so we will see some of these connections more in depth then. Come back next week, for the rest of the story!
Because for today, I want to stay centered on this idea of the healing hope of Jesus. Because it feels like our world is full of men and women like this, stuck on the side of the pool or the back room at the nursing home. And if all they needed was some physical relief of sickness, then it would be a relatively easy fix. But how often are physical symptoms the result of something more systemic, and cultural, and emotional, and spiritual, and relational? Jesus sees all that when he talks to this man, and it is a part of his healing story.
In fact, scholar Karoline Lewis writes that you cannot see this as a healing story if you stop in verse 9. After this man is physically healed, it says that he went to the Temple. Why do you think he might have gone to the Temple? If we view the story through the social, “illness” lens, then this makes perfect sense. He has been restored physically; now he goes to be restored in all of the other ways. He goes to worship, restoring his relationship to God. He goes to be connected again to the people who had marginalized him for 38 years, restoring him to community. He goes to restore his identity…he wants to be identified as something more than a person who cannot do a thing. Of course, the Temple is where he goes first! His healing journey doesn’t end in verse 9a….it is only beginning. The man wasn’t only wanting to be healed of his sickness…he wanted to be restored from this illness.
Likewise, his journey with Jesus doesn’t end in verse 9. Lewis points to two more verses that become the theological primers for the whole story. First, verse 14 tells us “Jesus found him.” Lewis writes that those words are the central theological message of the Gospel of Jesus. She says it this way: “To be found by Jesus intimates far more than a reunion after an absence. It is to be brought into a community, restored to wholeness, and to be in relationship with Jesus.” I would offer that there are so many in our world that are yearning to be found by Jesus. We talked about this some in the Life after Debt conversation this last week…our world is deeply and profoundly crying out to be found by Jesus. And it isn’t just senior adults in nursing homes…it’s young adults, middle-aged adults, children, youth. We currently live at the historic height of medical care in the whole of human existence, and we still find ourselves more depressed, more isolated, more alone, more afraid, more angry. We want more than to cease being sick…we want to be made well. Our world is yearning to be seen. To be heard. To be healed. To be found by Jesus.
Which brings us to the second theological centerpiece, according to Lewis. In verse 21, Jesus has moved to a Trinitarian conversation about the Father and the Son, but it centers on this idea of both giving life to those who need it. Again, Lewis explains, “To be cured, to be made well as it turns out, is more than being healed of a sickness, even that from which one has suffered as long as the man at Beth-zatha. He was given life, which is connected to resurrected and ascended life. The central theme of this entire discourse is life and what life means. To put it another way, the healing of the sick man is a resurrection, a transformation from being dead to being alive—it is to be born again.” That’s the good news that Nicodemus learned last week, and now the good news that this man learns in chapter 9. Jesus is the giver of life, both in this world and beyond it.
And the good news for us today. I won’t ask you to raise your hands this morning, but I am going to wager that many of us here yearn for this kind of healing. Maybe it is physical. Maybe it is emotional. Maybe it is spiritual. Maybe it is relational. Maybe it is…all of the above. If you hear anything this morning, I want you to know that there is a God who loves you in the middle of all of it. A Jesus who wants to find you in the pain of hopelessness. A Spirit who invites you to be born again into a new life of healing and hope. We do an awesome job in this church doing stuff for others. Faith in action. Hands and feet of Jesus. “Work” is one of our 4 W’s. Our mission statement reminds us to “serve the world.”
But perhaps this morning, and perhaps this Lenten season, you need a reminder of the work that has been done for you. Of the love that is offered to you. Set down the work for a moment, and know that you are loved. Jesus has found you. Let yourself be loved in his embrace.
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