"Do you want to be made well?"

“Do you want to be made well?”

This seems a strange question to ask someone in the situation we read about in today’s Gospel.

Surely the answer is obvious. Jesus could simply look at the evidence in front of him.

The man he asks this question to can’t walk. He is sitting next to Bethzatha pool – a pool widely known for having healing properties. Bethzatha – which means house of mercy – attracted people from far and wide who needed healing. 

We are told that the man in the Gospel story had been ill for 38 years. Surely Jesus didn’t need to ask this question. Surely, he must see that the man is tired of whatever sickness had taken away his mobility? Surely, he wants to be made well. Isn’t that the whole reason he is lying next to the healing pool? 

Yet Jesus sees all this and still asks: “Do you want to be made well?”

So, was this a pointless question?

With Jesus no question is pointless. Because he knows people. He can truly see them and what lies beneath the surface.

Often in the Gospels when we see Jesus ask a question that he already knows the answer to, it is because he wants the person he is speaking to, to do some inner probing, to search their own hearts, to search their motivations, and find out the things that they may be hiding from themselves.

Jesus saw this man. He really saw him. In our imaginations this morning, can we see him too?

Why had this man been there for so long? Did he really want to be well or had this place, his illness, become his comfort zone? It may not have been what he wanted but he was used to it. He was familiar with what he was going through. He had gotten used to being invalidated.

Had he absorbed the label that had been given to him by his community? Had he accepted the derogatory description for him and others like him – an INVALID?

The word “Invalid” would now be considered an offensive or outdated description for people who have been made weak or disabled by injury or disease. In this passage INVALID is used to refer to the people who lay by the Sheep Gate at the entrances to Bethzatha pool. At some point in their lives all of these people had suffered an injury or illness that had left them blind - without vision- , or lame - unable to walk, or paralysed, having lost the ability to move and feel sensations in parts of their body.

As a result of their physical conditions, they were labelled invalids – unacceptable, flawed. Society had told them that they were of no use, that they could not contribute.

These people had been invalidated. This man had spent 38 years hearing this message repeated over and over again. He had been told he was of no use to his community.

And so, he sat by this pool that offered the promise of mercy and healing. He sat by it but maybe he didn’t have the strength to go any further on his journey to wellness. He sat in the portico, the formal entrance to the pool of mercy. He was at the cusp of transformation so why was he not entering the pool?

“Do you want to be made well?”

Can we imagine this broken man looking up at Jesus? Can you imagine him feeling helpless and frustrated. I wouldn’t be surprised if no-one had ever asked him this question before.

Maybe this was the first time in a long time that he had been forced to examine his true feelings. Maybe years of being invalidated had numbed his emotions. Years of being ignored and passed by had made him believe that what he felt or thought was of no importance to anyone.

“Do you want to be made well?”

The man answers Jesus with a list of excuses.

-         He has no friends to help him.

-         Other people are too fast so he doesn’t get his chance.

-         He’s not quick enough.

-         He’s not strong enough, he’s not good enough,

-         It’s other people’s fault.

But do you notice he doesn’t answer Jesus’ question: “Do you want to be made well?”

Jesus ignores the litany of excuses and accusations and tells the man to, ‘Stand up, take your mat and walk.’ 

And, miraculously, the man does. At once he is made well, picks up his mat and begins to walk.

I can imagine him walking straight through the sheep gate entrance that he had been sitting by for all those years. The sheep gate was the easternmost gate in the wall around Jerusalem. It was used to bring sheep into the city which would be sacrificed at the temple. Maybe he headed straight to the temple that he had been excluded from by Leviticus law, which disqualified people with blemishes, people who were blind, mutilated, or broken from drawing near to God’s presence. (Leviticus 21:16-23)

Finally, this man was no longer an invalid, he was validated. He could enter the temple. He could offer his sacrifice. He could be welcomed into the community that had excluded him for so many years.

Can we relate to this man? What can this story, recorded in the Gospel, tell us? What does it mean for us this morning?

Maybe some of us have been sat at the entrance to the house of mercy for many years. Maybe we have heard the invitation into the Kingdom of God, we have come to Christ, perhaps drawn to him and the promise of his healing because we recognised our brokenness. 

Our life experiences may have caused injuries – some visible, many invisible. Childhood traumas, hurts inflicted in our relationships. Maybe it’s a fear of failure, or feelings of being unloved and unlovable. Maybe it’s a struggle with crippling anxiety or loneliness.

And when we heard the Word of God calling us to enter His Kingdom through belief in His Son Jesus, the sacrificial lamb, the Gate – we believed and came to his house of mercy. But perhaps for some of us, some of the issues and injuries we have picked up in life are making us hold back from fully entering into the promised healing.

Jesus sees all this.

Jesus asks us the same question today: “Do you want to be made well?”

He loves us. He knows the barriers we are afraid to let down. And He invites us to walk with Him, even if we might struggle to let go of our mat at first.

Our mat might be a different thing for each of us. I struggle with anxiety and self-confidence. For me, hearing God’s call into His kingdom, seeing His holiness, the place where no sin can enter, means battling daily to stay in a place of belief in Jesus’s power to validate and receive me.

 For me, hearing God calling me to Reader ministry, meant walking with Him in it even while I carrying the anxious feelings as I stood at my first pulpit to preach or wrote my first assignment.

But I find that now, I am able to set down that mat of anxiety and low confidence more often as I continue in this walk of faith. Frustratingly for me, I pick it up again from time to time, but I trust that healing is a process. I am in the process of being made well.

Jesus’ sacrifice means that we are invited to walk with Him, to follow Him and to allow Him to make us well. We have access to God’s throne. We don’t have to let our mats and our injured feelings be a place where we stay for too long. Jesus asks us to stand up, take up our excuses – both the valid ones and the invalid ones - and walk into His house of mercy.

This morning Jesus reminds us that He has made us valid, He has made us acceptable. He promises to show us that He is more powerful than the things in our lives that once floored us. He is stronger than the things that we are still carrying and – as we walk with him, as we allow Him to make us well – He will empower us to release those things that have kept us without a vision for the future, without the ability to move forward.

God wants us to be made well because He wants us to be useful in His Kingdom.

St Paul had to carry around the mat of knowing that He had persecuted Christians before His own encounter with the risen Christ. He had to walk out His faith in Jesus, with the knowledge that there would always be some of his peers who would doubt the validity of his conversion.

But Paul continued to walk, despite this mat he had to carry around at times. He allowed God to make Him well so that He could be used to spread the Gospel and he ended up writing the majority of the New Testament.

God wants us to be made well. He wants to heal our blindness. He wants us to share His vision, like Paul was able to. He wants us to look around at the needs in our community, in our society.

He wants us to hear cries for help with true empathy  instead of having hearts that are paralysed and unfeeling. We need to share His vision for the world. In this current time of political, economic and social unrest, it is easy to shut our eyes to the needs of others, to be selfish and solely focused on our own family and well-being. But God wants everyone in His Kingdom to remember our heavenly citizenship, to remember our purpose here on earth. He wants us to respond to His call to proclaim the good news to people, in word and deed.

God wants us to be made well. He wants to heal our lameness. He wants us to be willing to move and go where He sends us, like Paul was willing to head straight to Macedonia as soon as he saw the vision. God is preparing the hearts of people He will send us to, like he opened Lydia’s heart. He just wants us to be willing and obedient to go and share with the people He is already calling to share in His Kingdom. God wants no one to be excluded from his House of Mercy. In a world of political division, tribalism, religious conflicts and wars, God wants to use us to welcome those who we disagree with, those we may harbour prejudices towards. He sends us out of these pews and into the world, into our communities, to share the Good News of His Kingdom.

God wants us to be made well. He wants to heal our paralysis. For us to be sensitive to those in need, to feel empathy for those we may think we have little in common with. He wants us to stand up for humanity and love at a time when our financial difficulties are hardening many hearts to those in need of refuge, the disabled, the poor, the elderly. He wants us to be active in His Kingdom. He wants us to feel the passion and love that He has for every human he created. He wants us to share the desire of the Psalmist who longs for God’s ways to be known upon earth [and His] saving power among all nations.”

Today, our Gospel asks each one of us to answer the question: “Do you want to be made well?”

Let’s examine ourselves and take an honest look at the parts of ourselves that we know God wants to heal. Jesus died so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but will be made well and walk with Him forever. So, in the light of His sacrifice, in response to this precious invitation to enter through the Gate, let us be willing to put down the mats that we have picked up, and allow God to use us in His Kingdom as we walk with Christ.