Do You Want to Get Well?

The city was full for a feast, and most of the people in it had walked there.

Some time later there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Pilgrims came in from all over the country for the feasts, on foot, headed for the temple. Jesus came up with them. Then John stops the story at a gate.

Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool with five covered colonnades, which in Hebrew is called Bethesda.

In the nineteenth century, digging near the Church of St. Anne in Jerusalem's old city uncovered two large pools lying side by side, which leaves room for four colonnades around the outside and a fifth across the middle. John had the building right.

On these walkways lay a great number of the sick, the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed.

A whole city full of people who had walked in for the feast, and he went to the one place full of people who couldn't.

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One man there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.

That's all John says about who he was. No name, no town, no family, no word on what was wrong with him. Only the number.

The people in the porches believed the water healed, now and then, when it moved. The line that explains why it moved is missing from the earliest manuscripts of John, so most modern Bibles leave it out. The man's own words a moment later are enough to show what the porch believed: you waited for the water to stir, and the first one in got the healing.

Jesus walked past a great many people that day. He stopped at this one.

When Jesus saw him lying there and realized that he had spent a long time in this condition...

He saw, and then he understood something. Not just that the man was sick, but that he'd been sick a long time, long enough for the sickness to become the shape of his days. Then he asked.

Do you want to get well?

Think about the questions a man in that porch would have heard over thirty-eight years. What's wrong with you. How long has it been. What happened. Strangers on their way to the temple asked them, and new arrivals on the next mat, and maybe a relative now and then. Every one of them was a question about the trouble.

This one was about him. Not what was wrong, but what he wanted. It may have been the first question of that kind anyone had put to him in years, and it came from someone he didn't know, on a feast day, in the middle of a crowd.

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It was a yes-or-no question. The man didn't say yes, and he didn't say no.

"Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am on my way, someone else goes in before me."

He was asked about wanting, and he answered about help. The question went to the inside of him, and the answer came back about everyone around him. I have no one. Someone else always gets there first.

Every word of it was true. That's what makes the answer worth sitting with. He wasn't dodging. He was telling a stranger the honest situation as he understood it, the way he'd probably told it to everyone who ever asked. A reason carried that long gets smooth. It comes out whole, without thinking, ready before the question is finished.

And Jesus didn't wait for him to get the answer right.

Then Jesus told him, "Get up, pick up your mat, and walk."

Immediately the man was made well, and he picked up his mat and began to walk.

No yes. No confession of faith. No correction of the explanation. He had answered the question with the same reason he'd given for years, and the healing came anyway, straight through the reason, without stopping to argue with it.

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The same span of years shows up in the wilderness. Near the end of his life Moses looked back over the wilderness and counted the stretch between turning back from the edge of the promised land and finally moving toward it again. The time we spent traveling from Kadesh-barnea until we crossed over the Brook of Zered was thirty-eight years. A whole generation, between the place they'd stopped and the place they started again. John never draws a line between the two, and it's best not to lean on it. But the number had meant a long wait once before.

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Now the part everyone reads past. Jesus didn't take the mat away.

He could have left it on the stone, where it belonged to the old life. Instead he told the man to pick it up. The thing that had carried him for years, he would now carry. It was the first thing anyone noticed about him, too. It was the Sabbath, and the man was stopped on his way through the city. This is the Sabbath! It is unlawful for you to carry your mat.

The mat was the evidence. It was how anybody who'd walked past those porches for decades could tell who he was. He didn't throw it away to fit in, and he didn't defend it either. He told them the plain truth, that the man who made him well had told him to pick it up.

He didn't know who that man was. Jesus had slipped away while the crowd was there. The record goes past the tidy ending. Later Jesus found him in the temple and spoke to him again, and the man went off and told the authorities who it had been. John doesn't say why, and it isn't anybody's business to guess. He's not a hero in the story. He's a man who got up.

He answered with an explanation instead of a yes, and it didn't disqualify him. The reason was true. It just wasn't the end of the sentence.

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Where this meets your week

I have no one. After a role ends, the people who used to carry part of the load are often gone too. The assistant who made the calls. The crew. The partner who handled the side of things you never learned. The spouse who did the paperwork, before the funeral. "I have no one to help me" can be the plainest truth in the house. The man said it, and it wasn't held against him. Then he got up without the help he'd been waiting for. Name one specific thing you've been waiting for help with. Then name one person who could give a single hour of that help, and ask them for exactly that hour, with a day attached. "Could you sit with me for an hour on Thursday and show me how the online banking works? Just an hour. I'll make lunch." A request that small is easy to say yes to. If the first person says no, ask the second one on the list.

The reason with a birthday. Most long reasons started in a particular year. The knee that went out. The money that was tight when the kids were small. The falling-out. The year the doctor said to be careful. Some of those are still true. Some were true then and have quietly stopped being true, and nobody went back to check. Write down the reason you give most often for what you don't do, word for word, the way you usually say it. Next to it, write the year it was born. Then write one question that would test whether it's still true, and who could answer it. "Can my knee handle a flat two-mile walk now? Ask at the next checkup." Take the question to that person.

Carrying the mat. Some people, when something finally changes, want to leave every sign of the old life behind so nobody will remember them that way. He was told to carry his. The sick years, the long job, the loss, the season you'd rather not talk about: none of it has to be thrown out to be done with. It can be picked up and carried, which is lighter than being lain on. When someone asks about the new thing, have one plain sentence ready that includes the old one. "I spent thirty years running a warehouse, and now I'm learning to paint." No apology for either half. Practice it once out loud so it comes easily.

Someone else gets there first. While I am on my way, someone else goes in before me. Younger people get the job, the board seat, the contract, the attention. It can look like every opening goes to someone quicker. That may well be true. It didn't decide anything at the pool. The man who got well that day wasn't the fastest. He was the one who was asked. This week, notice each time you compare yourself to someone at the water, and make a tally mark on a card in your pocket. At the end of the week, count them. Then pick one thing to do that has no winner: plant something, cook for someone, walk without a step counter.

With someone else. The question came to one man, but it can be asked between two people who trust each other. With a spouse, a friend, or a small group, take turns. One person asks, gently, "Do you want to get well?" and fills in what it means for them: the hip, the grief, the silence with a brother. The other answers, and the rule is that the first answer is allowed to be a reason. Nobody argues with it. Then the asker says, "What's one small step this week?" and writes it down. Next time you meet, start by asking about the step, not the reason.

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Take the smallest step you've spent the longest explaining.

Not the whole thing. One step. The doctor's appointment you've explained away for three years, the call to the brother, the walk to the end of the street, the first page of the thing you were going to write someday.

Pick the time before you pick the step: tomorrow morning, the first hour you're awake, before the day fills up. Shrink the step until it takes fifteen minutes or less. Not "get in shape" but "walk to the mailbox and back." Not "fix things with my brother" but "dial the number." Write it on a card the night before and leave the card where your feet hit the floor. Do it before the reason finishes its sentence. You don't have to stop believing the reason. Just get up anyway.

If it goes badly, if the call goes to voicemail or the walk hurts or you lose your nerve halfway, it still counts. Write down what happened, then shrink the step again and set it for the next morning. The man in the porch only had to get up once for it to be a beginning.

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Immediately the man was made well, and he picked up his mat and began to walk.

Thirty-eight years, and John's word for what came next is began.