John 5.1-14
Cormac McCarthy published two novels before his death in 2023, The Passenger and its companion Stella Maris. Towards the conclusion of the former, Bobby Western, the man at the center of the story’s mystery, comes for a final visit to the psychiatric facility where, roughly a decade earlier, his sister, Alicia, a math prodigy and diagnosed schizophrenic, had received care before taking her own life.
At the facility, Bobby Western speaks with a patient named Jeffrey who was close with Alicia. During their conversation, Bobby asks Jeffrey about his sister’s delusions:
“Did she ever talk to you about the little friends that used to visit her?
Sure. I asked her how come she could believe in them but she couldn’t believe in Jesus.
What did she say?
She said that she’d never seen Jesus.
But you have. If I remember.
Yes.
What did he look like?
He doesn’t look like something. What would he look like? There’s not something for him to look like.
Then how did you know it was Jesus?
Are you jacking with me? Do you really think that you could see Jesus and not know who the hell it was?
Did Jesus say anything?
No. He didn’t say anything.
Did you ever see him again?
No.
But you never lost faith in him. No. The Israelite heals. That’s all you need to know. Let me quote Thomas Barefoot to you. His word is not going to come back to him void. It’s going to do what he wants it to do. You might want to think about that.
Who is Thomas Barefoot?
A convicted murderer. Waiting to be executed by the State of Texas.”
“The Israelite heals. That’s all you need to know.”
A decade ago, I had just shoved my wallet and keys and clothes into a plastic bag and climbed into a hospital gurney. I was waiting for the anesthesiologist’s lullaby to ferry me into emergency surgery. I had a tumor in my intestine the size of several Cormac McCarthy novels and later that afternoon I would awake in a recovery room to a hastily assigned oncologist informing me that the odds were not in my favor.
Nurses, dressed distressingly like butchers in a meat packing plant, were about to wheel me to surgery when a short, unassuming man slipped through the curtain. Jeff served on the bishop’s cabinet as my supervisor; in addition, he thought of himself as my mentor. Jeff was dressed, as he was always dressed, in a blue university blazer. A very uncool wooden cross hung atop his green tie. I had already kissed my wife goodbye. Jeff was near the bottom of the list of people I wanted to see in that awkward, anxious moment. But without any apparent concern about holding up my timetable, Jeff ushered the medical professionals to the side, straightened his glasses, and opened the scriptures.
He did not even announce much less explain what he was about to do.
First, he read from the Book of James:
“Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up…pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”
Closing his Bible, Jeff laid hands on me— he invited the staff to join him— and he prayed. After the amens emerged from a congregation of plastic surgical shields, Jeff removed a small brass stock of holy oil from the pocket of his chinos. He dipped his thumb in the oil and he traced the sign of the cross onto my forehead— a forehead that was clammy with fear. “Jason, I anoint you with oil in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Then he looked me square in the face. And without any irony or bravado, as though he was oblivious to the audacity of his faith, like it was more a command than a petition, he said, “Be healed.”
If I am honest, in the moment his boldness embarrassed me. He may as well have told me to take up my mat and walk.
“The Israelite heals. That’s all you need to know.”
Jesus has just come from Cana in Galilee to Jerusalem for the Festival of Pentecost. Entering the city by the Sheep Gate, the Good Shepherd passes the Pool of Bethesda. According to the prophet Nehemiah, the high priest and his brothers built the gate, but there is no other mention in the scriptures about the adjacent pool.
The pool is massive. It is one hundred feet in length and more than double in width, but it is forty feet deep. Some interpreters believe the pool by the Sheep Gate was used to wash sheep before their sacrifice in the Temple, which would mean the water was filthy and disease-ridden. Other interpreters argue the pool was a reservoir and thus clean. Again, there is no other mention of the pool in the Bible so it is all conjecture. What we do know from the text is that rumor or tradition or simply hope held that at certain times an angel of the LORD would stir the water of the pool. “Whoever stepped in first,” John reports, “after the stirring of the water was healed of whatever ailment afflicted them.”
Thus the massive pool by the Sheep Gate was flocked by masses of desperate people. As John reports, around the five porticoed pool “lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed.”
I remember feeling unsafe in Israel’s West Bank when a throng of desperate, unemployed young men suddenly converged on me, pleading with me to purchase their trinkets.
Such desperation has a sound to it.
The word John uses is plethos, multitude. The other time John uses that word is at the Feeding of the Five Thousand. People who cannot see. People cannot move. People who can barely walk— a multitude of desperate, despairing people who would have had difficulty finding their way into the healing water at just the moment the water began to stir. Frankly, that’s a lot of people who would not have had control over their bowels, a lot of people who would had to rely on others to feed them and clean them.
Such desperation has an odor to it.
Whether the pool was used to clean sheep or not, the place would have smelled worse than a government-run nursing home. Like the man who lived among the tombs, no doubt the mentally ill languished there too. And so Bethesda likely smelled like a hospice and sounded like a psychiatric hospital. And to those dumped there by their families, the place felt like a prison.
Among the multitude is a man who has been there as an invalid for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years! He has been trying to get into the water nearly as long as Israel wandered in the wilderness. Thirty-eight years! In other words, the afflicted have flocked to this pool for at least a generation.
Has this invalid witnessed the water heal others during those years? John does not indicate and, again, there is nothing in scripture that attests to the pool’s healing properties. All John tells us is that this man believes the stirred up water can heal him only he cannot get himself to it.
Jesus sees this man among the multitude.
The Great Physician first asks for his consent, “Do you want to be healed?”
Rather than answer, the sick man explains, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”
Jesus responds to his explanation with an exhortation, “Get up, take up your pallet, and walk.”
And the man obeys.
He gets up.
He picks up his pallet.
And he walks.
But notice, he is not yet fully healed.
Only later does Jesus complete the miracle.
In the novel The Passenger, Bobby Western’s conversation with the psychiatric patient named Jeffrey continues.
““The Israelite heals. That’s all you need to know…When you have seen Jesus once you have seen him forever. Case closed,” Jeffrey insists.
“Forever,” Bobby asks.
“Yeah. Jesus is a forever kind of guy.
You don’t see any disjunction between what you know about the world and what you believe about God?
I don’t believe anything about God. I believe in God. Kant had it right about the stars and the truth within. The last light the unbeliever will see will not be the dimming of the sun. It will be the dimming of God. Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not see it.”
Everyone is born with the faculty.
One of the astonishing attributes of the Gospels, a feature that has unsettled interpreters over the centuries, is how often Jesus does not succeed the first time he attempts a miracle.
On the Sea of Galilee, when Jesus commands the legion of demons to leave the man who has been bound and left to live among the tombs, the horde initially resist Jesus. The demons remain in the man and rebut Christ’s command. Only after Jesus parries and demands their name does he successfully exorcise them from the Gerasene.
After the Transfiguration, Jesus sees a father in the crowd, holding his son. Unclean spirit has possessed the boy and it has cast him into fire and water and often sought to destroy him. And so far, his father testifies, the disciples have been unable to free his of the spirit. Notice, the disciples believed they could work the miracle. However, Jesus fares no better on his first attempt. Jesus declares over the boy, ““You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” But the unclean spirit abides, convulsing the boy and rendering him as a corpse.
“He is dead,” the crowd cries out. Having struck out with his verbal rebuke, Jesus kneels down and lifts up the boy’s body and raising him up, Mark says, the boy arose.
“All things are possible for one who believes,” Jesus announces.
“Eventually,” he leaves unsaid.
Just after he multiplies the loaves and the fish, two men from Bethsaida bring their blind friend to Jesus. Takes the blind man by the hand and spits in his eyes— it’s like Jesus is making it up as he goes— and lays his hands on the man. “Do you see anything?” Again, not only does Jesus not always succeed on the first attempt, he does not always know whether the miracle has worked. “Do you see anything?” Like Jesus does not know the answer. “I see people but they look like trees, walking.”
So the blind man receives a do-over.
Here in the Gospel of John, the man who has been laid out for thirty-eight years gets up at Christ’s command. Despite the sabbath day, he picks up his bed and he carries it away. But he is no more fully healed than the Bethsaidan who saw people as trees. In chapter nine, after Jesus heals the man born blind the transformation of him is such that those who have known him no longer recognize him. But by the Sheep Gate, the Pharisees have no trouble placing the man they see carrying a pallet. Walking or not, the man remains a work in progress. Thus later, when Jesus discovers the man in the Temple, Jesus takes the scalpel to him a second time. “Behold,” Jesus says, “Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you. Now you are made whole. ”
“The Israelite heals…”
Eventually.
The Great Physician does not always heal his patients on the first attempt.
This odd feature of the Gospels raises a question unique to Christ’s incarnate identity. And it is a question about Jesus that carries crucial implications for how we perceive ourselves. The question is straightforward if unexamined.
Did Jesus perform miracles by his divine nature or by his human nature?
Christians have often answered these questions in ways that compromise the unity of Christ’s person. “Christ worked miracles according to divine power,” the first Pope Leo asserted, “whereas, as man, he was weak with human infirmity.” However, to say that Jesus could walk on water because he is God risks heresy. Specifically, the notion that Christ’s divinity overwhelms his humanity is known as Eutychianism, which the church declared a heresy at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. Not to mention, if we attribute Christ’s miracles to his divinity, then we must reckon with the fact that all his miracles were works previously performed by the Old Testament prophets. There is no miracle Jesus did that Elijah or Elisha did not themselves work before him. In addition, there is not one type of miracle that Jesus wrought which the disciples do not themselves also do.
We all know Peter could not walk on water.
But Peter did raise the dead.
“Tabitha, arise!” Peter commands, praying over her dead body in Joppa.
Paul too works his Lazarus moment. A young man named Lucky falls asleep listening to the apostle preach. Eutychus plunges out a window, three stories to his death. Just like Jesus, Paul rushes downstairs and bends over the dead boy. Taking the young man in his arms, Jesus says, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” Sometime between Paul’s embrace of the boy and the gathered’s celebration of the Eucharist— the scripture is not clear— at some point, the dead boy lives again.
Jesus does not do anything Elisha cannot do.
And everything Jesus does, the apostles also do.
Not just Peter. Not just Paul.
Phillip and Stephen and Saint Sergius too.
Just so, the Eastern Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov writes:
“Christ’s miracles were worked by the Son of Man, and they were worked by Him in His humanity; consequently, they have a human character, are accessible to man, are included in his the possibilities of this world, headed by man. This means, furthermore, that Christ’s miracles were natural not unnatural.
They disclosed the possibilities implanted in man’s relation to the world. They represented humanity’s testimony about itself, for man is called “lord” of the creation. And this power of man over the world is attested in the Perfect Man with staggering force, although miracle-working is not something that belongs to Him alone but is, in general, proper to many spirit-bearing saints of both testaments.
From the fact that the miracles are worked by Jesus with the participation of his humanity, it follows that all of them are possible for human creatures. Christ gives the apostles the power to perform all these miracles when He sends them off to preach. Of course, the LORD would not have given this command, which contains the fullness of His own miracle- working, if these works did not have a human character, if they were not doable for disciples…His miracles were worked humanly.”
In other words, on more than a few occasions when working a miracle, Jesus requires a do-over because…well, he’s just like you.
He’s human after all.
“Everyone is born with the faculty…”
Not just to see miracles but to do them.
Exactly one year ago, near the end of a visit with Mike Moser, I offered to pray. Not only did Mike know he was dying, he knew my own cancer had returned. I had not expected to tell him but I discovered that I needed to tell someone, and I guessed that a hospice patient would be the last person to serve me sentimental optimism.
When I offered to pray, Mike nodded but held up a bony finger as if he was hitting the pause button. His voice was faint, no louder than the hiss of oxygen tubed into his nostrils.
“Let me…” each word tumbled slowly out of his mouth like they were clues to a hidden treasure, “pray for you.”
“For me?”
“Let me pray for your healing,” he whispered.
All I could make out was his “amen” a few moments later.
Not long after Mike prayed for me, Christie admonished me one Sunday after service— a sort of prayer in the form of rebuke.
“You mustn’t describe your cancer as incurable,” she exhorted me, “there is no such thing with God.”
“Jason, arise” she all but said.
And this winter, following worship Bonnie insisted I sit down in the rear of the sanctuary next to her walker. Informing me that she had the gift of healing, Bonnie said, “I’m going to lay hands on you and pray over you.” She did not ask my permission. And she did not appear to doubt her power.
And I am not dead.
It would be blind superstition— faith alone in secular materialism— to insist the fact of my life owed to my treatment and not to the…the miracles… worked by Bonnie and Jeff, Christie and Mike, and many other brothers and sisters in Christ.
The reason Christ’s miracles are so often preceded by prayer, Bulgakov notes, is because “prayer is proper to the God-Man in his humanity.”
Notice, in the novel Jeffrey testifies to Bobby that “the Israelite heals.”
He does not say, “God heals.”
The Israelite heals— that’s what you need to know.
Ever since the Enlightenment, Christians have exhausted themselves trying to explain away the miracles of Jesus—as though they’re embarrassing relics of a pre-scientific age, problems to be solved so modern people can keep believing. Never mind that if you subtract all the miracle stories from the Gospels not much of Jesus remains. The real scandal is not that Jesus healed the sick or cast out demons. The true stumbling block is that Jesus tells us we will do the same. The problem is not believing he could do miracles; it is believing we are meant to go and do likewise.
We turn his power into a puzzle when he means for it to be our vocation.
As Sergius Bulgakov writes:
“In their content Christ’s miracles are works of love and mercy; in their significance Christ’s miracles are manifestations of human power in the world, human power that is reinforced and illuminated by God’s power. Christ’s miracles are tasks. These tasks are human tasks, and all of them are accessible to man, assigned to him as a natural being in the sense that they can and must constitute a task for him as well. This is the power of man over nature in order to apply the love of God to the world.”
When he later encounters the man from Bethesda at the Temple, Jesus makes a strange, cryptic comment. Jesus says to him, “Sin no more; so that, nothing worse will happen to you.”
What is the man’s sin?
The man hasn’t done anything since his miracle but go to the Temple.
According to St. Augustine, that is his sin.
His sin is that he went to the Temple but he never went back to the pool. As soon as Jesus heals him, he walks away. He forgets about all those desperate people with whom he just spent the last thirty-eight years of his life. As soon as he has his life restored to him, he brushes his hands off and steps on to a new life. His sin is wanting the blessing of God without the burden of those still in need of blessing.
His sin is that he went to Temple when he needed to be the Temple.
For them.
The miracle he received was not simply a gift.
It was a summons.
A task.
And let’s be fair.
Who can blame the man from Bethesda for not returning to the sound and smell of that desperate site, a place where the stirred up water held out just enough hope to make it a torture, a prison as much as a pool.
Kelly is a member of the congregation, a part of the church’s virtual diaspora. Every Sunday she worships with us remotely from Missouri where she lives and serves in ministry to inmates on death row. Knowing this passage from the Gospel of John was on the docket, she wrote to me recently to give me her testimony.
Kelly writes:
“I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I moved to the Midwest at fifteen. I am the oldest of three. I was raised in a tumultuous home by parents who are not believers. I was molested as a child, and it went unaddressed. I married a man who was abusive; he felt like home.
My paternal grandparents were Christians. They lived lives that exemplified Christ’s love. My grandfather was a sergeant in the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department, and a bailiff for the courts. He served as a bailiff for the Charles Manson case. Unlike the rest of society, he saw past the sensationalism of the case into the humanity of the man he referred to as “Charlie.” His example of living a gospel-centered life was profound.
It wasn’t until ten years after my grandfather died that I encountered the living Christ. Attempting to numb the pain of life, I had become paralyzed by substance abuse. I had started attending AA meetings, and after one particularly heavy meeting in which spirituality was the topic, I sat alone in the back of the room, like that man on his mat by the pool who wanted so badly to touch what he believed could make him whole.
Like him, I decided I wanted to be healed.
In the Bible he says, “I have no man to help me.”
I said, “God, if you are real, effing prove it. Prove you are real.”
And dammit but Jesus did.
Christ revealed himself to me.
Not long after my miracle, I was led— Jesus led me— to Missouri’s highest security prison where death row inmates are housed until their execution. This is not exactly the place I would’ve hoped Jesus take me when I prayed that prayer in the AA meeting all those years ago but else am I supposed to do— look a gift horse in the mouth?
That was seventeen years ago. The ministry I have done on death row has been, besides motherhood, the most beautiful, rewarding, heartbreaking experience of my life. I simply mean I walk beside prisoners and share God’s love. I have helped reconcile families, assisted with homework assignments, fundraised to help meet financial needs, received confession, and provided an ever-present ear for men and women who are incarcerated, always reminding them that we are not the worst things we have done because we are loved by the Father’s Beloved Son.
We live in a capitalist society that sees people as cogs in a machine, not as creatures who need us to be Jesus for them. Today, we await the likely execution of a prisoner who has become a dear friend and brother, Lance Shockley. He is a child of God, as much as you or me. My heart is broken, and I am crushed by a government that appeals to God for his blessing but otherwise ignores the burden Christ gives us.
I feel so inadequate to the task before me. But if I said, “God, you’ve done good to me. Now I can keep a safe distance from all those still in need of a miracle,” then that would be worse than if God had left me crippled by addiction.” So I work. And I pray with the presumption I can work a miracle for Lance and others. I’m no Peter or Paul, but, then, neither of those guys knew they’d end up heroes in something called the New Testament.”
Let me make it plain:
Jesus, who is the Temple, rescued Kelly.
And now she is daring to be the Temple for others.
“What did he look like?” Bobby Western asks Jeffrey.
And the psychiatric patient replies, “He doesn’t look like something. What would he look like? There’s not something for him to look like.”
Actually, Jeffrey is wrong. It is not the case that there is not something for Jesus to look like. Rather, Jesus wears such an infinite array of faces, he can easily escape notice. But once you’ve seen him, you’ve seen him forever.
“Be healed,” Jeff commanded, lifting his oily thumb from my clammy forehead.
I was still trying to determine how best to respond to him when I realized he had disappeared from my pre-op room.
“Truly, truly, I say to you,” Jesus says a few chapters after this passage, “whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and still greater works than these will you do.”
Look, I have no clue how such a promise is supposed to work.
But I do know—
At the very least, it must start with us taking Jesus at his word.
