In John 5,1-3, 5-16, we encounter Jesus in Jerusalem for a festival. He is at the pool near the Sheep Gate. Around the pool are large numbers of people who are blind, lame, and paralyzed. These are the ailments that we Christians often suffer from: blindness, when we cannot see where Jesus is leading us or where we should go in life; lameness and paralysis, when we can see but have difficulty walking or even moving along Christ’s Way. During this Lenten season, do we hear Jesus asking us the question He puts to the man: “Do you want to be well again? Do you want to be made whole again?”
More specifically, according to the Gospel, for 38 years the man has been trying to get into the water when it is “disturbed,” but someone else always got in before him. It seems that a spring in the pool bubbled up from time to time and it was believed that it had curative qualities. Note that Jesus wastes no time. “Rise up! Pick up your sleeping-mat and walk.” The man is immediately cured and walks away. We have here, in the words of Jesus, another intimation of Resurrection to new life – of which Jesus is the Source: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”
The Gospel also tells us that, at this point, the legalists step in. On his way, the man is challenged for carrying his sleeping mat on a sabbath day. How petty one can get! Here is a man who has been a cripple for 38 years and is now taken to task for carrying his sleeping mat on a sabbath. The wonder is that he can do it at all!
Have we ever been preoccupied with whether we have fasted long enough before receiving Communion, or whether the priest is “playing loose” with the words of the Mass, or if all the rules are being followed? It is so easy to lose our sense of proportion, isn’t it? Do we pay more attention to whether the rules are being followed (to the letter) than whether we are worshiping in spirit and truth, genuinely coming together in Christ Jesus? Later in the Gospel, Jesus and the man meet in the Temple. The man is told to complete his experience of healing by abandoning a life of sin, bringing body and spirit into full harmony and wholeness. This is not to say that Jesus is implying that the man had been a cripple because of his sin. Jesus did not teach that. But what He is saying is that physical wholeness needs to be matched by spiritual wholeness, the wholeness of the complete person. Are our Lenten resolutions helping us draw closer to spiritual wholeness? Along with being well prepared for Easter, isn’t that the whole point of this season? Do we want to be made whole again?
