There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate
a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes.
In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled.
One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lying there
and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him,
“Do you want to be well?” –John 5:1-16
* * *
“Do you want to be well?”
Funny guy, this Jesus and His questions. It shouldn’t take Omniscience to figure that someone who has been ill for 38 years, waiting by a healing pool, wants to be well!
But perhaps He knows that something happens when we bring our desires (or anything else) into dialog with Jesus.
Years ago, I sent my friend an article I had read. “You have to read this!” I exclaimed, “It is the most beautiful thing I have ever read!” A little while later, I asked if she had read the article yet. “No,” she admitted, “because I already know what it is going to say.”
I was appalled. But in fairness, I do the same thing to God on a regular basis. Rather than bringing something to prayer, I think about it and come to my conclusions about what God would probably think of it.
But if we’ve read anything about Jesus, we know that He is a God of Surprises. The words most used about His teachings and actions are “astonished” and “amazed” and “nobody else speaks as He does.” He says, “I make all things new.” There’s no divine title, “Lord of the Everlasting Same-Old Same-Old.”
Over and over in Scripture, we see seemingly simple conversations completely transform people. When Jesus tells the “Woman at the Well” about her five husbands and current non-husband lover, the woman declares Him a prophet and runs to tell the town “I met a man who told me everything I ever did.”
Let’s be real. Human nature being what it is, surely there were other people in town who could tell her exactly what her sins were! But there is something different about the way Jesus speaks to us of even our sins.
I spent a lot of time writing about today’s Gospel and had a few thousand words on paper, different themes and different stories, some funny, some poignant. I was torn over which direction to go, which stories to include, and finally in frustration I threw up my hands and prayed, “Lord, what do YOU want me to say?”
“That’s a better question, isn’t it?” He said gently.
I have a few decades of Catholic practice and a Master’s Degree in Theology under my belt. But my life only changed “for real” in a radical way when I committed to a daily prayer time, a set (and non-negotiable) time for God to show up in my life. A time for not just talking about God, but for talking to Him. A time for listening to what He had to say back. A time for Him to reveal what is in His heart, and also what is really in mine. I am consistently surprised by both.
The Christian life is a romance, not a hostage situation. God waits for your consent, and He invites consent by awakening your desires. “Do you really want to be well?”
My challenge to you today is to carve out some time to let God ask you this question directly. It may be that He has more to say to you than I ever could. 😉
From Saint John Paul the Great:
“Do Not Be Afraid…”
“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.
It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
Frassati Reflections 