Retirement Party

Text: John 5:1-9

For thirty-eight years the man had the same job. Thirty-eight years of sitting by the poolside. Thirty-eight years of hoping to get into the waters at the right time. Thirty-eight years of unrequited longing to be healed. Thirty-eight years of being pushed aside and passed by. Thirty-eight years is a long time.

Outside of Jerusalem, there was a pool about the size of a football field. There were covered porches around all of it. Down the middle of the pool there was a dividing wall, and there was a porch on that, too. Five altogether. Five porticoes, as it says. Every so often the water in the pool would bubble up or stir around. Some thought it was an angel who stirred the waters. An angel of mercy.

On these porches sat people who were suffering in some way. People who were blind, people who had lost their hands or feet or limbs. People whose bodies didn’t work the same as most. Those people were waiting for the water to move. It seems that the first person into the pool when the water was stirred up would be cured of his or her condition. It was, some might think, superstitious magic. The porches were like the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. People—desperate and resigned—waiting around the pool waiting to be healed.

The man was one of these people. He was not strong; he was without vigor, it says. There were no appointments for the pool. It was first come, first served. The man had had never been able to get to the water in time. Someone else was always faster, pushier, stronger. Or so he says.

Do you want to be made well? Jesus asks him. The man does not answer him directly. The man does not say, “You bet! I’ve been waiting thirty-eight years to be healed.” The man does not say, “Duh! Why do you think I’ve been camped by this pool all that time.” Instead, the man tells a little story of missed opportunities. A story of indignities suffered at the hands of others, of foiled attempts.

Does he want to be made well? The man has a stake in his present situation. His identity as a person is at risk. He is the man who sits by the pool. To be fair, maybe not all those thirty-eight years. It says only that he has been ill that long. But maybe it was thirty-eight. Long enough for Jesus to know that he had been there a long time. Long enough to have a little story about it. Long enough to make it his life. Long enough to become “the man who sits by the pool and never gets in.”

To be made well would have been a blessing. And a problem. To no longer be the person others had known him to be and that he knew himself to be. He would be out of a job. His life would be full of new people, new places, new patterns, new pitfalls as well as new possibilities. Do you want to be made well? In telling his story, the man answers: I don’t know. I’m not sure.

What do you want, Jesus asks the man? This is the world’s second hardest question. The first one being: what are you going to do next (as in: next year, after graduation, after the baby is born, after retirement)?

What do you want? It is a trick question, clean and simple on the surface and complex and messy in the middle. It can be especially scary when the person asking it has the power to make it happen. As Jesus does, as the man detects. Jesus is always asking people this question, and they are often non-plussed and tongue-tied.

“What do you want” hides another question. Which is: Who are you? As with the man by the pool, thinking about what we want forces us to think about who we are. And who we have been, and how it has gone so far. Not only: Would the person I know myself to be want what I want? Am I that kind of person who wants that kind of thing. But also: What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to know myself and how do I want to be known? And finally: do I have any say in the matter?

Jesus offers the man a change. From living one kind of life to living another. In one sense this is an offer for a wider future. Adventurous but also ambiguous. Unfettered but also uncertain. Healing, perhaps, but also scarring. The change from one kind of life to another. It looks forward in hopeful nervousness.

But at the same time, the new future leaves behind the old past. And even when the old past was not so great, it is still grieved. We are abandoning something, or we are being abandoned. We are losing something.

And in between the grief and the hope is a squishy area of confusion. When we are neither one thing or the other. The man picks up his mat and walks away. What now? What does he do. What does he do that very day, that minute? Where will he go? What will he eat? How will he spend his time? He does not know. No one does. The fact that the man seems to have a choice does not make it better or clearer. And for many people, there is no choice. Changes happen to us as often as we make changes.

At the very end of this passage, it says “Now that day was the sabbath.” In the verses that follow in John, people get upset, for it was not legal to heal someone on the sabbath. Jesus did not have to heal this man on this day. And it was not the only time that Jesus did something like that. There seemingly was no rush. After thirty-eight years, tomorrow would be fine. During normal office hours.

But the verse stands also for something else, less political. Sabbath time is a good time for making, or thinking about making, big changes. Sabbath time is down time. The days of sabbath are like movable joints in the track of our otherwise often rigid lives. Sabbath—Sundays—are occasion of transition between one week and the next. In those days, the demands of our identity have a weaker hold on us. And in those days, our ears are more aware of and open to God’s sometimes whispered invitations. Or to God’s insistent demands. Do this.

I said earlier that Jesus offers the man a change. But that is not true. There is no offer here. There is a question, (which we’ve been talking about). And there is a command. Stand up, take your mat, and walk. I suppose the man could refuse. But the deed has already been done. His body has been healed. He is changed.

Change happens to us whether we want it to or not. This is not always welcome. Some changes are harder than others. It would be nice to know the answers to those two hardest questions, but it is not necessary. And it is not really even germane.

What God wants, is. Through today’s story, we understand that God’s desire is that we be healed. That the reason Jesus is always healing people is because that is what Jesus wants. We are not required to know exactly what we want and who we are and what’s next. God does not wait for us to know what we want. I take that to be good news.

Does God know what we need more than we do? Does God know us better than we know ourselves? I cannot speak to that. It does not say.

It does not matter. What we do know from scripture is that God desires us to be made whole. God is the God of life, and invites us, and sometimes pulls us, and sometimes commands us, into the future.