Sunday 22nd May, Easter 6; "Do you want to be made well?"
“Do you want to be made well?”
Addressed to the man lying by the pool who had been sick for 38 years. But perhaps the question can be addressed to us too? “Do you want to be made well?” More on that later.
There’s no polite talk in this story. Hi, how are you doing today, what’s your name’. Jesus is straight in with this question. “Do you want to be made well?”
Is Jesus implying that this sick man has become so used to being ill, his identity so wrapped up in his condition, benefits from others giving alms, that he couldn’t imagine life without illness. So Jesus asks the question: do you really want to be made whole.
Jesus sees more than sickness. He sees defeat and resignation. He sees psychological and spiritual stagnation. He sees a man whose hope has dwindled. A man whose imagination has atrophied to such a point that he can’t even articulate what he wants for his body, his soul, or his future.
So, how does the man respond?
He doesn’t reply with a simple yes. In fact, he becomes rather defensive. The scarcity in his nursing home, the unfairness of the world. He invites pity, he hems and haws, he dodges. But he doesn’t answer Jesus’ question.
Has Jesus ever asked you this question? Do you want to be made well from all that paralyses and diminishes you? Do you want to stand up? Do you want to walk? Do you want to move?
What’s challenging is that we know exactly what it’s like to say we want freedom, to say we want healing — and not quite mean it. We know what it’s like to cling to brokenness because it’s familiar. We know what it’s like to benefit from the very things that cause us harm.
Two weekends ago, a group of us from the UB did the Enneagram workshop, brilliantly led by Revd Gordon Melvin. It involved identifying our ‘type’ out of a possible nine types, or lenses through which we see the world. It’s a wonderful tool to help you to understand yourself. But it’s more just a personality type quiz we might do on Facebook and laugh with our friends about it. It also reveals the nine broken stories. These are stories that each type adopts and inhabits in childhood to make sense of the world. And these are destructive stories we continue to tell ourselves in adulthood about who we are and how the world operates.
The Enneagram offers an opportunity of self-discovery, of healing and transformation. It allows us to potentially live more fully and creatively. I say potentially, because, if I’ve understood it correctly, the ego doesn’t want you to know how it dominates your life. We become entrenched in patterns of behaviour and outlook. We become so identified with our type, that we can’t see any other way. The Enneagram helps us see how we are trapped in our false stories and free to rewrite them.
However, it means we have to be willing to sit with some uncomfortable truths about ourselves. This is at the heart of the Gospel story – we learn that God wants us to be made well. He wants us to walk again. To thrive again. To live again. He wants to deliver us from the paralysis of our past, our baggage, our fear, our laziness. He wants us to say, “Yes.” Do you want to be made well? Yes.
Jesus totally loves and accepts us. With the paralysed man, he’s not worried about the loss of thirty-eight years. He also doesn’t heal the paralysed man on his terms — by helping him into the pool when the angel stirs the water. Jesus simply tells the man to get up and walk. And he does.
What we might learn from this story is that Jesus is always and everywhere in the business of making new and making well. His desire to heal is intrinsic to his character — it doesn’t depend on me. To return to that question: “Do you want to be made well?” It’s a question Jesus will never stop asking, because his heart’s desire is for our wholeness, our freedom, and our thriving. And he understands that there is challenging, even painful, power in the question itself. Confronting the big question of what we want — what we really want — is how the work of healing begins.
Reference:
The Enneagram in Personal Development, Gert Jurg
Debie Thomas, The Question that Hurts
Revd Dr James Heard
Vicar, United Benefice of Holland Park