"Rise, take up your bed and walk!"

On the Forth Sunday of Pascha we leave behind the Tomb and the Gospels about our Lord and his post Resurrection appearances. Now we move to the theme of healing through water. The Church is telling us what it means to be a baptized Christian. She desires us to understand what is the result of a life that has encountered the risen Jesus in baptism and now therefore must encounter the world daily. The Church wants us to see that though our actions in this world daily, we bring the victory of the Resurrection to a fallen world. We bring God’s love, mercy, and healing to people who need it most, the outcast and rejected of society. Those who have no hope, who have never known true love and mercy. 

This is just the scene that St. John gives us in today’s Gospel (John 5:1-15). Jesus walking in the shadow of the Temple looks out and sees this, “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time.”(5:1-6) He ultimately sees humanity itself. Sick and lying in need of a savior. A humanity that is unable to worship God and be in communion with each other. Here at the foot of the very Temple where worship of the Living God was supposed to happen, the multitudes just lie and wait. When God created Man he created us to do three principle functions in his new creation; to worship him as God, be in relationship with our fellow man, and to look after his new world. Well, as we see in this Gospel and so many others, when sin and death enter the picture, people are unable to live as God has created us to live. All the relationships break down and we cannot serve the living and true God. 

The question that Jesus asks the man reveals the fullness of the problem that he finds in this man and humanity. “Do you want to be made well?” (5:6) He is asking him much more than do you no longer want to not be sick. Jesus is asking him, “do you desire to be complete?”. Do you want to be the man that God made you to be? Jesus knows that it is only through proper worship and communion with one another, that this man will be made complete. Now he certainly cannot do this lying on his sick bed, no his must, as Jesus tells him “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” (5:8) Here we are reminded of Israel herself, in bondage and slavery in Egypt unable to serve and worship God. The Lord himself goes down to Egypt and takes her by the hand to leads her into the Promised Land. As God himself says in the Book of Exodus, “Thus says the LORD, Israel is my first-born son, and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me” (4:22-23) The man like Israel must be freed from the power of Sin and its result death. But then what does the Paralytic do in the middle of this scene? He tries to put a road block between himself and the powerful healing that Jesus is about to undertake. As so many of us do daily, he complains or whines to Jesus, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.” (5:7) Here God is about to act in the man’s life to make him whole and complete but as so often happens in life, he comes up with a reason to say no to God. Like us saying, “No Lord I don’t have time for you today, I will pray some other time, you really do not want me to help that person.” 

Here is the heart of our encounter with Jesus. The initial encounter that many of us made in baptism or the first time we heard or where moved by the power of the Spirit through the Gospel message. It’s not about complaining and winning, it’s about getting up from out sick mat and walking with Jesus. Let us not lie there lifeless and unable to move but get up and serve God as he so desires us to do. When we do worship God fully, love one another through mercy and love, and look after God’s good creation. Then we become fully complete partners and coworker with God, his alive sons and daughters. By doing so we truly reflect God’s image into the world. St. John goes on to tell us what Jesus says to finish out today’s Gospel scene. When pressed by the authorities why he has healed on the Sabbath, Jesus says, “For as the Father raises the dead and gives life to them, even so the Son gives life to whom He will.” (5:21)

Let us not return to the sin and death that ruled our lives before baptism but let is live the LIFE that God himself has given us. Only Jesus has the power to move the stones and obstructions that lie in our path. He calls us daily to leave behind that sick bed and take his mercy and love into the world. Be challenged everyday by Jesus and his message to “Rise, take up your bed and walk!”