BECOMING

BECOMING:

According to John’s gospel the man had been an invalid for 38 years. He found himself at Bethesda. It was a pool whereby, according to local legend, one could be cured / healed if they were lucky enough to be the first one in when the supposedly magical waters stirred.

There was no supernatural, or even natural, healing in those waters. They stirred because the pool was a hot spring, i.e. A pool of hot water that has seeped through an opening in Earth's surface.

People will put their hope in just about anything when they are desperate.

Who knows how long this man had been making the trek to Bethesda. Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? Then one day Jesus comes on the scene and everything changes.

The man had become an invisible fixture on the landscape of the city. Droves of blind, lame, and paralyzed flocked to Bethesda with high hopes and possibly the urgency of a last resort.

We read “Jesus saw him,” which was followed up with a painfully awkward question, “Do you want to become whole?” Jesus didn’t ask him if he wanted to become something different, something better, something new-and-improved, but rather, “Do you want to become whole?”

Jesus’ question is immediately (dis)missed by the man who then retorts, “Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred…”

We do the exact same thing day-in and day-out. Jesus comes to our Bethesda’s with a divine offer of transformation, reconciliation, perfect communion, in fact to become whole.

Instead, like the chronically blind invalid, we can only see our immediate circumstances thus missing the eternal weight of His incarnation and glorious offer of becoming whole exclusively in Him.

Like the blind, invalid, and paralyzed we look straight past God to our fictitious, mythical, magical healing pools and reply, “Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.”

Then we read that Jesus told the man “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” Scripture then tells us, “At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.”

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Maybe the thought lingering in your mind today is something like this, “Well, if Jesus would cure me and fix my problems (physical, financial, emotional) then I’d know for sure He was God; otherwise Christianity is just as fictional and useless as the ‘magical’ pool of Bethesda.”

The underlying problem is that while Jesus can, and occasionally does, fix our immediate circumstances - it does nothing to change our depraved and rebellious hearts of stone. That’s John’s point in this gospel story.

The King of Glory wasn’t asking the man if he simply wanted his decaying flesh to be temporarily patched. Jesus didn’t come for such a trivial and insignificant goal. Instead, God Almighty, was asking the man if he wanted  to be reconciled with God, to truly live eternally in the presence of and fellowship with God, i.e. to become whole as God created and intended us to be.

It turned out that the man’s physical disability epically paled in stark contrast with his spiritual obliviousness… i could just see this guy anxiously waving his arms for Jesus to move and trying to look past Him saying, “Yeah yeah buddy whatever. Help me in the pool or get out of my face!”

What the man wanted was to get into the “magical” pool. Graciously, Jesus did the man one better. Rather than dropping an invalid into a deep pool of water (I’m sure that would have turned out so great), Jesus actually restored / resolved what the man determined was his greatest desire.

Then a few verses later we hear Jesus say to this man who had been an invalid for 38 years, “Sin no more that worse does not become of you.” Jesus was speaking to the deeper eternal issue that remained untouched in this man - and in us; i.e. that of becoming.

Jesus knew that a fresh set of circumstances would only facilitate, and and actually expedite, this man’s depravity.

Jesus asks if we want to become whole. It’s something that has very little to do with our physical, temporal, financial, or emotional circumstances - and everything to do with our relationship with Him through faith.

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Jesus stands before all of us at our own healing pools of Bethesda and asks, “Do you want to become whole?” He’s not asking you about our financial situation, our paralysis, or our relatively insignificant temporal circumstances. He’s asking us about something of eternal significance - our relationship with Him.

Will you continue looking past our Savior in hopes of a temporary patch job when He’s offering you riches of His glorious inheritance in asking, “Do you want to become whole?”

It was important enough for Jesus to come here and die upon the Cross to make that happen.

So do you want new circumstances or “do you want to become whole?”

Blessings,

-Kevin M. Kelley

aMostUnlikelyDisciple.com