"Pick Up Your Mat and Walk!" John 5:1-15

This week, a collector paid $120,000 for the ambulance that took the body of assassinated President Kennedy to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for his autopsy. This miracle of Jesus took place at the pool of Bethesda, from which the Naval Hospital took its name. The man had been disabled for 38 years. We don't how he became disabled. The words of Jesus to the man do raise some questions, "See you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you." Had sinful behavior caused his affliction? Our sinful behavior does make a difference in our physical, emotional or mental health.

Jesus asks the man an important question, that at first seems absurd.

"Do you want to get well?"

I have discovered that sometimes we don't want to get well, that we have built our lives around being sick, sometimes getting a lot of energy and attention from being the victim. We may even be unwittingly contributing to our sickness or even making it worse. The man does want to be healed, but he thinks the power is in the water. But he is helpless to get himself into the pool when the waters are stirred. So Jesus heals him, without getting him in the water. The power is not in the water, it is in Jesus.

But notice the reaction of the religious leaders. They have an investment in the man staying afflicted. One of the powerful motivations of the Pharisees was the belief that people's afflictions were due to human sin and God's rejection of them. I laughingly ask people, "Have you been behaving this week?" They usually say, "No, you know me." I then say, "Good, then I still have a job." But that would be making the same move as the Pharisees, having the man's disability or sinfulness as job security. For Jesus to heal the man as an act of God turns their religious world upside down. That is particularly the case if the man's affliction was because of his own sinful behavior.

Jesus heals the man on the Sabbath and the religious leaders hassle him about carrying his mat on the Sabbath (a violation of the amount of weight a person was allowed to carry). They are so legalistic about religious detail that they are unable to rejoice in the work of God in this man's life. But there is another problem beneath their legalism. If they admit the man has been healed by the miraculous, then they must deal with their inability to do the same.

The truth is that all of life and ministry opens up when God moves among us. But what Christ does always breaks down the barriers, even the religious boxes we tend to create. There was a professor once who said, "Religion has been so broad and longstanding in its effect that it took the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ to end it." How might that be true or not?