Day Twelve - Jesus Heals a Lame Man - John 5:1-15

For many years, some scholars refused to believe this story because they claimed that the place, Bethesda, was in invention of John. He made it up they said, to represent the five books of Moses that Jesus came to fulfill. But in 1956, a team of archaeologists unearthed a rectangular pool with a portico on each side and a fifth one dividing the pool into two separate compartments. It's very close by an old crusader church, St. Anne's, just inside the walls of Jerusalem near Stephens gate. I've stood there many times looking down some thirty feet or so into the spring-fed, brackish water that still fills the pool. You have to use your imagination to see what Jesus saw - a great number of disabled people lying there - the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.

It doesn't take much imagination to see people with any kind of disability - physical or otherwise - continue to live a life limited through belief in myths, in falsehood. The people lying there believed angels stirred the waters, and that the first one in was healed - no award for second place. It is amazing what people today will accept as truth.

It doesn't take much imagination to see people bound up in misfortune, captive to excuses and self-pity. Most of us don't have to look further than the mirror.

Jesus question is profound. "Do you want to get well?"

The answer is not always as obvious as we might think. We become so accustomed, so comfortable with our patterns of brokeness that we have adapted to and call our life. We prefer our excuses, self-pity to the challenge of stepping up to the responsibility for change, working through our limitations.

Isn't that why seeing someone who has overcome true physical disabilities rise above their limitations is such an inspiring experience - like the Special Olympics? Hats off to organizations who work with wounded vets and those with physical and mental handicaps to help them realize and live into their abilities!

When you start feeling sorry for yourself, look around! Listen to Jesus call, "Pick up your mat and walk." It is clear that the issues for this man whom Jesus confronted were deeper than his observable physical limitations. There is a relationship between sin as a power to be confronted in our lives, and those things that keep us immobilized.

Lent is a time for looking deeply within ourselves. What are the deeper issues that the living God wants to address in our lives? What is really keeping us in bondage, from living the life that we were created to find? Can you imagine Jesus speaking to you?