The Pool of Bethesda must have been a sort of ancient Lourdes - a place of pilgrimage for the sick. There have always been such places, places that gain a reputation for healing because the water of some spring that flows in them has curative properties.

In Jesus' day it must have been a sad sort of place. Crammed into its porches (covered-in surrounds so to speak, to an open air swimming pool), was a pathetic collection of sick folk, in conditions of hygiene that probably left much to be desired - all of them dependent on charity to stay alive. Over the whole place there must have hung the sad atmosphere of beggary, and the grey climate of disappointed hope.

THE SITUATION IN WHICH HE WAS PLACED

Here, one man had spent 38 years of his life. Can you get a feeling for how long that is?... 38 years ago was 1962 ... all of your life since then, for those who were born then; for the rest, for longer than your whole life.

Nobody knew that place better than he. His memory it was that supplied newcomers with first-hand accounts of past healings. From his mouth, too, perhaps they would catch the cynicism with which the years had probably infected him. Wouldn't that be so? Unable to move himself, you see - wholly dependent on the goodwill of others to get him into the pool - he must have witnessed the same cruel spectacle time and time again. As the waters began to stir and bubble, a horde of screaming invalids would swarm past him - every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.

What a view of human nature the years must have bred in this man's mind. What had he ever seen in the actions of any man - when it came to the crunch - but raw self-interest. He would have passed through so many phases of experience. The early weeks of eager hope would turn to sick disappointment, and later to futile rage, and then to sheer despair. And after despair, the cold bitterness of cynical disillusionment. Nothing surprised this man any more.

The tedious years dragged by, and driven by the instinct for survival that lay deeper than even his cynicism, he would, quite possibly, have secured a position as a sort of unofficial king of the resident rabble. If you have worked in an institution for incurables you will know the sort of thing I mean. Those who have been there longest have secured little privileges for themselves. There is a certain routine established in the attentions they command. They have acquired a mild, subtle sort of tyranny in the place.

And yet, for all that, after 38 years, the whole meaning of his life could be summed up in that one, sad, tragic statement, "Sir, I have no man ... I have no-one."

It is an unhappy fact that most folk, whilst they are quick to respond with kindness in a crisis, find it hard to sustain their compassion over long periods. With someone whose illness has dragged on for years, our patience wears thin. There was surely not lacking at the Pool of Bethesda some milk of human kindness. It was just the place to draw it out of folk. But for this fellow? ... through all the long and wretched years, there had never been anyone with enough sustained caring to watch and wait with him, and get him in first.

"While I'm going" - heaving himself clumsily along on hands and bottom - "another steps down before me." That had been the story of his life.

I wonder how up-to-date his story is. There are conditions of human illness and unhappiness that just go on and on ... for 20, 30, 40 years, unrelieved by any flicker of hope. Is our society any better at coping with them than was the society of first century Jerusalem? Often enough, they find themselves parked away, like this man, in some institution where they will come to the end of their days, the long succession of helpers having become almost anonymous, so many have there been.

I wonder too whether this man is not like many others, whose trouble is of a less obvious kind - who are crippled, not physically, so much as emotionally or spiritually.

Perhaps some feel as this man did, that the reason they have been held back all their lives is that always when they are ready to go, "another steps down before them." The cause of their frustration, they believe, is not in themselves - but in others, more shrewd and aggressive and selfish than they who have pushed ahead of them and blocked their path. And they have a "poor little me" complex. They see everyone around as being in some sort of conspiracy to put them down, and keep them down.

"Sir, I have no-one; while I'm going, another steps down before me."

I think this man is a picture of many folk.

THE SEARCHING HE FACED

And into his life one day came Jesus of Nazareth - not on any official visit, like the Pope to Lourdes - but quietly, as any casual visitor might, so that soon he will slip away unnoticed, and the cripple himself will not know who he really was.

But in the little time he was with this man, Jesus asked him the one question no-one else had dared to ask him for years.

And here we see again something we have seen in the two previous signs John has recorded, and that is Jesus' habit of saying something, or asking something, that is altogether unexpected, and even offensive ... such that when you recover from the shock, and look at it again, and ask, "Why? ... why did he say that?" ... you see that it takes you to the very heart of our human situation.

Jesus asked this man, "Do you want to be healed?"

That is not a question you ask an incurable invalid. It is a cruel question, (asked by anyone else). What effect on such a man can it have but to oblige him uselessly to contemplate his tragedy? Around all such folk there is woven a web of silence about the prospect of recovery... because we recognise that it would be wrong and cruel to re-awaken hopes that have long since been put away, knowing that no fulfilment of them is possible. Why open old wounds you cannot heal? "Do you wish you were well?" You do not ask things like that of people like this!

But Jesus asked it! I can almost hear a sharp intake of breath from those standing by. It was ... shocking! How utterly tactless of the rabbi to ask him that! Had He no sensitivity at all?

What effect must it have had on this cripple? There would surely be a silence ... and incredulous silence, while he absorbed the shock of it ... a silence long enough for any waspish rejoinder to die on the cripple's lips before it could be said, while he looked ... his eyes filling with tears ... into the face that was so earnestly searching his own.

Something in Jesus' face would tell this man that Jesus understood very well what pain his question had given.

It was a question this man had not faced for years. To face it now was disturbing.

Did it, I wonder, re-awaken the memory of long-forgotten sin? Among the Jews, sickness was reckoned to be a punishment for sin. Never mind for the moment whether the sickness was in fact such a punishment - he would have believed it to be. He had been crippled by paralysis; the question would face him with his sin.

Did it bring his courage into question, too? Had he, through the long years of his illness, sold his courage to buy sympathy? It is such an easy thing to do ... to let others fuss sympathetically around us, encouraging in us the feeling that it is all so unfair, and let them take over for us responsibilities we can and ought to take for ourselves. How far, I wonder, had this man by the pool let that process go on, till it was so much easier now to lie there, waited on hand and foot, till his manhood was as withered as his legs? You have seen it happen? The helpers get trapped by the sufferer's clamorous need. And as time goes on the power of self-help that was there once ebbs away, till sufferer and helper are imprisoned together in a sterile relationship that nourishes nothing in either of them.

Did he wish to be well?
... to stand on his own feet?
... to exchange the unruffled calm of his days by the pool for the struggle of life in the street again?
.. to cease to be special?
... to live without the fussing his condition fetched?
... to be a servant to others, where till now, others were always to be seen only as servants to him?
Did he? Could he carry the bed that had so long carried him? Having made his bed, there were compensations in lying on it. Could he bear to lose them?

What a world of clamorous disturbance must have been stirred up in him by Jesus' question!
... as it will when He asks you.
He will resurrect in you all the questions you have learned to avoid ... your failure ... your weakness ... your inadequacy ... your sin ... your guilt ... all those issues that are crucial to your real progress. "Think not that I came to bring peace on earth," Jesus said once. Not peace-at-any-price. He is a troubler of our peace, this Christ.

THE SALVATION HE EMBRACED

He does it of course, so that He may open up to us again all those wide horizons of life on which we pull down the blinds. He knows He can open them up to us again.

Painful it may be; painful it is ... for He gets at the truth of you, the truth you can hide from other's eyes, and even your own; but not His.

What passed between them, I wonder ... between this man and Jesus as they searched each other's faces? We shall never know. We do not need to know. We need only to know what His searching, loving gaze reveals in ourselves.

Their faces still searching each others', Jesus simply said, "Rise - take up your bed - now walk!"

In that moment, all his lost powers were returned to him, and he was on his feet ... unsteadily no doubt, at first, but confidence would grow. He will have to learn to walk again, like a child ... and live again, like a man, and it will not be easy. To be made whole is not the same thing as to be given life that is a bed of roses. To be made whole means to be given the power to strive again, and to wrestle, and to bear - to be plunged back into life, with all its demands for courage, and patience, and initiative, and faith.

Listen now to the three words - three sharp, incisive words Jesus spoke:

1. "Rise!"
"Do the thing you cannot do - have never done - because I tell you to do it." It has to be His command, of course, not merely our wish. "The words I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." In the very command Christ issues, there is given the power to obey.

2. "Take up your bed!"
In other words, "You're never going to come back here again." No provision is to be made for a relapse.

3. "Walk!"
Do not ask to be carried. Live now in the power of the healing you have received. You will find the unaccustomed exercise of your limbs painful. You will feel uncertain, anxious even... But walk!

And walk he did!

So will you, when He commands ... not into a life of ease; into a life of toil, but toil that will satisfy, because it will be toil for Him.

The first place this fellow's new legs took him was to the temple. You have not missed the significance of that, have you? - to give God thanks, and worship. That is where Jesus came looking for him, and where they found each other again, and where he learned at last who this Jesus really was.

Let it be so for you. Come often to the place of worship and pour out your heart to God ... Christ will meet you here ... again and again. And you will learn, as this man did, Who He is. He will tell you His secret. And you will have a testimony to bear to Him - a testimony no other can give.

And so to the last word Jesus spoke to him.

4. "Sin no longer, lest a worse thing befall you."

I am told that it is wrong and unworthy to use fear when you appeal to men for God. But Jesus did it. There is something to fear. It is worse than if you were to spend your life a cripple.

"If," said Peter (II Peter 2:20), "if men have escaped from the world's contaminations through knowing our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and then become entangled and overpowered again, their last state has become worse for them than their first. It would be better for them never to have known the way of goodness at all, than after knowing it to turn their backs on the sacred commandments given to them."

When the Saviour heals us, He does not simply set us free to go our own way again. He sets us free for God. The only freedom He will give us is the freedom of His Father's house.

Have you noticed how often it is said in the Gospels of someone Jesus has just healed - like Peter's mother-in-law, for example - that at once they ministered to those who were in the house. Jesus did not send them off on a holiday. He gave them work. That is what He will do.

"Do you wish you were well?"

PRAYER

O Lord You come to me this day, as of old You came to this cripple, and search out my heart, as You searched out his.
There is in my life too, Lord, a kind of paralysis. I am bound, as he was bound.
Today I admit it. Only You can free me. Speak to me Lord.
Speak the word of command that shall be strength to me, and new life.
And let me rise, Lord, a free man, and my freedom I shall give to You. I shall serve, not my wants, but Yours. Others shall not be my servants, but I, for Your sake, shall be theirs.
Let it be. Amen.