“The Business of Making New and Making Well”

May 25, 2025

John 5:1–9

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

2 Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five porticoes. 3 In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people.5 One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” 7 The ill man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way someone else steps down ahead of me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. ***

Think of people you know who are skilled at posing in-your-face type of questions. Such questions are often

direct, confrontational, even aggressive and designed to challenge someone or make a point.

In-your-face questions are usually presented with a strong and confident tone. “Did you really mean to say that?” “Now what are you complaining about?” “Why are you always late?” Usually, these questions leave no room for ambiguity.

The best way to responds to such questioners is to be direct and polite. “Thank you for your concern, but I prefer not to discuss that right now.”

Jesus was skilled at asking in-your-face questions. “Do you love me?” “Why are you so afraid?” “Are you also going to leave?” “How long shall I put up with you?” “Do you still not understand?”

In this section of John 5, there is an in-your-face type of question spoken by Jesus who is in Jerusalem, near a pool by the Sheep’s Gate. In this area, the chronically sick and disabled of the city lie waiting. Rumor, legend, or tradition has it that an angel visits the pool at random times, stirring up the water, and giving it healing properties. The first person to step into the pool after the angel disturbs it, receives healing.

Jesus visits this outdoor nursing home, finds a man lying by the pool who has been sick for thirty-eight years, and approaches him with a question. No introductions. No small talk. No sermon. Just a question: “Do you want to be made well?”

Does this seem to you to be abrupt, even offensive? Imagine being unwell for nearly 40 years when a stranger comes along and asks if you really wanted to get better? It implies that the ongoing sickness was at least partially your fault. Or implying that you were benefiting from remaining sick, that you had stakes in it, that your identity was so wrapped up in your infirmity you could not imagine your life without your illness.

How would you feel? How would you respond? Would you hear pure insult in the question? Or would you hear a faint echo of the truth? The kind of truth that hurts.

All four Gospels attest to Jesus’ deep compassion for the sick and disabled people. So I do not believe that Jesus is blaming the victim in this story. Not once in Scripture does he respond to pain or illness with contempt, mockery, or condescension. Not once does he tell a sick person that her illness is her own fault. In fact, he corrects that cultural misunderstanding about disease and disability at every opportunity.

All of that to say: I trust Jesus’s heart and his motives enough to take his question in this Gospel story at face value. When he looks at the man who has been languishing by the pool for thirty-eight years, he sees more than sickness. He sees defeat. He sees resignation. He sees psychological and spiritual stagnation. He sees a man whose hope has dwindled. A man whose imagination has atrophied to such a point that he cannot even articulate what he wants for his body, his soul, or his future.

How do I know this? Well, notice that he does not answer Jesus’ question. “Do you want to be made well?” Jesus asks, and the man does not say “yes.” Isn’t that odd? After thirty-eight years of intense suffering, he does not say yes! Instead, he gets defensive. He explains the mechanics of scarcity in his nursing home: “I have no one to put me into the pool.” He makes a compelling case for the cutthroat unfairness of the world: “While I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” He invites pity, he hems and haws, he dodges. In short, he avoids answering the question Jesus actually asks, which is not a question about the man’s circumstances at all, but a question about his heart, his identity, and his desires: “What do you want?”

Has Jesus ever asked you this question? Do you want to be made well from all that stymies, hobbles, paralyzes, and diminishes you? Do you want to stand up? Do you want to walk? Do you want to move?

How have you answered such questions in the past? How would you answer them today?

For me, the question stings because the very idea that God cares about what I want — that he is curious about my desires, that he wants me to recognize and articulate them — blows me away.

But if I am willing to sit with the uncomfortable truths at the heart of this week’s Gospel story, maybe I can come to know that Jesus’s desires for me are not murky and two-sided like mine are. He wants me to be made well. Period. He wants me to walk again. To thrive again. To live again. He wants to deliver me from the paralysis of my past, my baggage, my fear, my laziness. He wants me to want, and to want fiercely. He wants me to say, “Yes.” Do you want to be made well? Yes!

If there is anything more remarkable in this Gospel story than Jesus’s question, it is what happens after he asks it. “Stand up, take your mat and walk,” Jesus tells the man. And the man does exactly that. “At once,” John tells us, “the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.”

Notice that the man never asks for healing. There is no indication in the story that he even knows who Jesus is. Notice that Jesus makes no reference to belief, as he often does when he performs a healing miracle. He does not tell the man, “Your faith has made you well,” because that would be a lie. Notice that Jesus does not dwell on the man’s past; he does not dredge up the loss and waste of the thirty-eight years the man cannot get back. And notice that he does not heal the man on the man’s terms — by helping him into the pool when the angel stirs the water. Jesus simply tells the man to get up and walk. And he does.

What I take away from this story is that Jesus is always and everywhere in the business of making new and making well. It is not one’s faith that heals. It is not divine favor delivered in response to earnest prayer or a stellar circle of prayer warriors.

The good news is Jesus’ desire to heal is intrinsic to his character — it does not depend on me or you. In other words, “Do you want to be made well?” is a question he will never stop asking, because his heart’s desire is for our wholeness, our freedom, and our thriving, and he understands that there is painful, surgical power in the question itself. Confronting the zinger question of what we want — what we really want — is how the work of healing begins.

Images: Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; Ancient Answers.