The Healing Place

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus finds a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years lying beside a pool. We all know what happens next. Jesus heals the man, who picks up his mat and strides away.


We should not, however, read past an important detail in the story. When Jesus asks the man whether he wants to be made well, he replies by complaining about how no one ever helps him get into the water and about how others cut in front of him when he tries to move there himself. The man has settled on a notion of what it would mean to experience healing: get into the pool. And, of course, Jesus has something else in mind entirely.


We tend to become fixed in our bad habits, our weaknesses, our failures of forgiveness and perpetuities of prejudice. But this story sounds a different cautionary note. It reminds us that we can also become fixed in our vision of what it would mean to be healed, to be made well, to be made whole. And it warns us not to miss the still small voice of a better way in our eagerness to get to the places in which we have firmly settled the confidence of the unknowing.