For the Undeserved and the Ungrateful

'After Jesus healed the son of the official in Capernaum, there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethzatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids-- blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 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?" The sick 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." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk." At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath.'

-John 5: 1-9

You know what really grinds my gears? Facebook ads! Back in my day, there were no ads on Facebook. Well, there were a few, but now it’s crazy, especially how the ads work.. Using their fancy algorithms, Facebook ads are tailored to peddle the product that we absolutely need in any given moment. It’s like someone is listening to all of our conversations—hint: they are!—and everytime we pick up our phone, wow, there’s that thing I really need, that magic product that will make everything about life finally make sense. Thanks, Zuckerberg!  Ugh.

In our reading from the Fourth Gospel this week we hear of a pool in Jerusalem called Bethzatha, which means House of Olives.  This pool was the kind of product you’d see in a Facebook ad: it’s the solution to all of your problems.  These pools were common in the ancient world, and folks would use them all the time to heal all kinds of ills, thinking an angel came down and touched the water, causing it to bubble up. What they didn’t know was that a subterranean stream was beneath the pool, which caused the bubbling. There was no angel. The pool had no healing properties and wasn’t a magical fixer of all problems. 

But the man we meet in this story doesn’t know that. He’s been coming to the pool for 38 years with some unknown illness, trying to get in and desperately cure himself. If only he can have the thing, then his life will make sense and everything will be ok.

Jesus, it turns out, is hanging around near Bethzatha, and in an unconventional move, this sick man does not seek Jesus out, but rather Jesus takes notice of him, lying there on his mat, looking at the pool, and wishing someone would help him in.

Now if you or I had been there maybe we would’ve told him that he's a fool to think that a bubbling pool, or any other magical product, could heal him. But Jesus does not give the man a lecture about the properties of the water, instead he asks the man a question:  do you want to be made well?

It seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yet the man’s response is not really an answer to Jesus’ question, but rather a retelling of his own story. He doesn’t ask Jesus for anything. So, does he really want healing or to just be slid into the magic hot tub? Hard to say. Maybe, because he doesn’t seek Jesus out himself, he’s just content with being in this helpless and hopeless state; after all, it’s all he’s known for nearly four decades.  

This raises an important question for us when we are faced with the dilemma of seeing a person clearly in need who doesn’t actually ask for anything. To help me with this conundrum whenever I am faced with it, I think of the example of my mother. Whenever she would come to visit me in New York City, my mom would always be sure to carry extra cash to give to folks she thought could use it. One time, while we were on the subway, she saw a man who appeared to be schizophrenic, talking to himself. He had a cup in his hand with a few coins in it, but he wasn’t walking down the aisle asking for help. Mama reached in her wallet and pulled out a bill and put it in his cup as we were getting off the train. “I gave him $50, son.” Is what she said, and you might be able to guess what she said next, ‘You think I shoulda given him $100?” God rest your soul, Mama!

My mother and me on World Trade Center/Chambers St. subway platform in 2010.

The man in the story never asks Jesus for anything, neither did the man on the subway ask my mother.  Yet in both cases the need was there and was clearly known, and the grace of God broke through.  It was unprovoked grace, to be sure, but it was grace, nonetheless, and I’d like to think both cases resulted in a miracle happening.

So Jesus heals the man and tells him to pick up his mat. Unfortunately, our lectionary ends the story there (and it never comes up again in our 3-year lectionary cycle). Thus, we lose a significant part of the story; that is, the aftermath. What do you think happened?  Did the man go around telling folks that the pool was bupkus, but that this Jesus fellow was the real deal? Did he dance for joy now that his legs worked and gave praise to God?  Nope.  He just goes about his day. He never says thanks to Jesus, and when the religious authorities chastise the man for carrying his mat on the sabbath he throws Jesus under the bus: “That guy told me to do it," he says. There’s no indication in the text that this man’s faith was restored or that he changed in any way because of his encounter with Jesus.  He seems ungrateful. That’s a bummer, isn’t it?  But it’s a good reminder for us that not only can miracles be performed independently of faith but that miracles don’t always produce faith.    

There’s an old saying that “faith works miracles,” and yes, it’s true; it’s why Jesus often says, “Your faith has made you well.”  Even when everything else is falling apart, our faith can sustain us and work miracles. But this story? That notion utterly breaks down here.  The man doesn’t seem to have a strong faith, yet Jesus comes to him anyway.  The man doesn’t show any gratitude for what Jesus does for him, but Jesus doesn’t seem to care.  Sometimes we feel we shouldn’t help someone because they don’t appear genuine.  And sometimes we regret helping someone who seems to be ungrateful.  But that makes it about us, not about the person in need, and not about what God can do through us.  It is God who works the miracles, and neither someone’s level of faith nor their gratitude are preconditions for God doing so.  Claiming that we should help others based on these preconditions is as foolhardy as thinking that some magic product, even bubbly angel water, will cure all our ills.  (Watch me get a Facebook ad for bubbly angel water later!) God’s gift of grace is always freely bestowed. It isn’t really up to us.

I think this story today is an important lesson for us to remember the next time we find ourselves face-to-face with someone in need who maybe we don’t think deserves it, or someone who might be ungrateful. It’s important for us to remember how grace works because we may very well find ourselves on the other side. I speak from experience. 

I needed a liver transplant because of a random, crazy disease called primary schlerosing colangitis, which manifested in my bile duct and gave me cancer. If left unattended, the PSC and cancer would spread to my liver, shutting it down and eventually killing me. After going through cancer treatment, I got on the transplant list, and in six months, I had a new organ. I carry it with me everyday and am reminded that I did nothing to earn it. I didn’t even really ask for it because the old one, it turns out, was working pretty well at the time. And yet, I got it, though who’s to say I deserved to have it more than the person in active liver failure, or someone who has spent years on the transplant list? What's more, I can’t ever say thank you to the person who gave it to me, nor am I allowed to know anything about them or their loved ones, which kinda means I can’t ever show my gratitude. Still, by the grace of God, I got to be the recipient of a miracle, and I’m gradually learning to accept that grace, that free gift—the grace, not the liver. 

Walking on the day of my release from the hospital following my successful liver transplant in December of 2021.

So, whichever side of the care we find ourselves on, God asks the same thing of us: the Greek word is metanoia. It's the word we translate to "repentence" but it means to "turn around," or a better translation might be "to turn rightside-up." God asks us to metanoia away from our preconceived notions about tailored to us by society, and agents like Facebook, to the possibility that grace really is free and there’s nothing we can or should do to try and earn it; God asks us to metanoia to the faint hope that God can, in fact, still work miracles, even among the undeserved and ungrateful. 

The question Jesus poses to the man isn’t a question about how much he actually wants to be healed, as if Jesus wasn’t going to do anything if the man said no.  “Do you want to be made well?” is just another way of saying, “Do you want metanoia? “Do you want your very outlook about the world, about your fellow human being, about yourself to be turned right side up?” There’re no magic product that’s going to do it, not even an angel hot tub. This kind of transformation only comes when we accept God’s grace, freely bestowed upon us all, and whether we are the recipients of that grace or the one being called in the moment to share it, miracles can and will still occur.