May 25, 2025

What Do You Want?

At a Kirkridge conference a number of years ago, I heard the late, great preacher and teacher, Fred Craddock, relate an experience he had once on an airplane (back in the days when they served meals to everyone on the flight). During boarding a man sat down next to Fred – sixty-ish, very well dressed, and rather imperious in manner – and immediately rang for the flight attendant. When she came the man told her his name and said, “I want to remind you that I am to have a special meal for lunch. When I made my reservation I gave specific instructions about that.” The attendant politely assured him his special meal had indeed been ordered and that, in fact, his would be the first tray served just as soon as they got underway. He seemed content with that, and before long she brought his healthful-looking special meal, a piece of baked chicken, a pear and cottage cheese salad, and whole wheat roll on the side, just as he had ordered. The man was half finished eating by the time the attendant brought a tray to Fred which had on it a piece of baked chicken, pear and cottage cheese salad, and a whole wheat roll on the side. The man looked at Fred’s lunch and with obvious annoyance said, “Well, you seem to have gotten the special meal that I ordered.” Whereupon Fred, looking all around, observed to the man that his meal looked to him like all the other meals that were being served. Flustered and upset, the man began pushing the call button over and over until the attendant appeared. He berated her loudly, “I told you that I had ordered a special meal and you assured me that the order had been received.” She answered, “Yes, sir, I did. You ordered baked chicken, cottage cheese and pear salad, and a whole wheat roll. Isn’t that what you wanted, sir?” To answer that question honestly, of course, the man would have had to understand the difference between the menu he said he wanted, and the special attention and position of privilege he really wanted.
And therein lies my thesis for this morning: Do you really know what you want? That’s the essence of Jesus’ question to a man in our scripture reading for today. Jesus’ dealings with the man by the pool at Bethzatha were so extraordinary that the incident is probably more deserving of a book than a sermon. I’ll try not to preach a book this morning though.
The scene for this drama is set by the description of a sick man (we don’t know the nature of his illness) lying by the pool. This pool is curious enough. There’s something magic and mystical about it. The name of the pool is given by some textual sources as Bethesda, by others as Bethsaida, and yet others as Bethzatha. Archeology has yet to yield any conclusive evidence for it’s location, and the legend of it’s special healing power is murky; one explanitory verse that shows up in some texts is, as most authorities agree, a later addition (in that verse, the pool is said to have been regularly visited by an angel who troubled the water – whoever first stepped into the pool when the waters were troubled was healed of whatever disease he had.)
So, get your mind around this scene if you can. Here is a man, in some undisclosed way terribly ill, who has been essentially living beside this pool, living with this illness, for thirty-eight years. He has waited in the sun and slapped mosquitoes. He has learned the faces and the daily routines and the personality quirks of all his companions. He has begged for bread and learned the complex rules of the small society around the pool, its pecking order and its rituals of interaction. This place has, in many respects become his life. It is a prison for the diseased, but like the long-term prisoner who knows no other life, here he remains, clinging to the legend of the pool, clinging to the hope of a magical cure, clinging perhaps to far more than that.
Any of us who have lived long years with some disease of the heart, or some secret ugliness in our lives or our families, or some character flaw, or persistent failing, knows the truth. We know that such things can become our most familiar companions. We know that, in time, like it or not, our lives are shaped by such things, and we cease to have any concept of who we would be without them. We know the astounding and confounding truth: that, in time, we find ourselves not only clinging to the hope for healing, but clinging to the disease itself. Years spent in therapy can often times seem like little more than the sad but comfortable ritual of lying next to the miracle pool, struggling to get in the water, and never quite making it.
But our condition is far from hopeless. In fact, there may even be something in our comfortable and cherished rituals of infirmity that bears the very hope of our healing.
This man by the pool at Bethzatha was caught in a familiar cycle of helplessness, dependency and disease. Jesus knew it. The scriptural account says, “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?’” That is the most astonishing question perhaps in all the gospels. Between the lines of that question lie countless volumes about human consciousness and psychology. Jesus knew the man was ill. He perceived that he had been there by the miracle pool for a long time, suffering with this chronic disease. He looked into his eyes and knew him. He somehow discerned this man’s attachment to his suffering, and to his little world of struggle by the pool. His question is the last one we expect, but the one most revealing.
Notably, he does not say, “How can I help you? What can I do for you? Could I give you a hand, helping you into the pool?” He does not check his vital signs, and ask if he has had headaches or nausea. He does not ask if he’s been to a doctor, or if maybe he could give him a ride to the hospital or pay his cab fare. He fixes his gaze upon him and speaks directly to the man’s soul, and to ours: “Do you want to be made well?”
Do you want to be made well, or do want to continue clinging to your dysfunction? Do you want to be made well, or do want to stay here with your familiar circle of friends and enemies and competitors. He gazes upon the man’s life, and upon our own, with the intensity of one who has the power to transform, and asks, “What do you really want?”
Do we know what we want? Do we want to be healed? Do we want to be made whole? Do we want to grow? Or is it more comfortable to live within the safety of our limitations?
The man’s response is very familiar. It is often our answer to the challenging voice of eternal insight. He can’t muster the courage to answer the question. Instead, he stammers and whines about extenuating circumstances. “It’s not my fault. I’ve tried. Nobody will help me. Somebody always manages to jump in ahead of me. Life’s out to get me. I can’t afford it. My car broke down. The sun got in my eyes.”
That’s when the miracle happens. By whatever powers Jesus possessed, he could see through the excuses and the avoidance, and he knew this man was ready. He knew that he had been going around in the same circles long enough to be ripe for a breakthrough. And so he broke through. He broke through the myth of the pool; he broke through the pattern of dependency; he broke through the clinging to the disease, and all the rest. He held the man in his gaze and said, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”
And he was right. The man was ready. He offered no more excuses. He didn’t respond with, “Oh, I can’t do that. I’m sick. I haven’t walked in so long, I’ve forgotten how. If I tried to walk, I’d fall down and hurt myself even more. Everyone would laugh at me for believing I could, and falling on my face.” No, he simply rose to his feet, then and there. And that was that.
He didn’t really know what he wanted. At some level he wanted to be healed. But at another level, he wanted to cling to his excuses for not being healed, and to his disease. He was so like us. It is, after all, such a comfortable thing to live with our diseases of spirit, of mind, and of relationship. It’s comfortable because it’s familiar. We wouldn’t know who we were without the old friends of our inadequacies and the reassuring patterns of our dysfunctional relationships. At some level, we would like to be free of those chains, but life outside the prison of our patterned existence is all too often more frightening than we can bear.
But here’s where the hope lies. There is something within us that keeps us searching for the healing moment. There is something divine in the core of our being that keeps us coming to the pool, even for thirty-eight years, at some level knowing that one day the time will be right, the gaze from our companion will be steady, the voice will be true, and the chains will be broken.
The very circles of our dysfunctional patterns and diseases are themselves a form of searching, of groping in the darkness for the hand of Christ. That’s true for us as individuals. I believe it’s also true for our culture. We may keep clinging to our wasteful patterns, polluting the earth and falling into mindless conflicts, but each time around that marry-go-round, humanity comes a little closer to the moment of casting off our carelessness and animosity to be healed and to become healers.
David Perata, in his book, The Orchards of Perseverance, relates the story of the monk, brother Adam, who complained to his superior that he didn’t seem to be making any progress. He would start in the morning with good intentions, but by night time he would wind up exactly where he was at the beginning of the day. His superior, Dom Frederick Dunne answered, “Well, it might seem that way to you. But actually it isn’t. No, you start out and make the silly little circles and you come back to where you were. But there’s a difference. You’re a little bit higher than you were previously. What you’re doing is spiraling, and you’re goin’ a little bit higher and a little bit higher.”
It may seem that we remain forever conflicted, unable to finally decide or know just what it is we truly want in life, but we are, in working out our patterns and circles, growing ever closer, step by step to finally choosing to be healed. A psychologist friend, the late Merle Jordan, once said he believes people tend to marry the one they can continue to rehearse and relive the key themes and dysfunctions of their lives with, only with a twist. This person offers the hope of finally breaking the old patterns and leading us into a new world.
At the source of it all, however, it is not simply our mate or our own determination that bring us to the point of healing. It is a powerful force at the heart of being, the divine response to the hand stretched out in the darkness, the Spirit of Life urging and calling us on. It is the voice of One whose words thunder down through the generations and encounter us after years of going around in the same old circles, ambushing us at just the right moment, breaking through our excuses and complaints, asking us, “Do you want to be healed?”
If you are ready, “Stand up, and walk.”