Do you want to be made well?

It seems a straightforward enough question:  "Do you want to be made well?"

This anonymous man had been waiting by that pool at Bethsaida for 38 years, waiting for a healing.  The rumor around the pool was this:  every so often an angel stirred up the water of the usually quiet pool, and the first person into the water received healing.  Unfortunately, this man had no one to help him into the pool and, well, someone always got there ahead of him.  So, 38 years later, he was still waiting.

.....which would, to me, make his answer to Jesus' question all the more obvious.  "Do you want to be made well?"  Of course!  Finally!  Thank God!  Yes, please!  Any of these would do.

Yet that's not what we get.  All of this set me to wondering why he would hesitate to embrace the opportunity, even if it turned out to prove false.  Why wouldn't he want to be healed?

First, he would have to go home.  The pool was a place for healing, not hanging out with some friends.  His place there would disappear.  In fact, the only place that had been home for him for 38 years would no longer be his.  That might cause a person to pause.

Second, we have no idea if he had a home to return to.  If he had truly had no one to help him into the water for 38 years, perhaps he had no family at all waiting for his return.  Perhaps they had forgotten him long ago, wrote him off as a burden.

Furthermore, would they even recognize him?  Up until this moment his identity was as the paralyzed man who lived next to the pool at Bethsaida.  If he picks up his mat and goes home, well, he could easily just blend into the crowd, no one special, identity gone.  And now that begging would no longer be an option for him, he would have to get a job.  Like being a farm hand.  Labor.  Hard labor.  After 38 years of nothing.

Perhaps it isn't so difficult to imagine his hesitancy.

Our Maundy Thursday confession includes this same idea when we say  "I ask for healing, Lord, but in the end, I prefer my sin to your healing."  Or, to state it another way, 'rather the often uncomfortable life I have to the unknown comforts of a new and unfamiliar life.'...like the life we are called in to in baptism, where the water is disturbed by the Holy Spirit, wholeness is ours as a gift from God, and our lives are forever disturbed.

Healing would disturb this man's life.  All the years he waited and watched for the water of the pool to be disturbed so he could chase after healing. Now that healing was simply offered to  him perhaps he had time to consider how much it would disturb his life.

I wonder if we are stuck in an old, paralyzed life, afraid to truly grab hold of a life of wholeness offered by God in Jesus.