Do you want to be healed?

 Sermon for Easter VI, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Text: John 5:1-9

Clay and Christopher were a gay couple that my wife and I knew in Bloomington, IN in the mid- to late-1980s. Christopher was from West Virginia, and a high church Episcopalian. Clay was Eastern Orthodox, and had grown up here in Louisville. They were both graduate students at IU, and had been together for about 10 years when we knew them. They were a wonder to me, being a newly-wed. About thirty years later, Kim looked them up, and was shocked to see that they had moved to Pennsylvania, and that Clay had died first in 2010, then Christopher a few years later. We strongly suspected that they had died of AIDS, and having known them in the later 20th century, we knew that there were people who blamed them for their own deaths, and said that an HIV infection was a moral sentence from God. If I had a wish for them, it would be that they were still alive, and that their dignity had been restored, much like the sick man’s health and dignity had been restored by Jesus in our reading.

In this story in the Gospel of John, things do not quite add up. When Jesus asked the sick man near the pool if he wanted to be healed, he didn’t say yes. Instead, he started explaining why he hadn’t been healed, making an excuse for his long-term illness. He had been sick for thirty-eight years, and by the pool for a long time (we don't know how long, but a long time, nonetheless), so you would think that he would have had an opportunity to be healed when water in the pool rolled over. We’re left wondering why this has gone on for so long, and why he didn’t immediately say that yes, he wanted to be healed. To be clear, neither Jesus nor I are blaming this man for his poor health and no access to healing. Society was doing that just fine, and Jesus was, by his action, repudiating that blame. You see, in that time, illness, infirmity, and immobility resulted in a loss of social status and place, cutting off the sufferer from being a part of the community and of their family. Jesus’ controversial healing was not just about doing something that only God could do, it was also removing the object of scorn and blame on the part of the healthy, able-bodied people around him. The sick man’s passiveness may have been a role pushed on him by others, saying in effect, “You’re sick, so you are not allowed to do these things. You have to be like this now.”

In our time of understanding disease and infirmity as molecules, biological processes or structures gone wrong, we have mostly given up on the social morality of disease, except when we are afraid. We didn’t know what caused AIDS for several years, enough time for fear to grab hold of imaginations and result in moral diatribes against gay men. Not even Ryan White, an innocent young boy with hemophilia form north-central Indiana, who was infected through blood products, could shake that fearful condemnation of the sick. We knew what caused Covid-19, but we didn’t know what the coronavirus was capable of, and we went through another round of panic-induced moral outrage, this time at a whole lot of things. And as with the sick man in the reading, we’re left wondering why these things happened. We stray into thoughts of did they protect themselves? If only he had taken his medicine; if only she had gone to see a doctor sooner; and with every “if only…” the line between personal responsibility and the tragedy of illness and death is blurred. It becomes harder to treat the sick and immobile with compassion. There’s an expectation that Jesus will come and tell us to take up our mat and walk, and when that doesn’t happen, we look around for someone or something to blame.

This makes Jesus’ signs as written in John’s Gospel a hard sell, hard to accept because we’re used to hearing in the other three gospels that a person’s faith in Jesus healed them. And our reaction is to say, “If only they just believed hard enough.” If only... But, again, Jesus doesn't work that way, because he acted as a catalyst in healing those who believed in him already, despite being told by the religious authorities that Jesus was a sinner. In John’s Gospel, four of Jesus’ seven signs involved illness or death that he encountered. The other three were situations at a wedding, feeding 5000 people, walking on water. What happened in those signs was that Jesus’ salvation came through as a restoration of life, health, wine, and bread, bringing wholeness to the people in need as he came across them. The healing that the sick man received was to be able to return to his family and become part of them again. The healing that Clay and Christopher could have received was compassion for their illness without the declaration of immorality. The healing that I might receive would be spiritual, that I would not be abandoned by God in my illness because I didn’t make the best health choices, or that I had a run of bad luck.

Salvation and healing come together in this scene of Jesus telling the long-sick man to get up and walk, and that’s what happens so quickly. But think of what the man had to overcome: a passive role in his own life enforced by social expectations; separation from friends and family; and then a new identity as a whole, healthy person. These are not so quickly overcome for us when we are healed because we have to convince ourselves and the people around us that we are no longer that sick person. Our life is no longer centered around our illness and all of the busyness of getting medical care. Our perspective of our life and identity are no longer the same, having changed again after being healed. My sister recounted the moment when the ultrasound tech found a spot in her breast: she realized that she had become a cancer patient, and her life was forever changed in that moment. Her identity as a cancer survivor has come more slowly as her anxiety over a relapse slowly fades. I try to think of her as just my sister.

We have to be aware of what healing and salvation look like, and not let the people around us define who we are based on our moral or physical condition. Likewise, we have to see beyond the illness and imperfection to the person beneath, as Jesus did. Hearing or making excuses, or laying blame only gets in the way of the most important part of this story: that we are restored, or experience salvation, in some way, to who God sees us as and not to who we think we are or who others think we are. We need to be as audacious as Jesus was by challenging an expectation, an expectation that sick people will conform to our need to blame them for our insecurities.