Imagine buying a brand-new, top-of-theline smartphone. It has incredible processing power, a high-resolution camera, and endless potential.
But there’s a catch. You don’t have a charging cable.
No matter how advanced or pricey the phone, without power, it’s just an expensive paperweight. Something like that happens quite often in the Bible.
John 5, verses 1-15, provides an example with a man who was lame.
We find him at the Pool of Bethesda living like that cell phone paperweight for 38 years. He was surrounded in Jerusalem by religious services, daily prayers, a temple, Jewish laws and rules, and the expectations of priests, Pharisees, and Sadducees.
But amid all that religious power, he’d laid by the pool without mobility, or in the phone’s case, a way to be charged.
Then Jesus walks into the scene to both change his physical condition and also to change his spiritual situation — to save him, heal him, and make him whole again.
The Biblical word for save is “soterios” meaning both a physical and a spiritual healing.
Dr. Frank Stanger, president of Asbury Theological Seminary while I studied there, says we should — rather than ask for physical healing — ask for wholeness.
The Pool of Bethesda was surrounded by a crowd of sick, blind, and paralyzed people. According to local tradition, an angel would periodically stir the waters, and all those broken people would race to the pool.
The first one to reach the water was healed, according to the legend. When Jesus asks the man if he wants to get well, he replies:
“Sir, ... I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I’m trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
— John 5: 7 In physics, when electrical energy flows through a wire it creates resistance.
Some of the electrical energy is lost as heat when the electrons in the copper vibrate and collide.
But if you cool certain materials to ultra-low temperatures, they become super-conductors and the resistance drops to near-zero.
Something like that happens when we try to forgive our own sins or solve our own problems. It’s like a lame man in a race to the pool.
We get frustrated, lose energy and burn out.
But Jesus offers to be our super-conductor with a zero-resistant wire to the power of God. With a word, he healed the royal official’s son in Cana and now heals the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda.
And now:
“Do you want to get well?”
— John 5: 6
Charles “Buddy” Whatley is a retired United Methodist pastor serving Dawson Street Methodist Church in Thomasville, Ga. With wife, Mary Ella, they are missionaries to the Navajo Reservation.
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