Reverend Jonathan Waits
More Than Well (John 5:1-16)
March 16, 2025
Have you ever fallen for a gimmick? Someone came along with a really great sales pitch for a brand new product that was going to completely revolutionize your life. All it was going to take from you was a “modest” investment of capital to help get this new venture off the ground. But when you did, you were going to be on the ground floor of an entirely new cultural movement. This wasn’t just about making your life better; it was about making the whole country better (healthier, more fit, financially stabler, and etc.). This wasn’t just an opportunity you didn’t want to miss. This was an opportunity you couldn’t afford to miss.
I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten sucked up into something quite like that. But there was a video game for the Nintendo Wii a few years ago that we made quite an investment in thinking it would be a lot of fun for the boys. It was called Disney Infinity, and it had a really neat concept. It was an open world game with endless possibilities for play. In order to get characters for the game, though, you had to buy these little action figures. When you set them on a scanner that also had to be purchased separately (of course), the character magically appeared in the game. They had all sorts of Disney characters from Mickey to Captain Jack Sparrow to Iron Man to Sully, the big blue monster from Monsters Inc. We discovered the game when it was on clearance at Walmart. It was on clearance because although Disney had made this enormous investment in it, it flopped. But it was cheap, so we bought it. And all the characters. I mean all of them. We paid a fraction of the price we might have paid to get them all when they were new, but it was still a fair bit of money. The boys had some fun playing the game for a little bit, but once the initial shine wore off, their interest ebbed swiftly. I think we finally just gave the whole collection away a few months later.
Last week, we looked at a story from John’s Gospel about a man who came to Jesus in hopes of finding help and healing for his dying son. He came, we said, because he had likely heard about what Jesus could do. He had heard about the miraculous healings Jesus had performed. When word reached him that Jesus had returned to the region from a trip to Judea, he knew he had to go and see if he could get a miracle for his son. Jesus was the latest miracle fad, and this desperate father was ready and willing to go all in on him if it meant making his son well again. Sometimes we treat Jesus the same way. We go to Him because of what He can do for us, and that’s about all we look to get from Him. But while Jesus will do good for us if we go to Him because that’s the kind of God He is, He wants more for us than that. This morning, we are going to look at a story about another man who received another miracle. But in this case, Jesus intentionally offered him something more.
Today finds us in the third part of our teaching series, All Signs Point to Jesus. Over the course of these eight weeks, wrapping up on Easter Sunday morning, we are doubling down on our Sunday school Bible study to look at what the apostle John identifies in his Gospel as seven miraculous signs Jesus performed to help us better understand who exactly He is. Each week we are walking through another one of these signs and asking the question each time: What does this mean, and what does it mean for us?
In the first couple stops on our journey we have seen Jesus turn water into wine and heal a man’s son from a distance. In both cases, Jesus was doing more than merely a miracle. He was inviting people to see Him. He revealed His glory so that specifically His disciples could see who He was. And, as we just said, in healing the royal official’s son, Jesus was inviting the man to see Him and not merely the things He could do for him. In order to be in a meaningful relationship with another person, you have to actually see them. Well, Jesus very much wants to be in a relationship with us. So, He does things to help us see Him. And indeed, when we really see Jesus, He is going to do great things in us and for us and through us to bless the people around us, but He invites us to even more than that.
If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning—and, by the way, it’s always a good idea to have your own copy of the Scriptures handy so you can make notes for later study—find your way back to John’s Gospel with me. If you took up my advice to put a marker there last week, you’re already going to be in the right spot because this morning we are going to start right where we left off last time. As you find your way to John 5 with me, let me offer a quick note on context.
The Gospel authors didn’t organize their presentations of the life and ministry of Jesus in the kind of neatly chronological fashion we are accustomed to in our storytelling. This doesn’t mean they throw out chronology altogether. There’s a definite flow from the beginning to end of each Gospel that roughly tracks with the outline of Jesus’ ministry, but offering up a literal historical timeline isn’t their goal. They were thinking thematically. As a result, sometimes when we turn from one story to another, while our first instinct is to assume that the next part happens chronologically after the last part, the amount of time between the two stories could be moments, but it could also be months, and later parts fill in the gap between the two parts. I say all of that because that’s what we see here. John 5:1 opens with, “After this…” but while these events did indeed take place after Jesus’ healing of the royal official’s son, there were probably a few months in between the two events.
“After this, a Jewish festival took place, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.” We don’t know what festival this was, but ultimately that doesn’t factor into the point of the story at all. John was just giving us context. Also, remember that “going up” was a function of elevation, not cardinal direction. Jesus was going south, but up a mountain. Once in Jerusalem, though, Jesus found Himself by what is called the Sheep Gate into the city. The Sheep Gate, first mentioned in Nehemiah in the context of his leading the effort to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem after Babylon destroyed them, was where the livestock used as sacrifices in the temple would have been brought in. Still today, there is a sheep market that operates near this ancient gate on a regular basis.
Near this gate was a place called the Pool of Bethesda. “By the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem there is a pool, called Bethesda in Aramaic, which has five colonnades. Within these lay a large number of the disabled—blind, lame, and paralyzed.” At one point several generations ago, before it was uncovered, skeptical New Testament scholars argued that John was just making this up. Then they discovered the Pool of Bethesda right where John said it was. But they didn’t find the colonnades he described, so they said he was making it up. Then archaeologists kept digging and, sure enough, they found the colonnades. It turns out John was right. Perhaps that’s because he was there and saw it with his own eyes.
Now, in my Bible, the next verse we come to is v. 5. If you are paying attention to your own Bible, though, you might notice that the previous verse was v. 3. What happened to v. 4? Well, if you look down in the chicken scratch at the bottom of the page, you will probably see a note containing the second half of v. 3 and all of v. 4. You will also likely see some sort of a brief explanation that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts don’t contain this verse and a half, and so most scholars agree that John didn’t write them. They were a later addition to the text from a copyist who thought he would add a bit of further context for his readers that’ll make more sense in just a second. Verses 3b-4 speak of a legend common at the time about the Pool of Bethesda which helps explain why all of these disabled people were gathered there. The disabled people camped out by the Pool because they believed “an angel would go down into the pool from time to time and stir up the water. Then the first one who got in after the water was stirred up recovered from whatever ailment he had.” The copyist who added that in wasn’t saying he agreed with the legend, but was merely giving extra context for readers. Either way, John probably didn’t write it, and the story isn’t affected by it, so most modern translations either leave it out entirely or else put it in a footnote.
In any event, there was one particular man gathered among all of these disabled people by the Pool of Bethesda who had been there for more than a generation. He would have been a fixture at the Pool. Everyone would have known who he was. But Jesus wasn’t from Jerusalem. This guy would have been a stranger to Him. All the same, something (the Holy Spirit, of course) drew Him to the man, and the pair had an interesting interaction. Stick with me in the text at v. 5 now: “One man was there who had been disabled for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and realized he had already been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to get well?’”
I don’t know about you, but my first reaction to this from Jesus is, “What kind of a stupid question was that?!?” The guy had been lying there paralyzed for almost 40 years. Of course he would want to be well. What would possibly possess Jesus to ask such a patently absurd question? The answer to the question was so obvious as to make asking it more than a little offensive. This guy would have been perfectly within his rights to tell Jesus where to take His question. But…have you ever been in a situation you didn’t like so long that you started to get used to it? And even though you kept saying how badly you wanted out of it, you started to find yourself missing exit ramps on purpose and then making up excuses for why it wasn’t really going to work anyway. Sometimes we find ourselves stuck in a bad situation for so long that we get used to the misery of it. We can’t imagine life without it…and if we’re being really honest, we’re more afraid to find out what life might be like without the pain than we are of sticking with what we know even if what we know is miserable.
This poor man could have gotten really upset and offended at Jesus’ question, but look at what he actually says: “‘Sir,’ the disabled man answered, ‘I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I’m coming, someone goes down ahead of me.’” Now you see why the copyist added in that explainer earlier. In other words, “I keep trying to make myself well, but something keeps getting in my way every time.” And maybe this really was just an explanation from the man about why he’s stuck in the condition he’s in, but after almost 40 years, it’s a little hard to see this as something other than an excuse.
But don’t miss what’s going on here. In response to Jesus’ question as to whether or not he wanted to be well, the man talked about his constantly failing efforts to make himself well. That’s not what Jesus asked, though. He didn’t ask him how his efforts to make himself well were going. He simply asked whether or not he wanted to be well. But this poor man had been in the condition he was in for so long that he had lost just about all hope of getting better. He felt abandoned by his friends and family, by his culture, and maybe even by his God. His only remaining hope was that he was going to be able to drag himself into the water of the Pool of Bethesda when it started bubbling. A silly superstition was the last thread holding his sanity together. Making himself well was the only thing he could imagine anymore…and he wasn’t able to do that.
Sometimes when we are in the midst of a mess so thick that we can’t see out of it, Jesus has to reach down to tell us what to do. Jesus looked on this man with compassion. He heard his heart crying for relief that he didn’t know how to obtain. And so He responded by just telling him what to do. “‘Get up,’ Jesus told him, ‘pick up your mat and walk.’”
Think about how utterly silly that had to sound to this man. He couldn’t walk. That was the problem. But in being confronted by Jesus, he was engaging with someone far more powerful than a superstition about bubbling water. As a result, “instantly the man got well, picked up his mat, and started to walk.”
Think for a second about everything physically and mentally that had to happen for this to take place. Remember: this guy hadn’t walked for 38 years. Jesus’ command didn’t merely restore the nerve connections between his brain and his legs that had somehow been severed so long before. He had to restore muscle tone. Muscles start to atrophy after a few weeks without use. This guy had almost four decades of disuse under his belt. Neural pathways that perhaps once knew how to walk depending on how old he was when he became paralyzed, but which had long since been clogged and covered up by new ones in the 38 years since they had last been used had to be cleared and restored so that he could even stand up, let alone walk. And at Jesus’ word, all of this happened in an instant. Can you even imagine the joy and wonder this man experienced in this moment? I wonder if any of the others who were gathered around the Pool were paying enough attention to notice this, or if they were all so focused on getting into the bubbling waters themselves that they didn’t see it.
We don’t know about that at all. But we do know about some other people who saw him. At the end of v. 9, John notes “that day was the Sabbath…” You can almost hear the music turn sinister when you read that note. Uh-oh! Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath. There are stories about His doing that in the other Gospels, and it never goes well. The Jewish religious leaders were rather nitpicky about not working on the Sabbath. There were lots and lots and lots of rules spelling out exactly what could be done and what couldn’t be done. In fact, there are 39 different categories of what was to be counted as work that wasn’t permissible on the Sabbath. And these categories all have sub-categories. It was quite a system. And, as it turns out, carrying a mat like this man was now doing (at Jesus’ command) fell under the auspices of one of the categories. That is, he was technically working…on the Sabbath. “…and so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, ‘This is the Sabbath. The law prohibits you from picking up your mat.’”
The trouble was that Jesus had told him to pick it up. And when a guy tells you to get up and for the first time in 38 years you can stand and walk and jump and dance and run, you tend to do what he says. Jesus had told him to pick up his mat and walk, and so he did. No other rule mattered to him. So, “He replied, ‘The man who made me well told me, “Pick up your mat and walk.”’” Don’t you just love that language? He wasn’t just healed, he was “made well.” Jesus doesn’t stop with mere healing. He moves to make us well.
Of course, the Jewish religious authorities didn’t care about any of that. “‘Who is this man who told you, “Pick up your mat and walk”?’ they asked. But the man who was healed did not know who it was, because Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.” Think about that one. Jesus hadn’t introduced Himself or anything to the man. He just came up, asked if he wanted to be well, and made him well. The formerly paralyzed man didn’t know anything else about Him. No doubt he wanted to, but he didn’t. And as a result, he couldn’t answer the question of the religious authorities. So they let him go.
Sometime later, then, when things had settled a bit, Jesus sought the man back out because He wasn’t quite done with him. Verse 14 now: “After this, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, ‘See, you are well. Do not sin anymore, so that something worse doesn’t happen to you.’” Having figured out who it was who healed him, the man went back to the Jewish authorities to tell them. I tend not to think he had any kind of a sinister motive here. More likely, he was so excited about his encounter with Jesus that he wanted them to know everything about so that others could have the same experience as him. “The man went and reported to the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.” The Jewish religious authorities, though, did have sinister motives, and this guy played right into their hands. “Therefore, the Jews began persecuting Jesus because he was doing these things on the Sabbath.” That sounds ominous, of course, but as we will later see on our journey, God had all of this well in hand.
Speaking of having everything well in hand, let’s go back to that last thing Jesus said to the formerly paralyzed man. Look again at what Jesus said: “See, you are well.” He asked the man if he wanted to be well, and then He made him well. He healed the man physically. Thirty-eight years’ worth of clogged neural pathways and atrophied muscles and critical nerve connections were restored in an instant. The man was well. That alone was worth celebrating. But Jesus didn’t stop there, did He? After observing the man’s new physical condition, Jesus went on to warn him about an entirely different condition: “Do not sin anymore, so that something worse doesn’t happen to you.”
What is this? Our bodies are an important part of what makes us human. But we are more than just our bodies. And if the only thing we give any attention to making well is our bodies, we’re going to be ignoring another part of us whose being well is actually even more important than having bodies that are well. This other part of us is our spirit or soul. When you get into nuanced philosophical conversations about spiritual anthropology, you’ll sometimes encounter more precise definitions for spirit and soul that clearly differentiate one from the other, but for our purposes here, I’m talking about the intangible part of what us makes us. And we can be physically well, but spiritually a mess. In fact, I suspect you know some folks who are physically fine and spiritual wrecks. Perhaps you’ve been one of those folks. Maybe…just maybe…you are one of those folks.
The key to being spiritually well is being in a right relationship with God. That’s what Jesus was inviting this man to experience. He had been made physically well. Jesus took care of that. That was no longer a concern of his. Now Jesus was inviting him to be spiritually well. This was going to happen by his staying away from sin.
You see, sin separates us from God. This is because sin is at its core an act of taking control of our lives away from the God who made and thus rightly owns them. If you take something away from its rightful owner, you’re not on good terms with the owner unless and until you give it back. And, since our original owner is the source of all goodness and life, disconnecting from Him sets us on a pathway of evil and death. But because we are talking about our spirits here, the impact of our journey down that pathway may not show in our physical bodies immediately or ever. Yet being spiritually unwell is worse than being physically unwell. There are medical cures for being physically unwell. Most of the time, though, those cures don’t even begin to touch spiritual sickness. Being spiritually unwell is the result of our separation from God. If we don’t get that addressed, if we keep choosing to stay separated from Him, eventually that separation will become permanent. That is, eventually, He’ll give us what we have made clear we want. Jesus didn’t want that for this man, and He doesn’t want it for you and me. John presented this sign from Jesus because he wants us to understand that Jesus doesn’t just want to make us well. He wants to make us whole. Jesus wants to do more than merely make you well.
Okay, but how do we experience that? I mean, it doesn’t seem like Jesus’ telling this guy to just stop sinning was going to do very much. I don’t know about you, but I’ve made commitments to myself to stop sinning before. Those don’t tend to take very long. This is because on our own, we can’t just stop sinning. It is in our nature to sin. We need more help than we can muster on our own. We need more help even than just the church by itself can provide even though active involvement in the church is an absolutely crucial part of helping us walk a path of righteousness. Thankfully, Jesus wants to do more for us than just make us physically well. Jesus wants to do more than merely make you well. Jesus wants to make you whole.
We can find this wholeness in Him. On our own, we sin. We do things that are out of sync with God’s character. And we don’t have the power to beat it. I don’t need to convince you of this either. You already know it. You perhaps already know it far more thoroughly than you wish you did. I do. What Jesus offers us is help. After all, Jesus wants to do more than merely make you well. We can access this help when we put our faith in Him. When we are willing to accept on faith the historical fact that Jesus rose from the dead, conclusively demonstrating the truthfulness of His claims to be God, Jesus sends His Spirit—the Holy Spirit—to take up residence in our hearts. From there, He is able to begin working in and with us to change our nature. He makes us new. As the apostle Paul declared, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!” With the Holy Spirit’s help, we begin to develop the ability to choose other than sin. We can keep God’s command. Most notably, we can keep His command in Christ to love like Jesus did. And, honestly, if we get just that one command down, everything else God desires for us will fall into place fairly naturally. The key here, though, is that we have this new, right relationship with God through Jesus. It’s not our right relationship. It’s His that He shares with us. And when we are covered by His right relationship, we are able to be well in the ways that matter most. Jesus wants to do more than merely make you well. He wants to make you whole.
Being whole in Christ is a pretty incredible thing. When we are whole in Him, things that might otherwise threaten or prompt fear in us in this life lose their power. When we are whole in Christ, we are able to look forward to one day receiving God’s promise to restore all things, including our physical bodies to the kind of shape that is designed to last for as long as His kingdom does. And His kingdom is eternal. You do that math. We still strive to be well in this life because that’s better than the alternative, but even where that’s not available to us for one reason or another, we can lean into Christ and the wholeness He brings and not be brought down spiritually by physical ailments. We are able in Him to sit back with joy and contentment to see how He is going to work all things together in the end for our good and His glory. Jesus wants to do more than merely make you well. If you haven’t experienced this healing that is deeper and richer and fuller than anything you’ve ever experienced before, there’s only life to be received when you do. There may yet be challenges and apparent setbacks in this life, and those may be intense, but you will be living then for more than this life. And when you are living for more than just this life, you can be well in the ways that matter most. You can be whole in Christ. Jesus wants to do more than merely make you well. I hope that you will let Him. You’ll be glad you did.