If you didn’t yet, you can start here -> Bethesda, Part One: Him
I am the one who said no.
“Do you want to be healed?” – Jesus, John 5:6
A while ago, I started writing down the questions of Jesus out of curiosity. I had read a book about leading by asking good questions rather than by simply making decrees, and I was intrigued. Did Jesus do that? It turns out, he absolutely did. Jesus asked a lot of questions. Most of them were rhetorical. But some – some are just plain bizarre. Like this one – “Do you want to be healed?”
I always thought this question was absurd. The man was lying beside the pool of Bethesda. He had been crippled for thirty-eight YEARS. Of COURSE he wanted to be healed. …Didn’t he?
I got to wondering – why does Jesus bother to ask questions? He already knows our hearts. He proves that time after time as he tells people exactly what they are thinking and then answers their thoughts. So why bother asking?
And then it struck me – he asks us questions because we don’t know.
God sees more clearly into our hearts than even we do. There are times we are just going through the motions, reacting to the hits of the world from our broken foundations, hearts desperately in need of healing, and we don’t even know. We don’t know what’s going on in there that’s making us react this way. But Jesus does.
Do you see how the man sidesteps the question – “I have no one to help me into the pool when the angel stirs the waters”? It’s such a straightforward question. Why wouldn’t he just say yes?
I didn’t understand until God asked me the same question.
For the past few years, I haven’t felt well. I thought maybe I was eating the wrong foods, taking the wrong vitamins, doing something wrong because I woke up nauseous almost every day. My energy was bare minimum; I tried to exercise, to lose weight, to eat well, to take supplements, to diet. Nothing helped. It just kept getting worse.
But my focus could not be on me. My daughters were in the process of being diagnosed with a handful of chronic diseases that required some major lifestyle shifts for us, and I was buried under new diets and medications and appointments and needs. It all came to a breaking point at the end of March, when my youngest spent a weekend in the hospital with asthmatic complications from pneumonia, and the beginning of April, when my gallbladder had had enough.
It turns out it was inflamed. Badly inflamed. I’d been having symptoms of it for at least three years, but by April, it had gotten so bad that I could not eat anything without pain. My doctor got me in quickly, but the surgeon she referred me to could not see me until May, and THEN we would schedule my surgery appointment.
They offered me surgery on July 27th. I was in pain. I could not eat. My government insurance expired May 31st, after which I would not be able to afford surgery, even with new insurance. And they wanted me to wait MONTHS to have surgery.
I needed God to step in.
May 7th, a young man from our church asked if he could pray for me and my husband about the surgery. Of course, we said. Little did I know God had something to say, too. Or, rather, ask.
Do you want me to heal you?
I was so surprised by His clear, steady voice that my reaction was knee-jerk and raw.
Don’t You DARE, I said.
I was mortified. And furious.
He was calm, gentle, steady.
Don’t You DARE do for me what You would not do for my children, I kept going.
I was shocked.
He was not.
Okay, He said.
The next morning, Monday, as I was sitting in my car, in pain, about to try to go into the grocery store and crying out, “God, help!”, I got a phone call. They had a surgery appointment open up on Tuesday morning; did I want it?
Why would You do this for me after what I said to You?
Nothing in my life has ever surprised me like the love God pours out on me when I’m being a brat, when I’m throwing a fit, when I’m refusing help, when I am acting like a kicked beehive of anxiety and fury. In those moments, my absolute ugliest moments – God is kind to me. And it stuns me into silence. It humbles me into repentance. It draws a kind of awe out of me that pours out as worship to this remarkable Being who could love me, even still.
If you had told me before how I was going to respond to God in that moment of prayer, I would have told you you were completely nuts. But God knew there were things going on in my broken, messy heart that needed work, that needed healing, and the first step would be to shake me out of my “I’m fine, everything’s fine” reverie. Maybe the same reverie a man was lying in beside the Pool of Bethesda two thousand years ago. And sometimes, what it takes is a question no one else would think to ask –
Do you want to be healed?
…
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<shaky breath> All right, Lord. I’m here. Please heal this hope-sick heart.
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