Mockingbird blog has posted this devotional on John 5:5-8, where Jesus encounters a paralytic by a pool, and why an enquiry about wanting to be made well is neither callous or obtuse, but rather a penetrating means by which the man is challenged to set aside preconceptions which were both hindering and harmful.
A central literary element of the story is the absurdity of a paralytic trying to win a race to a pool. It’s almost modern in its extreme irony. But this is also a timeless picture of the human being: the very thing we want to save ourselves from is also the thing preventing us from being healed, the roadblock. And this roadblock is, by the classic definition, our need to save ourselves –libido dominandi, et cetera (the tautology would almost be funny if it weren’t kinda depressing too).
Say for a second that the pool doesn’t really heal people, but is a superstition. Maybe I’m wrong, but this first-to-the-finish-line mentality just seems way too human to really have a divine healing spirit. What if the man had been there for several years without witnessing a divine miracle? Wouldn’t he have left by then? Maybe not – human nature has a remarkable ability to continue trying to make our lives better with things that prove, time and again, incapable of helping us.
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