"5 After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralysed. 5 One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” 7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.
Now that day was the Sabbath."
John 5:1-9
Into that multitude of impotent folk, blind, halt, withered, and right to where the impotent man was, Jesus came. It is fitting that we should be reading this story in the days leading up to Christmas, for this is exactly what Christmas means:
He comes, the prisoners to relieve, In Satan's bondage held.
And the significance of what we call 'the festive season' was surely fulfilled in this poor, broken piece of humanity, as Christ's presence and power transformed his life. Our Lord spoke two words to him, one a question, the other a command. These are full of significance and instruction. Concerning the question, two things have to be said. First of all, this: however we may render or translate the words, it still remains a strange question to ask. Was it not asking the obvious, to ask him if he wanted to be healed? Not necessarily. Here is a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years - a long, long time for any man to be thus incapacitated. Can we imagine what this must have done to his mind? The long and dreary continuance of his condition must surely have robbed him of any expectation of being made better, and this must have brought a listlessness and apathy on his soul, and bludgeoned his mind and heart into a condition of insensitivity, as he acquiesced in the utter dullness and despair that such a condition would bring. The man must have been little more than a vegetable, as we would say. And Christ's question introduced to him a new possibility of something that had long since left him. Our Lord was recalling him to humanity. This was one major purpose in asking the question. Its other significance we shall discuss in the next Note.