Of all the stories about healing in the gospels, this one stands out to me as particularly interesting. In part, because it is puzzling. We don’t know exactly what is going on here. Apparently, this pool of water has healing properties, and people come to the waters to be healed of their disabilities. I have no doubt that water has healing properties. Just the other evening, my daughter told me the baby was having a complete meltdown. I prescribed a bath.
The peculiar thing about these waters was that, evidently, they would periodically become stirred up, and people believed that the stirring was caused by the presence of divine power. According to the King James Version, only the first person to get in the pool after the waters stirred up would be healed. This seems unfair. And it’s probably not even true, because newer translations have left it out. It seems that this detail was added somewhere along the way by a scribe, wanting to make some logical sense of the fact that this man had been trying and failing for 38 years to reach the healing waters.
Some others have wondered about this and concluded that this man didn’t really want to be healed. Surely, if he wanted to be made well, he would have gotten to the water by now. Even Jesus seems to be suggesting this, because he asks the man this very question. Do you want to be made well?
It’s easy to hear a little implicit blame in his question. We don’t know what his tone of voice was like, but it might have sounded like, “Do you even want to be made well? Because I – and some of the others here too – suspect that you like this. You like being helpless, not having to do anything, not being responsible for anything.”
Whether or not Jesus would be as snarky as that is questionable. Actually, I doubt he would have asked in that manner. But he did ask. And in asking, it might be that Jesus wanted this man to take a moment to reflect on his own desires, his own motivations. In this way, he was making him an agent in his own healing.
Last week I told you about the woman, Lynn, who was living in her car in the parking lot at the King of Prussia Target. Two women approached her. One of the first things they asked her was, “Do you want help?” Only when she said yes did they go any further.
Helping another person is not a one-way proposition. We might forget that sometimes, when we see ourselves as helpers and others as helpees. It would always be simpler, easier, if when we see a problem we have the means and desire to fix, we could just go ahead and fix it. But it’s usually not so simple. In reality, helping another person often gets complicated. There are many reasons for this.
People don’t always want the help we want to offer. If you have ever tried to help someone get up or cross the street and they batted your hand away, then you know this. The two women who approached Lynn in her car knew it was better not to assume she wanted the things they wanted to give her, so they waited for her “yes” before proceeding.
But when someone says yes, this opens the door to more complications. There can be further mismatches between the wishes of the helper and the helpee. There may be competing desires – what you want for the other person and what they want for themselves.
A few years ago, there was a family living in their car in the Walmart parking lot – this was just a few blocks from the church I was serving at the time. Some women noticed this family and, just like the women at the King of Prussia Target, they were moved by compassion. They learned that this family included a veteran and his wife, two disabled children, and a dog. They had been trying to get back home to Oklahoma when their car broke down.
Pretty soon the whole community was mobilized to help. The women who initially approached them organized fundraisers and put out notices on a community Facebook group. We took up a collection for them in our congregation. People donated food and other supplies, and someone even donated a car. Everyone wanted to help this family get home, and we did. Happy ending.
But within a few weeks this family came back. Their troubles did not disappear once they got back home, evidently. And they had found our community to be so warm and caring and helpful, they wanted to come back and draw more water from that well. But I’m not sure there was any more water in that well.
What the people of the community had signed up for was to help them get back home. What they wanted (or needed) was, apparently, something else.
The problem with helping is we often don’t know what kind of help is going to be needed. What’s more, we don’t necessarily have the ability to give what is needed, or the desire to give it.
In Norman MacLean’s story, A River Runs Through It, there is a father with two sons. It is very much like the parable Luke tells. The older son is hard-working and responsible, the younger son just can’t seem to help being a prodigal. He is restless. He can’t settle down. He is an alcoholic and a gambler, a slave to these two addictions. And, like all addicts, he resists help. His brother is dying to help him but fails again and again. And at one point, his father speaks to the older son about the nature of help. “Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. So it is, that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Or, often, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.”
A sobering assessment. But perhaps we need to make a distinction between “fix” and “help.” No one can fix an addict. But something as small as giving a drink of water or holding their head might help.
It is a bit easier when someone comes right out and asks for help. In the story from Acts, this is Paul’s dream – that a man from Macedonia stood before his eyes and said come on over and help us. Help us. And so he did.
I think Paul was grateful for the direct request, because before this point he had experienced a succession of failures. He had somehow been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to enter the lands they were trying to enter. It was like they hit a spiritual brick wall. So, they would turn and go a different way. Then another brick wall. When Paul received the Macedonia vision, he perceived a door opening up before him and he raced through.
And in Macedonia, he was able to help. The gospel was well received by Lydia, a woman of wealth and influence. Now the gospel of Jesus Christ had reached a new shore – because there was a request for help. Again, a happy ending.
But you might have figured out by now that the happy endings, more often than not, are quickly followed by further complications. Our work of helping one another doesn’t really end. The church was established in Macedonia, but we cannot possibly think that once they put the building up it was all smooth sailing. No doubt, there were arguments about what color to paint the walls, and difficulties raising enough money to fix the boiler. There were laments about how the youth didn’t seem to be interested in the church their elders had worked so hard for. There were fights about how the mission budget should be spent. How to be Christ to one another is a continual uphill struggle.
I think in many cases the problems we have with helping others have to do with why we are doing it and what we are looking for. Consider this story from John’s gospel.
When Jesus approached the disabled man at the pool, what did he ask him? Did he ask him if he wanted to be put in the waters? No, he asked him if he wanted to be made well.
The man’s answer, then, did not really fit the question. He told Jesus all the reasons why he had been unable to get to the pool. It would be so easy, at that point, to fall into an argument on the logistics of getting in the pool of healing waters. It would also be futile to get in that argument. One thing we know about Jesus is that he was expert at avoiding that kind of trap. He simply ignores the man’s response and suggests to him: Pick up your mat and walk. And so the man does.
What can we learn from this about helping someone? Perhaps we can learn that it is good to know what kind of help you can give and what you cannot give. And learn to be comfortable giving what you can give, not berating yourself for the things you cannot give.
Perhaps we can learn that the important thing is figuring out the real need – if possible. This man’s real need was not to get to the pool, but to be made well. Maybe he, himself, had lost sight of that, but Jesus saw it.
Perhaps we can learn that it is good, if at all possible, to respect the other person’s autonomy. Helping someone help themselves is one of the best ways to help another. I think the women who helped Lynn get out of her car and into a home were trying to do just that. It involves giving people the help they want, not necessarily the help you think they should want. It may be the case with the family we tried to help in Ohio that we misunderstood their desires. Maybe they didn’t really want to go home.
Anybody who ever said, “helping someone is simple,” didn’t know what they were talking about. It’s never simple, really. Because helping is never really an isolated incident – it’s always part of an interconnected chain. As human beings, we are always helping and being helped, one way or another.
In Richard Price’s book, Samaritan, there is a man named Ray who goes back to his hometown to devote himself to helping the needy and downtrodden. He learns how not-simple it is. He repeatedly runs into troubles. An old friend in town tries to help him with the troubles caused by his helping. What we see in the story is two different kinds of help. Ray has a past he wants to be vindicated from by his good works. But his friend, Nerese, wants to help Ray for simpler reasons: Ray once helped her, and she is grateful.
So, you see, Ray wants to help in order to receive gratitude. But Nerese wants to help out of her own gratitude. This is where we all should find ourselves. We won’t receive salvation because we help others. But knowing we are saved by the grace of God, we may be grateful.
And may our gratitude serve God by helping others.
