A Bad Egg

 “He was a bad egg, that man at the pool of Bethesda.”

That’s the thought I had after listening to his story from John 5 on Tuesday.

Before Tuesday, I’d always felt sorry for the man—

An invalid for 38 years with no friends to get him to the water and no way to be healed.

But on Tuesday it struck me:

There must have been a reason that the man had not been healed after so long.

 

If he and many other disabled, probably homeless, people lay there together day after day,

Then it seems that they would have gotten to know one another.  

And if they had gotten to know one another, then it seems that they would have wanted to help one another.

Yet this man claims that he has no one.

And he makes the excuse that someone always gets to the waters before him.

That is his response when Jesus asks if he wants to be healed.

He doesn’t say yes.

He doesn’t take responsibility for his own wishes or desires.

He simply makes an excuse and places the blame for his condition outside himself.

But Jesus, in Jesus’ infinite love and compassion, sees something in the man and heals him anyway.

Jesus, in Jesus’ way of believing in people beyond themselves, tells the man to take up his mat and walk.

 

When confronted about carrying his mat on the Sabbath,

The man doesn’t testify that he’s just been healed and that it’s the first time he’s been able to walk in 38 years and that he would like to ask forgiveness for breaking the law on such a momentous occasion.

Instead, he places blame on Jesus.

He throws Jesus under the bus for telling him to get up and walk!

He just doesn’t know who Jesus is.

 

And when he finds out who Jesus is, he doesn’t thank him.

He doesn’t ponder the information in his heart and celebrate his healing.

Instead, he goes straight to the authorities to tell them who had healed him on the Sabbath…

Thus beginning Jesus’ persecution by the Jewish leaders.

 

As if all this weren’t enough to let me know that the man at Bethesda was a bad egg,

Jesus himself hints at the fact when he tells him,

“Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

At first, I was confused by this statement.

Is Jesus saying that the man’s condition was caused by his sin?

But then I realized:

Maybe the man’s sin was his grumpiness, or his judgmentalism, or his foul language, or his excuse making, or his refusal to accept help, or his desire to stay where he was rather than to move forward.

Stop doing those things, Jesus said, or something worse than being healed may happen to you.  

Maybe the man was so set in being who he was—someone, who, ultimately had no responsibility in life but to beg and depend on others, that he didn’t want to accept the responsibility of being healed.

 

I don’t know what Jesus saw in this man.

I don’t know why Jesus took such a big risk as to heal him on the Sabbath.

I don’t know what part of love compelled Jesus to love the unlovable.

But he did.

And instead of being thanked for it, he was thrown under the bus and hurt.

 

This is the Jesus that I love.

 

Dear God: Forgive us when we, like the man at Bethesda, are the bad egg. And help us, always, to find the courage and compassion to love the bad eggs that surround us. Amen.