John 5: 1-16
After this, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep [Gate] a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes. In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled. [] One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.
Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who was cured, “It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” He answered them, “The man who made me well told me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who told you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” The man who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there. After this Jesus found him in the temple area and said to him, “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went and told the Jews that Jesus was the one who had made him well. Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus because he did this on a sabbath.
New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. USCCB approved.
Hope and Imagination
“Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6)
Recently, I’ve been asking God for help in my accompaniment of those around me. Whether it be with a student during my office hours or with a friend over dinner, there is an ever-creeping tendency to despair these days. Witnessing the current strife throughout the world and experiencing the seeming uncertainty of what is within our control, my students and friends are often left defeated, while I am left searching for words to console them with.
So, Christ’s words to the paralytic waiting at the pool initially confuse me. I can imagine the eye rolls or raised eyebrows if I were to echo Jesus’s question to my students and friends. “Do you want to be made well?” Of course they do. Who wouldn’t?
I don’t believe Jesus asked the paralytic this question to simply exercise naming his desires. Rather, I believe the paralytic’s answer reveals a deeper truth Christ wishes to reveal, that hope and imagination go hand in hand. Our capacity to hope is fed by our ability to imagine what is possible, what is redeemable, what is curable. Let us all pray for the grace to imagine anew what might be possible in our world and in our own lives.
—Noah Banasiewicz, SJ, is a Jesuit scholastic and lecturer in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago.
Prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
—Peace Prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi