by James Martin
Instead, I would be grateful just to finish theology studies, which I was able to do by asking my professors if I could take exams orally and turn in handwritten papers. Fortunately, all of them were open to that proposal, and I was able to finish my studies and enjoy them. (My friends also lent me their class notes when I couldn’t use a pen.)
These days I deal with this persistent problem, as do many who live with far more serious chronic illnesses—by managing it. A combination of stretching, massage, and swimming helps. But from time to time, when I spend too much time typing, it flares up and I use voice-activated software to help me write.
Why am I bringing this up? Certainly this condition is not debilitating, much less life-threatening. It’s nothing like the sickness that kept the paralyzed man on his mat for thirty-eight years by the Pool of Bethesda. And it’s nothing like the serious illnesses so many people—maybe you—struggle with.
But this decades-long struggle is an entrée to the world of sadness, discouragement, and even the despair that attends illness.
Over the years, I have come to know many people living with chronic illnesses, painful ailments, and terminal diseases. And I’ve seen not only the grace of acceptance, but the overpowering, intensified, bottomless, passionate, almost infinite longing for healing. What can compare to a person’s desperate desire to be healed from a serious illness? What can compare to a person’s longing to be “made whole” physically? What can compare to the unquenchable thirst for the end of physical pain? This is true not only in cases of physical ailments and debilitation, but in emotional and spiritual ones. Some of my friends and acquaintances have been plagued by psychological problems, and their desire for release is just as intense as that of someone with a long-term physical illness. We all want to be “made whole,” like the man on the mat.
Over the past decade, I’ve also been privileged to accompany pilgrims to the shrine of Lourdes, which I described earlier. Like the paralyzed man who sat by the pool of Bethesda, millions of pilgrims come annually to bathe in the waters at Lourdes, driven by the same thirst for healing.
Only sixty-seven cures at Lourdes have been authenticated. That is, there are copious reports from physicians attesting to serious illnesses that were once there, but are now, following a visit to Lourdes, gone. But other kinds of cures happen by those waters: emotional healings that come from being among others who suffer, spiritual healings that come from a consoling conversation, and smaller physical healings that are not documented, but that I have seen. The people who journey there on pilgrimage are hopeful. They live from a place of hope and faith.
During my very first visit to Lourdes, as I waited to enter the baths and later as I plunged myself in the icy spring waters, I prayed for healing from my carpal-tunnel problems. Then I made another prayer in the grotto where St. Bernadette Soubirous saw her visions. I prayed as hard as I could and promised that if I were healed, I would ever after write only what would glorify God. The next day I woke up, stretched out my hands, and with a sigh realized that I had not been healed.
Lately, two people very close to me have suffered bouts with cancer. Both were required to undergo surgery; both were treated with chemotherapy and radiation. Both also shared their experiences of God with me. Both reported, around roughly the same time in their illness—at the beginning of the treatment—a palpable sense of God’s presence in their lives, which manifested as a sudden onset of calm. Often we are more open to God’s presence in our lives when we are more vulnerable, and with our defenses down God can more easily break into our lives.
But in the past few years I’ve come to believe that, just as Jesus did with the paralyzed man at the pool, perhaps God seeks out those in special need of care. A few years ago I might have said that God is equally present to each of us. But it seems that God somehow moves closer to those who need help, as Jesus did with the man who had no one to help him. So maybe it’s not surprising that some people report God’s special presence during difficult times, when we are more open and God seems to move closer.
One friend undergoing cancer treatments told me that after an experience of God’s peace, she found it helpful to return to that “place” in herself where God had given her calm and try to “live from there.” Rather than move toward discouragement over her illness, she would return to the calm that she felt was a gift from God. Though she didn’t always feel the same sense of God’s presence, she could return to the memory of grace.
There is, however, another place for the sick person. There are times when the suffering person feels that nothing can change, that all is hopeless, that the pain will never end, that a “normal way of life” is no longer possible. Even though I have not suffered from a terminal illness or a life-threatening condition, I do know that place. I have spent time there, and I sometimes find myself returning to the place of discouragement and, sometimes, despair.
The paralyzed man may have lived in this dark place for many years. Perhaps this is the main reason why Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be made well?” Likewise, the man may have defined himself primarily through his illness. Jesus might also be saying to him, “Are you ready to let go of your identity as ‘the paralyzed man’?”
The longer I meditate on this poignant story, the more I believe that William Barclay’s explanation is apt. Barclay says that Jesus’s question is not as foolish as it may sound. The paralytic lying by the pool might have been living in a “passive and dull despair.” Who knows if he had been chronically depressed or had given up hope altogether? “He wanted to be healed, though he did not see how he ever could be since he had no one to help him,” says Barclay. “The first essential [step] toward receiving the power of Jesus is to have intense desire for it. Jesus says: ‘Do you really want to be changed?’ If in our inmost hearts we are well content to stay as we are, there can be no change for us.”10
Jesus is asking the man, “Have you given up hope?” Jesus is asking the man if he still has faith.
God asks the same question to those of us who enjoy perfect physical health, but who may have given up in other areas. A broken marriage, a miserable work environment, and overwhelming financial difficulties can lead us to despair. We can experience a spiritual paralysis that needs to be healed. But buried deep down under the despair is hope.
Hope is like the Pool of Bethesda. For years that place was thought to be lost, then just a myth. For years it was covered by dirt and gravel and trash. Perhaps it existed once, people thought, but no more. But it was always there, waiting to be uncovered, waiting to be restored, waiting to be seen again. It took work, but it was found.
This is how God comes to us—asking if we still want healing, if we still believe, if we still have faith.
Even while we dwell in despair, God excavates our hope and asks us, “Do you want to be made whole?”
* * *
THE HEALING AT THE POOL OF BETHESDA
John 5:1–18
* * *
After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” 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 making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who
it was, for Jesus had disappeared into the crowd that was there. Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
* * *
CHAPTER 17
Jericho
“He was trying to see who Jesus was.”
AS I MENTIONED A few chapters ago, during our time in Bethlehem we met up with a friendly cabdriver named Aziz. After we had spent a half hour in Shepherds’ Field, George and I plopped back into the car. Aziz asked if there were any churches we might like to see before we went to our ultimate destination, the Church of the Nativity.
“Well,” I ventured, “how far is Jericho?”
George looked at me quizzically.
“I want to see Zacchaeus’s tree,” I explained.
On a retreat a few years before I had read the story of Zacchaeus, the diminutive man who climbs a sycamore tree to see Jesus as he passed through Jericho. After I mentioned this passage in Luke’s Gospel to my retreat director, he gave me a photo of the “Zacchaeus tree,” by tradition the plant in question, which pilgrims still visited in Jericho. Though I wondered if the tree could possibly be two thousand years old, the photo helped me to picture the story more easily.
“Oh, Jericho is very near!” said Aziz. “On the way we will take a trip to Herodium.” George and I looked at each other blankly.
“Herodium!” Aziz said. “King Herod’s palace-fortress. Oh, people come from many countries to see it. It is beautiful. You will see! And it is a very short ride.”
George and I shrugged and nodded. After all, how many palace-fortresses do you get to see in life? And now for a big detour—the “very short ride” turned out to be a two-hour journey through the desert.
Let me tell you something about the Judean desert: it’s hot. When I used to read stories about Jesus’s time in the desert, I imagined it like the deserts I had once seen in New Mexico: filled with attractive sagebrush and vibrantly colored flowers, with the odd green iguana scampering across the picturesque landscape. Or the terrain in northern Kenya, where the hard red earth is still hospitable for green acacia bushes and thorn trees. The Judean desert is, by contrast, empty: chalky white, completely dry, stubbled with small rocks that cover miles of undulating hills. Aziz sped on. Occasionally we passed clusters of people huddled under tents or corrugated sheets of tin. “Bedouin,” said Aziz as he zipped over the smooth roads.
The highway followed the path of the “Old Roman Road,” which is the imagined setting of Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a traveler comes to the aid of a stranger who has been attacked by robbers on the way “down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Jesus’s listeners would probably have nodded as he told the story, easily picturing the vulnerability of a solitary traveler on this winding road.1
After a half hour I asked, “How far is Herodium?”
“Oh,” said Aziz, “very near!”
Presently we saw in the distance a rounded hilltop, the shape of an overturned soup bowl. “There,” he said. We slowly drove up the side of a mountain. Aziz parked.
“You go there,” he said, pointing to a narrow metal staircase that led up the hill.
When George and I got out of the car a sledgehammer of heat hit us. We started to climb the staircase.
Panting and sweating, we reached the top of the palace-fortress.
Herod the Great (73 BC to AD 4), ruler of Judea around the time of Jesus’s birth, is mainly known to New Testament readers as the king that sent the Magi (the Wise Men) to discover Jesus so that he could “go and pay him homage.” After finding Jesus, however, the Magi were warned in a dream not to return to Herod—who would later order the death of all the male children under age two in the area of Bethlehem as a way of eliminating the potential future rival. Joseph, Mary’s husband, was warned in a dream to flee to Egypt to avoid Herod’s murderous plots.2
Herod (whose appellation “the Great” is not used by everyone) also expanded the Second Temple in Jerusalem; the stones of the Western Wall, seen by pilgrims today, mark his construction. Indeed, whatever his many sins, Herod was a great builder. Among his largest projects was the city of Caesarea Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast; Herod was the first to use underwater cement to construct a breakwater, which created an immense harbor. (His son Herod Antipas, who succeeded him, was the Herod who questioned Jesus before his execution.)
Even with all that history, I hadn’t planned to see Herodium. But when we reached the top of the citadel, I was glad we did. From the rim of the mountain one could peer down into the ruins, which looked suitably Roman (Herod, although Jewish, was a client king controlled by Rome). A courtyard, a cistern, and various baths, including a caldarium, a “hot room,” all could be discerned in the colossal stones.
“Oh, good,” said George, “just what we need today. A hot room.”
After walking through the huge, empty underground cisterns and running into a group of boisterous Norwegian students, we set out for Jericho, which, I suspected from scanning the desolate landscape, was nowhere near where we were.
“On the way to Jericho,” said Aziz, back in the comfort of our air-conditioned car, “we shall visit St. George’s Monastery.” I flipped through the guidebook.
“What’s that?” whispered George.
“It is very beautiful. You will see!” said Aziz. “People come from everywhere to see it. There are still monks there.”
As we drove across the chalky landscape, I opened my guidebook to the description of the Monastery of St. George of Koziba: “Clinging to the steep cliff of the Wadi Qilt above a small garden with olive trees and cypresses, this perfect example of a MONASTERY IN THE JUDAEAN DESERT has always been famous for its hospitality, which, from the C6 [sixth century], has also been extended to women.”3
“Anything named St. George can’t be that bad,” said George. “What else does it say?”
Interesting legends attach to the locale. It was the place where Elijah stayed on his way to Sinai (the place, not the monastery obviously) and was tended to by ravens. It was the place where St. Joachim, the father of Mary, was supposed to have wept over his wife’s barrenness. (I didn’t need Jerome Murphy-O’Connor to pronounce on that legend.)
Then an alarming warning: “Hikers (who do not suffer from vertigo) can reach the monastery by a good path which follows an Herodian aqueduct.” Vertigo? Also: “It is not advisable to leave cars unattended.” Two things I wasn’t excited about: vertigo and danger.
Aziz cheerfully remarked, “It is located in the Valley of the Shadow of Death!”
George laughed. “Oh, then I definitely want to go.”
Later research would reveal that the location was indeed the traditional Valley of the Shadow of Death mentioned in Psalm 23. I looked out the window at the punishing landscape and could see why. I wondered how anyone in Jesus’s day (or ours) could even think about traversing this terrain.
Aziz pulled off the road and parked on a small rise. We emerged, once again into the stunning heat. Climbing to the edge of a rocky lookout, we met three Bedouin men, who stood beside their mangy camel. George and I peered across a deep, dry ravine and saw a minuscule cluster of sand-colored buildings with bright-blue roofs on the opposite side.
“There,” said Aziz, “St. George!”
The Bedouin men asked if we wanted to hire the camel for transport. We declined, foolishly.
We clambered down the steep rocky path and began our walk into the Wadi Qilt. Our very long, very hot walk. A camel laden with tourists passed us, its bells jingling. A man wearing shor
ts and climbing the other way, uphill, passed us wordlessly, panting loudly. After a few minutes of walking, George and I were bathed in sweat and took long drinks from our rapidly dwindling water bottles. The walls of the ravine were incised with small crosses.
After half an hour, we reached a ramshackle bridge that crossed the ravine. Above us, clinging to the hill like a swallow’s nest was St. George of Koziba Monastery, its sandy towers topped with powder-blue domes, in the Greek style. The monastery was destroyed in the seventh century by Persians, restored in the twelfth century by Crusaders, and gradually fell into ruin. The current structure was restored in the late nineteenth century.
After the punishing walk, I expected a hidden gem, an architectural jewel, a gorgeous monastery that would be an aesthetic reward for our pilgrimage. The Greek Orthodox church in Capernaum was such a place: a small space crammed with mosaics, bursting with color and light. But St. George’s monastery is a modest one, its chapel small and its artwork simple. After praying in the chapel for a few minutes, peering at some icons and lighting a few candles, we departed.
The trek back was even more grueling, as it was almost all uphill; we stopped several times just to catch our breath. It was the hottest I’ve ever been in my entire life, and that includes two years in East Africa. At one point I thought George was going to have a heart attack. At another point that I would faint. Between concerns about heart attacks and fainting, I thought of Jesus in the desert, and also how difficult it must have been for him and the disciples to walk from town to town. But later, when we recounted our overheated tale back at the PBI, someone pointed out that Jesus and the disciples probably traveled at night.
At one point George turned around, his face streaming with sweat. “Death . . . march,” he said between breaths.
I wondered aloud if we would go straight to heaven if we died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.