Still, I feel I owe it to the church to come back restored.
I had better explain.
Jesus defied the Sabbath conventions of his day. The scribes and Pharisees, like Delilah, kept trying to bind him up in elaborate snares, and Jesus, like Samson, kept throwing off the bindings with ease and disdain, as though so much singed thread. Here’s a man in the synagogue with a shriveled hand, lying directly in front of Jesus. They watch. Will Jesus flout their Sabbath regulations and heal him?
He does.
Here’s a woman shuffling her way into the meeting place, her shoulders a mound of skewed bone and twisted sinew. They watch. Will Jesus affront their dignity, brook their growing disapproval, and heal her?
He will.
These stories, like courtroom dramas, ooze with political intrigue. They crackle with caustic dialogue and bristle with sharp-edged retort. They’re spellbinding yarns. But what we sometimes miss is the human story.
The man. His hand a gift he never treasured until he lost it. One day he suffered an injury or an illness—a large stone lodged in the teeth of a harrow, maybe, and he reached down to pull it out, and the oxen lurched, and the hand was caught and mangled on the spikes. Or a cut on his arm, just a nick, really, got dirt in it, and two days later the wound erupted in a mess of pus and rawness. The infection throbbed down into nerve and marrow, and that hand crumpled in on itself and never came back. Or it could have been any number of things.
Now he hauls that hand around like a dense burl of wood he picked up to burn, like a fish he bought at the market to boil, cold and stiff with death. Only he can’t put it down, not ever. He’s had to develop all kinds of techniques for getting around it, to compensate for the absence of his hand’s use, the presence of its uselessness. A whole half of his body has grown thin and weak doing this, the other half strong and nimble.
There’s a man here.
And a woman. For eighteen years she’s been like this, stooped and twisted, at war with gravity. Her whole body lists earthward. Who knows how she got this way: Perhaps, turning to say good-bye to a friend, she tripped at the top of stone steps and tumbled to the pavement below, then never really got up again. Or maybe she has some rheumatoid ailment that, with each fresh flare-up, plucks her joints and sockets farther apart, grinds them sharper together, leaves her more misshapen? Jesus recognizes Satan’s work here: this has all the hallmarks of his cruelty, his sadism.
Eighteen years, and she still comes to synagogue every Sabbath, hauling her sickness with her. She lugs it on her back, drags it in her hips, hefts it in the soreness and stiffness of her knees. Eighteen years of this, and she still loves God. Maybe she has grandchildren. Maybe her prayers come down to one thing: to have enough straightness in her body, even just once, to hold those children, strong and close and gentle, to pull them into herself and press the wideness of her hands against the birdcages of their ribs.
Jesus sees them. In the midst of his pitched battle with the Pharisees and company, he never misses the man, the woman. He’s not just out to prove a point, force an issue, settle a score. This is more than a political showdown for him. This is more than some theological standoff.
These are men and women, real people, with stories and histories, with hopes and sorrows. Jesus sees them, and in that moment of seeing, the other issues at hand dissolve. Jesus becomes single-minded in his purpose: he means to restore.
A curious thing about restoration is that it doesn’t need doing. Strictly speaking, life carries on without it. Restoration is an invasion of sorts. It’s fixing something that’s broken, but broken so long it’s almost mended. This man, this woman—they’ve already adapted to their misfortunes, made all the necessary adjustments. Restoration meddles with what they’ve learned to handle, removes what they’ve learned to live with, bestows what they’ve learned to live without. Replacements have been found already, thank you all the same.
These people are doing fine just the way they are. They’ve learned to live this way. They’ve almost accepted it. They’ve taught themselves tricks to bypass it, to contain it. To utilize it, even. They’ve built lives around not being whole. They’ve learned, if not to welcome, at least not to spurn those things their sickness drags in with it. They’ve learned not to mourn the absence of those things it chases away. Secretly, perhaps, they have come to love their illness.
Sickness can actually steal the place of God. It can become the sick person’s center, the touchstone by which he defines himself. Illness is a tyrant with huge territorial ambitions. It is a seductress with large designs. It wants not only the sick person’s body. It wants his heart and mind also. It wants to be his all-consuming passion.
No wonder Jesus once asked a man he meant to heal, “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6). Maybe the man didn’t, strange as it sounds. Maybe his sickness had become his haven, his lover, his overlord. And no wonder Jesus was so responsive to any old beggar or leper or blind man who threw caution to the wind and outright begged for healing.
Not everyone wants to get well.
It’s the most natural thing to befriend your sickness, even, after long association, to depend upon it. Imagine any of the people Jesus heals. Their entire lives—their physical lives, for sure, but also their emotional and intellectual and relational lives—all have taken shape around their injuries or diseases. That man at the pool of Bethesda whom Jesus first asks if he wants to get well, for instance.
He’s been there thirty-eight years. His entire existence has narrowed down to the daily drama of his lifelong suffering: the sores on his undersides, the ghostly sensations flitting along his nerves. He likely has a fermenting resentment toward those whose lot seems a margin better than his own, and a smug disdain toward those whose lot appears slightly worse. At night, sleeping on some narrow cot, he must dream of this place, its people, its shapes, its textures: the old man, rotund and dewlapped, stretched across the wet stones, muttering and shaking his heavy jowls; the young girl, rawboned and waxy skinned, with a voice faint as a handrubbing cloth; the sound when the water churns, like big boulders falling at a distance; the sudden billowing at the pool’s surface, an eruption of froth and steam, and the tumult of bodies heaving, flailing, lurching, as each rushes to find a place before the others do.
Thirty-eight years of monotony. Thirty-eight years of futility. Thirty-eight years of self-pity. Thirty-eight years of poisonous envy and secret pride. Thirty-eight years of never being able to work, travel, make love, cook, care for children, or fix an oxcart. Thirty-eight years of life without options. Thirty-eight years of life without obligations. He carries burdens, yes, but one he’s never carried is the weight of others’ expectations.
For thirty-eight years.
And then Jesus shows up one day and changes all that. One word from Jesus, and all thirty-eight years fall behind the man, vanish in a blink, and a future he stopped daring to imagine stands vivid and solid before him. He can do all the things he never could and ever wanted to do. He can do them here and now—for Jesus’s miracle joins healing and therapy in one terse command. Muscles spongy from years of idleness suddenly grow taut and supple. Bones spindly from never bearing the body’s full weight turn instantly thick and sturdy. Balance all topsy-turvy from chronic proneness immediately calibrates for walking, running, dancing, leaping.
And now the man can work and pay taxes. And now he can marry and take on domestic responsibilities. And now he can build a home and fix its roof when it leaks and shim the door when it skews crooked. And now he relinquishes the unique status suffering bestows on a man and enters the anonymity that comes with being well. Now he loses the strange privilege of sickness and takes up the everyday obligations of health. He’s just like everybody else now. We expect things of him.
Do you want to get well?
Restoration shocks the system. It alters not just our health—it alters our world. All that we establish to placate or indulge or accommodate our sickness disintegrates with those stark words,
“Take up your mat, and go.”
Do you want to get well?
Do I want to get well? That’s a question I’ve wrestled with on sabbatical. If I believe I’m to go back restored, in what ways am I sick now? And how have I grown content with that?
I try to control too much, is one. I know how this happened— there was a season when the church seemed to require it. There was a time it seemed that to be at the center of all decision making was the shape strong leadership took. But even if that’s so, explanation is no excuse, and the reality is that now I meddle in too many things. And there must be something in me, some flaw, some weakness, that rises to meet the challenge in just this way. Other pastors I know have, in the face of many demands, committed the opposite sin: they’ve become dangerously passive. My sickness manifests as control. So it’s one area where I seek restoration.
I want to return to my work slow to speak, quick to listen, slow to become angry. I want to hide more things in my heart and ponder them there. I want to return with a sharper instinct to pray, to watch and wait, and with less impulsiveness to act straightaway. I want a stronger conviction that, though God welcomes my honest efforts, he manages quite fine without my Peter-like outbursts of ill-conceived enthusiasm and then sudden loss of nerve, my opinion swapping and bully tactics, my reckless volunteerism to fix things for God and then desperate evacuation when things go wrong.
Part of Jesus’s regimen for me, I’ve discovered, is holding my tongue. This is easier right now, during these months, because I’m in daily contact with fewer people—my family, mostly—and they actually require an opinion about or even need my hand in few things. It’s something of a shock, realizing how much my family has its own culture and economy—preparing meals, washing walls, shopping for groceries and gym shoes and mouthwash, practicing piano, playing games after school, visiting friends—that I’ve been pretty much oblivious to and that exists independent of my coming and going. I observe this now with wonder, admiration, some guilt.
So I hold my tongue and realize how the world hums right along without my commentary on it. It manages just fine without my managing of it. It doesn’t just survive without me: it—could this be?— appears to do a little better, even, without my incessant tinkering.
There is a deeper lesson here. God is teaching me quietness of heart. I didn’t realize, until I started experiencing this, how clamorous and anxious my heart generally is. Inside, I’m a schemer. A constant chattering goes on in my head. I mutter to myself like Gollum. But as I quiet down, my heart does as well. Quietness allows room for God to speak or to be silent. Both are gifts. Quietness stops crowding the Holy Spirit, elbowing aside God’s gentle presence. The end of striving makes room for dwelling.
Which leads to another thing. I long to get back to a place I was at a few years ago, where every day I heard God. I was more vigilant then, I think, more expectant and hungry. I was the hunter hunted. I was the man in the woods who depended on the keenness of his senses in order to eat and not be eaten. My pursuit of God had an end-of-the-world kind of desperation. Like Rachel crying to Jacob, “Give me children or I die,” I cried to God, “Give me your Spirit or I die.” I was spiritually lean, wily, stealthy, alert, and yet also vulnerable, wide open. A child and warrior both.
Somewhere I got dull. The child got old, the warrior timid. Again, I think I know how this happened—a combination of growing responsibility and increased privilege—but so what? Somewhere, I started to play things safe. I started to fall back on tried, tired methods of doing things and stopped asking God each day whether I should fight or not fight, go up or go down. I got formulaic in my thinking. I got hidebound in my routines. In the spring, when kings go out to war, I started to stay home, wander bored and restless on the palace roof, looking for something to make me feel young again.
Do I want to get well?
Yes.
I think.
Sort of.
Maybe.
I’m not sure.
The problem here is that nakedness and hunger are painful. They are like an unclosed wound. And God is relentless, always pressing that wound. He is always calling us higher up the mountain, deeper down in the valley, farther out on the water. And some days, I just want life to be easier. My wife said to me awhile back, “Sometimes I want a holiday from the burden of being made holy. A little time off from God.” Or as my daughter Sarah asked when she was four, “Is it true God sees us all the time? Even in our hearts? Even what we’re thinking?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” she said and looked stricken.
And yet my response is the same as Peter’s when Jesus asked his disciples if they, like so many others, wanted to leave him: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
I have nowhere else to go.
Yes, I want to get well.
But you don’t need a sabbatical for God to restore you, or else most everyone’s in trouble.
Sabbath will do.
Jesus’s favorite day to heal and restore was the Sabbath. He deemed that day most appropriate. “Should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” Jesus asks his critics, who think this kind of healing is better done midweek, along with the laundry and hay baling and stone quarrying (Luke 13:16).
Eighteen long years. Jesus says that, uses that adjective: long. He knew. A year in captivity is longer—darker, bleaker—than a year in freedom. A year in sickness is painstakingly slow, each day an ordeal.
So Jesus isn’t working, he’s liberating. That’s his language too. “Woman,” he announces, “you are set free from your infirmity” (Luke 13:12, emphasis mine). The religious rulers accuse Jesus of working here, but this woman is the one who’s been working. She’s had to slave without ceasing beneath her affliction. She’s the one cursed liked Sisyphus to this unending toil, only instead of pushing a boulder, she’s hauling one. It’s on her back. What Jesus does has nothing to do with work as it’s commonly conceived.
He sets her free. He liberates her.
Liberation is dangerous. It’s costly. It’s high drama and high stakes. It calls for enormous risk, superhuman effort, steely nerves. There’s an enemy in the way, a vicious enemy, heavily armed, not to be trifled with. Of all the words we might use to describe what Jesus does here, work isn’t one of them.
Setting free isn’t work.
But being set free can be.
You have to want to get well.
U.S. News & World Report featured, on the eve of 2004, a series of articles about people to watch in the coming year and beyond. One was Cynthia Kenyon, a researcher at the University of California whose specialty is the genetic makeup of worms. Cynthia might have spent her entire life in the obscurity of her lab work, rummaging through the molecular intricacies of creepy crawlers, except she stumbled on an astonishing discovery: the gene in worms that turns off—or significantly dials down—the aging process. Daf-2 is the switch, a tiny protein factory that generates the equivalent of insulin.
In 1993, when she first discovered this, she and her team were able to double the life span of a single worm. In late 2003, they increased a worm’s life span sixfold, the equivalent of five hundred human years. She’s moved her research to mice, with promising though not quite as stunning results. Cynthia’s hope—in her own lifetime, of course—is to develop a therapy for humans. “If our company could make a pill,” she says, meaning a pill that dramatically extends longevity, “everyone would want it.”
“I want,” Cynthia adds, “to take the pill.”1
I’m not sure everyone wants it. I don’t. It strikes me that, of all the ways God wants to restore us, keeping us earthbound for centuries, genetically altered to live longer lives but otherwise stuck as our same ragged and haggard selves, isn’t one of them.
I’m having enough trouble, in these three score and ten years or so I’ve been allotted, just staying w
ell. I’m struggling as it is to become and remain and grow as a man after God’s own heart.
I don’t want to live twice as long, or six times that. It is enough, a simple and sufficient prayer, for Jesus just to make me whole.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Wanting to Get Well
A person with a terminal illness is a study in hope. The death sentence handed him becomes, in most cases, an impetus to life. He starts fighting hard, digging in, refusing to be shaken off with pat answers and red tape and gloomy verdicts. He finds ways to dismantle bureaucratic stone walls, to end-run endless committees. He jumps queues and crashes lines. He finagles backdoor access to specialists. If there is a treatment available somewhere—Switzerland, Mexico, New Zealand—he devises a way to get there. If there is some untested or unconventional product available, he makes almost black-market deals to procure it.
This doesn’t surprise me. I might, I reckon, do the same if I or someone I loved was diagnosed with such an illness.
What surprises me is how this impulse rarely carries over into the spiritual. The impulse is stirred, deep and strong, when our physical well-being or survival is threatened. But when it has to do with our spiritual well-being—when we are faced with chronic, perhaps terminal, sickness of heart—it hardly flickers.
Physical sickness we usually defy.
Soul sickness we often resign ourselves to.
A woman whose gossip has irreparably damaged every relationship she’s had? She usually looks for one more person to whom she can tell the real story. A man whose soul has been parched for ten years, who maintains his religious commitments out of dull habit or vague guilt? He is often content in his misery. A teenager whose waywardness is destroying everything he once cherished? He typically looks for someone to blame.
The Rest of God Page 16