Ask
Victor Austin
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Church Publishing has contracted with me to write a volume in their "Journey Book" series. I'd like to share with you one of the entries that I have written. It has the title "Ask."
The man had been crippled for years. He lay on his bedroll near the pool where, when the water became disturbed, he might have been healed—if he had been able to get to the pool on time. Jesus, with his customary entourage, was passing by. The man cried out to Jesus for help. Jesus said to him: Do you want to be healed?
Does he want to be healed! What a bone-headed question. The guy is crippled. His life has a diameter that could be measured in feet. Does he want to be healed! Might as well ask if the slave wants her freedom, or if the light wants to shine. Who (we want to put the question)—who wouldn't want to be healed?
But a minute's thought reveals the answer. An infirmity, a condition of dependency, can become in a strange way comfortable. Although no one would want to enter into a condition of illness, once there, once a person has been infirm for some time, once one has endured life in a crippled state for years upon years—one can come to identify one's being with one's illness. Instead of, say, "I'm a person who has AIDS," we start to think, "I am an AIDS-person." Instead of "I am a person who can't walk," we think that our core identity is as a cripple. I have a disease, therefore I am.
Jesus calls to us from outside the comfort of our dependency and asks us if we want to be healed. To be healed means to take up our bedroll and walk. It means to walk away: to set up housekeeping, to become responsible for ourselves. We will have to join the common lot of Adam's descendents and work in order to live. And, even more, we will have to become responsible servants of Jesus and start to care for others, since none of us is a person unto ourselves.
To be healed means, in that aspect of our life where healing comes, that we cease being recipients of kindness (as far as our identity goes) and we take on the grown-up, healed identity of grantors of kindness. Jesus' question could thus be rephrased: Do you want to leave behind your dependency and become more fully a human being, with responsibility and power to care for others as, heretofore, others have cared for you?
And if you want that, you have to ask for it. Jesus makes the man who has been crippled ask, precisely, for his healing.
The story poses for each of us a very precise question. What, precisely, would we like to be healed of? Some of us have physical ailments for which, yes, we would like to have healing. Others of us may think of spiritual conditions (let's not be too quick to call them "sins"), aspects of our personality that are not altogether beneficial to others and yet we are loathe to have them changed. It would mean, we might say, growing up.
For it is easy, it is the work of an instant, to proclaim that we regret we carry grudges around with us. But if Jesus offered us healing from our grudge-bearing habits, we might well hesitate at the cost. There is a certain pleasure that one gets from carrying a grudge, just as one can enjoy picking at a scab. Keep picking, of course, and the wound will never heal (and the pleasure of picking will never go away).
Do you want to be healed? Funny, Jesus, that you should ask that question. . . .
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