Tuesday, March 21, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
I am just a fruit tree, though my story’s seldom told
Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticos. In these porticoes lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.
I love the water. All my life I’ve felt like a dolphin, sliding around the water, bending my body and holding my breath. What a life, to be swimming like a fish, goggles on, the water clear like glass. Never to come out to the dust and dirt again.
Or, I could be a crippled man, staring over at the water just unable, for soon to be forty years, to reach it in time to grasp its supernatural superstitious healing miracle when the water is stirred. I cannot be healed. I will not be healed. I am lost, I am forsaken. And swimming? Who wants to swim? I just want to be healed.
Or at least I thought I did. Maybe it’s better to let that hope fade a bit. Nothing has happened for so long. My brother tells me to keep believing, keep fighting. My mother tells me to learn a little acceptance. Healing turns out to be complicated. How do I approach the pool?
When Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had been ill for a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be well?”
I did not know Jesus. Who are you, I asked? How can you ask me such a question? Of course I want to be healed. But I don’t believe anymore. I have lost my faith in this pool.
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 there before me.
Jesus cocked his head and looked straight into my eyes. He spoke the words of Zephaniah, our prophet.
The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing. I will rescue the lame, He says. I will gather the exiles. I will give them praise and honor in every land where they have suffered shame.
You don’t need this pool. You only need me. So get up. Let’s go. Everything changes now.
And he stood.
The angel brought me back to the entrance of the temple of the Lord, and I saw water flowing out from beneath the temple toward the east.
When I was in eighth grade, I passed my junior life saver’s test at Lincoln Lakes. I could rescue others officially now. A week or so later Mom and her friend Norma brought me and my friend Gary to the lake to swim. They sat on a beach blanket and talked. We wrestled with each other in the water. I jumped on Gary’s shoulders and dove into the lake. My head hit the ground hard and I came up screaming.
In seconds the lifeguard was beside me in the water. I recognized him; he was a high school student in my class. He was a senior life guard, and he helped save my life. A stretcher was brought down to the beach, and I was taken to the hospital. Nothing broken in my spinal column. No nerves severed. No paralysis. I was free to swim again, whenever I wanted to.
It took a few days. Gary felt guilty and eventually became a physical therapist in Madisonville, Kentucky, Margaret’s home town. I did not lose my love for the water. Neither, I think did Ezekiel:
There was now a river through which I could not wade; for the water had risen so high it had become a river that could not be crossed except by swimming. He brought me to the bank of the river, where he had me sit.
I imagine Ezekiel throwing off his clothes and jumping in. I would have jumped in, I think. And been happy.
The leaves of these fruit trees shall not fade, nor their fruit fail. They shall be watered by the flow from the sanctuary.
(Ezekiel 47, Psalm 46, Psalm 51, John 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
