“Jesus said to him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’”
To be made well. It is something that everyone wishes for when they fall ill or suffer from a longterm illness or condition for which there is no cure. The desire to be made well is a desire that springs from within the deepest parts of our being; we want to be made whole as a human being, to have the ability to move freely and to exercise our free will through the movement of our bodies. The desire to be made well is often thought of in the most immediate terms – in the wellness of the body. The desire is to appear strong, to have the appearance of being a person that is complete and able to do the things that everyone is able to do. But, the first reading of this desire leaves much unattended that is equally important to the well-being of humanity. The desire for wellness can also be thought of as a desire for wholeness throughout the human person. It is a desire to have wholeness not only in body but also wholeness in spirit and in mind. We desire to be complete and to have our dignity restored as a person created in the image of God.
The question that Jesus asks of the man is a question that we might think we should take as our own. It is a question that reflects our need to feel helpful, needed, wanted by others. As we survey the landscape of creation, it does not take long to see the truth of what living in a tragic, fallen creation means. With just a cursory glance of our surroundings, we can identify people that are struggling with the affliction of poverty, disease, malnutrition, physical disabilities, mental disabilities, infectious diseases, terminal illness….
In this scene, Jesus witnesses the same tragic reality of creation. Jesus sees a man that is struggling with a physical affliction. The man sits by a pool intended for healing and wants to move into the waters “when they are stirred up” to find the healing that he desires so deeply. Jesus enters into the scene, witnesses the tragic condition of the man, and extends the grace of God flowing through the power of the Spirit to the man that is in front of him. Jesus enters into the tragic reality of creation in an effort to reconcile humanity to God through that same Spirit that abides in us, adopted children of God. It is the same Spirit that enables us to cry out, “Abba! Father!” that moves through Christ and empowers Jesus to achieve the mission the Father sent him on – to restore the dignity of humanity by walking a life of servanthood that we are able to witness. Continue reading
A few nights ago, I attended a small group discussion of Plato’s Meno in an effort to explore the depths of virtue and what Plato’s text had to teach us about it. The beginning of the text begins with Meno asking Socrates if virtue can be taught or is a result of practice or if it is possessed by men by nature or some other way. As the text goes, the reader is left wondering what the overarching nature of virtue is and if there is a single way of defining virtue that would also be true of all things which we would label as virtuous. The text itself provides the reader no direct answer but leads the reader to think about the nature of virtue itself. The exercise of reading the text can be a frustrating one because it does not take you from point A to point B in a way that you are able to point back to the text for an operating definition of virtue. Instead, you finish the text without any clear answers and many more questions about the nature of virtue than perhaps you thought you had in the beginning.
A Journey In Faith 