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March 29, 2022
“Do you want to be well?” Scary question. But Jesus is good at asking scary questions. Like “who do you say that I am?” and “can you not stay awake with me for one hour?” What's scary about the question Jesus asks the man at the Bethesda Pool is that the answer should be obvious to any right-thinking person: “Yes! I want to be well!” That another answer is even possible seems, well, scary. To respond – “No, I don't want to be well” – points to a disease and a dis-ease deeper than anything physical. To fail to recognize that this response reveals a fundamental dis-ease is even scarier.
Yet, our postmodern culture seems bent on destroying any distinction between what nearly everyone everywhere once called wrong and what is now celebrated as not only right but heroic. How this shift came about takes us through several decades of “– isms” relentlessly eroding rationality and nurturing expressive individualism and emotivism. The end is/will be nihilism unto a return to widespread barbarism.
But our focus during Lent is on the question: do I want to be well? What is it to be well? For Christians, this question requires us to consider what it is to be “tuned into God,” that is, what it is to be on the path of perfection in Christ Jesus. “To be well” never implies that we are – right here and right now – perfect as is. That would be presumptuous. We can't know what “being perfect” is in our current imperfection. But it can mean that we have some idea of what perfection looks like given the life, death, and resurrection of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. He assumed our nature – fallen, sinful, irrational – so that we might be restored to the possibility of perfection and the clarity of right reason. The only survivable response to our culture's nihilism is this: “Look, you are well; do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”
