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Scripture: John 5:1-8 

There are plenty of stories in the Bible about people who are suffering. For people like me who have a melancholy disposition, there is a special power inherent to these stories; they illustrate Jesus' ability to identify with people where they were. Through these stories, we learn that God speaks to us in our particular situations, whatever they may be.

Certainly the paralytic we read about in the fifth chapter of John, a man who has been waiting by a pool that presumably (if he could enter it) could heal him, is one such story. The thirty-eight years he had waited for someone to help him into the healing waters had, no doubt, left him discouraged both about himself and the people who continually walked past him.

Jesus’ response upon encountering this man may at first seem strange. He asks the paralytic, "Do you want to be made well?" Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, pastor of the St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, a congregation that has developed innovative programs for revitalizing its community, notes that this question is indeed absurd. We know that Jesus knows the paralytic had been waiting by the pool for a long time in the hope of being healed. Of course he wanted to be made well!

In response to Jesus' question, the paralytic offered two excuses: there was no one to help him in, and others had gotten into the water ahead of him-certainly reasonable explanations. These excuses, however, did not answer the essential issue of concern to Jesus. Did the paralytic want to be made well? If Jesus was looking for clues as to the man's motivation (or lack thereof), none can be divined from this response.

So Jesus changed tactics. He issued the paralytic a direct command: "Stand up, take your mat, and walk." "Stand up" was a pretty strong and perhaps even cruel command to issue to a man who had not walked for thirty-eight years, but the Revised Standard Version's translation is even stronger than the NRSV's; in the RSV, Jesus told the man to "rise." Rev. Youngblood notes that "rise" is an interesting word for Jesus to use in this situation because it is a reflexive verb-no one can "raise" the paralytic. If this man is going to "rise," he will do so through his own volition.

Indeed the paralytic did rise, take up his mat, and walk-just as Jesus told him to do. Traditionally, this episode is linked to the ten verses that follow, an episode in which Jesus is criticized for healing on the Sabbath. But the scene where Jesus "heals" the paralytic stands on its own and can tell us much about what it means to help another person. What does the interaction between Jesus and the paralytic tell us about helping and healing people whom we encounter, or about being helped by others?

Maybe Jesus was administering a kind of divine tough love. He meets a paralytic whose record of helping himself is pretty poor and tells him to buck up and pull himself up by his bootstraps, and the man heals himself. In this interpretation, the idea that all people need to heal and help themselves is an in-depth critique of their failings in life. One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons has Calvin telling Hobbes that his New Year's resolution for helping other people is to tell everyone he knows what he hates about them and how they need to change. But this interpretation doesn't seem to fit with what we know otherwise about Jesus and his ministry; the episodes in which Jesus heals people without any comment that could be taken by anyone to be condemnation are much more typical. 

Perhaps this episode tells us that people who are in need of help and healing cannot cure themselves, that our call is to go into the world to find supposedly helpless people to heal-by force if necessary. There are certainly many instances in Scripture in which Jesus heals people who never could have helped themselves. But if Jesus' intention was to heal the paralytic on his own, then why did Jesus command him to rise (or stand himself up) and walk?

We still have to ask ourselves, Who healed this paralytic? I think that this text is ambiguous, and intentionally so. We read in verse nine that he was healed (passive voice), although the text does not explicitly say that Jesus healed him. Jesus ordered the paralytic to rise, and the paralytic offered no argument. Was it the paralytic's effort that caused his own healing or Jesus' divine power that did what the paralytic could not do?

The answer, I think, is both. The text purposely makes the answer to this question somewhat of a mystery, but it seems clear that the paralytic's healing can be ascribed to his obedience to Jesus’ order and Jesus’ ability to administer healing. But where does Jesus' power stop and the paralytic's effort start? The text doesn't say.

Why did Jesus want the paralytic to participate in his own healing? Certainly Jesus could have forced healing on the man (perhaps by levitating the paralytic off the mat), but doing so would have denied the paralytic his freedom and dignity. The healing would have been Jesus' work alone and might have caused the paralytic to feel like he was inept and helpless. Jesus knew that the paralytic needed not only physical healing, but also spiritual healing as well. By allowing the paralytic to participate in a healing act that Jesus could have done himself, Jesus restored both the man's body and his sense of self-worth.

This is as it should be. Jesus’ healing strategy was neither paternalistic nor judgmental-rather, he believed that this man carried some latent ability to bring about his own healing if some assistance were provided. In our lives, we all find ourselves on a continuum between being able to help and needing help-but we are rarely if ever completely omnipotent or helpless at any given time. Jesus limited himself, but we are inherently limited. We are also endowed with abilities, however. We need guidelines for living out our faith by working as partners with people we can help and people who can help us.

Upon meeting this paralytic waiting beside a pool for thirty-eight years, Jesus knew that the man could be entrusted with a part of his own healing. How often do we make the same assumptions about others? When we are in a position to assist another person, how often do we assume incompetence or slothfulness? How often have others made the same assumptions about us?

As Christians, we all want to serve God, and helping others is one of the ways that we worship God; but when we help others, we must be careful to respect their autonomy and capabilities to help themselves-we honor neither God nor the other person when we treat him or her as incompetent. Likewise, we must be ready to accept help from others when it is needed and offered-when we fail to do so we deny others opportunities for service. 

In the summer of 1994 I helped plan and administer a two-week study tour of U.S. community economic development efforts for fifteen South Africans seeking to rebuild their country after the all-race election. Our country's experience in this area has often been bad-for many years "solutions" to the economic problems of communities have been proposed by economists and policy-makers without any involvement from the communities in question. For far too long it has been assumed that poor people are unwilling or unable to help themselves, but they are starting to create their own plans for economic revitalization; and these efforts are often successful. The planners of the conference, most of whom had been involved with such work for many years, wanted to share the United States' experience with our guests. 

So, wanting to impress our guests, we took them to visit the most successful examples of communities that have started to fight back from extreme poverty. In many of these communities, new homes and businesses are replacing burned-out buildings and empty lots. The South Africans met with church and community leaders, forward-thinking bankers, and visionary government officials. All of these people, with some justification, felt as if they had a good understanding of what kinds of economic development worked and wanted to share this knowledge with the South Africans. 

The conference went well, but we were convinced that the South Africans were leaving with an inaccurate understanding of the United Sates and our community development efforts. There is, after all, so much that remains to be done in this country, and we have made (and continue to make) many mistakes.

We worried for naught. On the last day of the study tour, the South Africans were asked about what they had seen and experienced. Their evaluations were generally positive, and they indicated that they had learned much in two weeks. But one person burst any pretense of omnipotence when he commented in his evaluation of the study tour: "They don't know everything."

"They don't know everything"? I thought, Who is the "they" in this statement? Was it the community development leaders, government officials, bankers, or even (God forbid) the planning team? Of course, everyone involved (including the South Africans) had gaps in their knowledge and abilities. We all possessed part of the "truth" about community investment, but not all of it. In short, we in the United Sates could offer some help-but the South Africans could and should be entrusted with their own social healing and economic restoration.

We are inherently limited creatures. There will be many times when we are in a position to help a person or a group. There will be other times when we will need to accept the help of others. Both Jesus and the paralytic give us some clues as to how the helper-helpee relationship should exist.

From Jesus, we learn that it is important to respect the dignity and self-worth of others and that needing help does not mean a person is helpless. The paralytic teaches us that individuals generally possess some ability to heal themselves and can do so with the right environment and encouragement. Our efforts at building real Christian communities depend on how well we are able to live out both roles at different times in our lives.