"Do you want to be made well?" Jn 5: 1-16

"On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food.  Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month...Their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing."  Ezekiel 47: 12

"Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea."  Ps. 46

"Do you want to be made well?"  Jn 5: 6

The flow of Spirit in our lives is a subtle and hidden work of healing and happiness.  From Ezekiel's vision we hear her described as a river that flows beneath the threshold of the temple eastward and southward, feeding and healing all of life.  We have a sense that this threshold of the temple is at the heart of each and every one of us, of every human being, as a potential for joining Christ in this self-giving, life-giving flow for the good of the world.  The river, he goes on to describe, feeds the trees on either side of its banks, and leads to the sea where it freshens what would otherwise be dead waters.  We flow with the whole of creation, of the earth, and are made of her elements: water and earth, to freshen, heal and feed the people, places, and world we find ourselves in right at this moment.

Fear holds us back from going with the flow.  We can get stuck, trapped, or frozen along the way.  God gently calls us back in the flow, like Jesus coming upon the man by the pool of water "Beth-zatha", who's been ill thirty-eight years.  Jesus asks him as he asks us "Do you want to be made well?"  For how long have I been trapped or stuck in fear?  For how long have I blamed others or made excuses for my paralysis holding me back from plunging into the pool of life? 

Jesus doesn't wait for the man to say 'yes'.  He listens to him compassionately.  How do I listen to my friends or strangers in need? Do I listen with judgment or with love? Jesus doesn't help the man into the pool of Bethzatha. Jesus is the river of life.  He says, "Pick up your mat and walk.", and the man does just that, on the holy day of rest for the Jews.

Drinking in his new life of wholeness and self-gift, this man walks towards the temple, towards God, not knowing who it was who 'cured' him!  He is free, whole and walking in the flow of life for the first time in thirty eight years!  The legalists see him, and trapped in their lives of trying to please and to secure themselves a place in God's house, they try to confine the man in their own traps once again with their empty words.  "You can't do this on the Sabbath." they insist, and they want to bring down whoever is telling him to walk and carry his mat (the symbol and reminder of his years of groundless fear and waiting). 

Jesus finds him in the temple and declares himself as the One, the Living Water, who's made him well.  Jesus tells him, "Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you." 

The cured man, not knowing this Jesus as a friend - not knowing him well enough to see through the strained and myopic hearts of those who want to harm Jesus - goes and tells them Jesus made him well.  And they, in their ignorance persecute Jesus for giving life and for being rest on the Sabbath.   

Ezekiel's vision of the river has us walking in first ankle-deep, then knee-deep and ever deeper into the River of Life - into Christ's heart.  The deeper we go, the more we can be sure we will be persecuted.  The deeper we go, the more our fruit becomes food and our leaves healing for a world of blind, lame and paralyzed others.  A thousand more steps and we will be in the flow of the Eternal.