Later on Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now at the Sheep-Pool in Jerusalem there is a place with five colonnades. Its name in the language of the Jews is Bethesda. In these colonnades there lay a crowd of sick people, blind, lame and paralysed. Among them was a man who had been crippled for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and was aware that he had been ill a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to recover?" "Sir," he replied, "I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is disturbed, but while I am moving, someone else is in the pool before me." Jesus answered, "Rise to your feet, take up your bed and walk." The man recovered instantly, took up his stretcher and began to walk.
(John 5:1-9)
There can be no healing until the sick person wants to be healed. This does not simply mean that he should have no hostility to the one who ministers to him, remembering how hostility blocks absolutely the healing power of the Holy Spirit. It means that the afflicted person's will must be directed positively and unequivocally to the path of recovery: he must desire healing with his undivided heart and mind. But what is this will that Jesus challenged in the man who been crippled for so long? The man would surely have protested his desire to get well if he had been challenged at any period of his illness. It is easy enough to make glib affirmations of an almost self-evident type; for who would not want to become healthy again after a long period of infirmity? But the heart is the most deceitful of all things, desperately sick and almost unfathomable (Jer. 17:9). Indeed, the very concept of a free, autonomous will is dismissed out of hand by many psychologists and social scientists, for they know how imprisoned our responses are in emotional turmoil adverse conditioning from our earliest years, and the economic environment in which we have had to battle for survival. Yet if we have no personal freedom to choose a particular direction of progress, our lives become increasingly meaningless so that eventually there is no future ahead of any of us other than immediate sensual stimulation and superficial conviviality.
It is true that our actions are powerfully influenced by our environment. This includes the conditioning we had initially to undergo from the earliest period of our life onwards as part of our training to become socially acceptable, useful citizens. To it is added the group solidarity that is exacted as a price for our acceptance as members of our particular niche in society. Nevertheless, there is an inner spark in us all that responds to the ultimate values of existence. These can be summarized in the concept of integrity, which unites the platonic triad of beauty, truth and goodness into a composite whole. That which offends against aesthetic taste in the world of art, intellectual truth in the realm of learning, and goodness (or love) in human relationships strikes at the heart of the personality in which the spark of the soul, called the spirit, eternally burns. "The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it" (John 1:5); this statement is true as much of the spirit in all of us that is our point of contact with God as of God incarnate in Jesus who blazes the trail of truth and love to his own death. He says to Pilate, "My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this I was born: for this I came into the world, and all who are not deaf to truth listen to my voice" (John 18:37). It is from the point of truth in the depth of our personality that the authentic will emanates. It is free yet directed by the Holy Spirit to fulfil itself to its perfection.
Freedom necessitates choice. In the words of Deuteronomy 30:19: "I summon heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I offer you the choice of life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life and then you and your descendants will live." In the service of God there is perfect freedom, for we can be ourselves without shame or the need for justification when we give of ourselves in childlike faith to him. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, and because his nature is love, he accepts us as we are. Provided our will is directed to his service - and this enlightened will is the action of the spirit, which is the central core as well as the animating force of the personality - he raises us up to something of his own stature seen in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. It is the will deep in us that is the outer manifestation of the soul's action. It determines whether we remain slaves to the world's demands and our own conditioning or whether we respond to a nobler calling: to follow the path ahead of us that leads to a fulfilment of our personality in Christ.
Let it be said at once that not all conditioning is deleterious, nor are all the world's demands a hindrance to our development as fulfilled people. Without the training and teaching imposed on us during the formative years of our youth, we would not be able to cope with the society in which we are obliged to live and work. Without the assistance provided by the world around us we would not be able to survive for any length of time. Furthermore, not every impulse that comes from the soul is necessarily healthy; the spirit cannot err, being one with God, but the soul is a fallible agent. It learns in the hard school of life the essential lessons of humility, faith, sacrifice and love, so that eventually it places itself under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit who comes to its own spirit. Balance and order are the bases of all healthy living: the demands of society have to be integrated with the thrust of the personal will, so that our own fulfilment as people may be set in equilibrium with our duties to those around us. This is indeed the immediate purpose of life as well as its final end. It follows that in the end we have to be detached from all outer clinging for assurance and security, and find the centre within us from which the will can choose freely and definitively. In many people's lives, the will lies dormant until some dramatic, often cataclysmic, event demands an immediate conscious response. Then the will initiates the full reasoning process, guided always by the intuition, and a choice is made. This is one that may determine the future direction of the person's life: there may be a conscious opting for life rather than death for the first time in his experience, for the usual state of many of us is that of a sleep-walker until we are jolted to consciousness by the threat of destruction.
Why should one not wish to be healed, assuming there are no ulterior motives, such as the sordid attraction of financial compensation or sheer laziness? To be healed means that one has to return to the world once more and bear one's own responsibilities. One can no longer live in a shaded light where one can hide from the demands of society. In the healing act that prefixed this chapter, once the cripple had accepted Jesus' ministry, he at once became a centre of controversy. It happened that he was healed on the Sabbath when the Law proscribed any activity other than worship. This carrying of his bed on the Sabbath immediately put him beyond the pale of religious convention, and he had eventually to name the person who had healed him (John 5:10-15). At once he became a focus of disturbance in the community because of his association with the controversial teacher and minister of healing, Jesus of Nazareth. No longer could he lie concealed in the shadows of non-commitment. As he gave of himself to health once more, so he had to stand up and be counted: was his ultimate allegiance to God, made manifest in Jesus, or to the comfortable security of the community, ruled over by a theocracy of priests and doctors of the Law? To be associated with Jesus was to be put in fear of one's life as Peter was to discover some time later: he chose a thrice-repeated denial of his Lord to the possibility of accompanying him to the cross. And then he came to himself and wept bitterly for his own private betrayal of his true nature mirrored in Jesus Christ. Only then did the will of Peter show itself free and vibrant, as he dedicated the remainder of his life to following his Lord and giving of himself to all who would receive Jesus.
Health is ultimately in our own hands. God gives freely to all who seek, but we have to contain the gift and use it constructively. Once we have given of ourselves to God, a new way of life opens to us. Its three demands are prayer, service, and sharing with others. We can no longer lead the old thoughtless life of self-indulgence and unawareness of the needs of others; regression is tantamount to death.
Jesus was no sentimentalist. He spoke out directly against hypocrisy and dishonest dealing. In the instance of the cripple whom he had healed, Jesus warned him, now that he was well again, to leave his sinful ways, lest he suffered something worse (John 5:14). In this respect his teaching about the danger of re-infestation by an unclean spirit is especially apposite.
When an unclean spirit comes out of a man, it wanders over the deserts seeking a resting-place, and finds none. Then it says, "I will go back to the home I left." So it returns and finds the house unoccupied, swept clean, and tidy. Off it goes and collects seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they all come in and settle down, and in the end the man's plight is worse than before:
(Mat. 12:43-5)
Whatever views one may have about the obsession of the personality by outside psychic forces - and it is wiser to have an open attitude to the possibility rather than to dismiss it out of hand as a relic of pre-scientific superstition - it is certain that until the person has attained a degree of wholeness, which is of a different order to a mere cure of some disability or disease, one trouble is bound to follow another. It may first be an illness that is alleviated by drugs or surgery, which is followed by an accident causing bodily injury. This may in turn be succeeded by an emotional or mental breakdown, or some financial disaster, or a betrayal in a deep personal relationship. Furthermore, these misfortunes may not simply befall one personally, but be visited on one's family also. Until there is a shift in basic perspective, a change in heart (or metanoia) in fact, one trouble will follow another as surely as night follows day. And the person will quite plausibly curse his bad luck or else attribute the manifold misfortunes to God's inscrutable punishment. In fact the punitive consequences of thoughtless actions are brought about by the spiritual law of life that is transgressed only at our own peril. Without this basic law which is enshrined in the moral teachings of all the great religious traditions and reduced to their essence in the two commandments of Christ - the love of God and of our neighbour as ourself - there could be no communal life. When each individual is for himself alone, there can be little place in his scheme of survival for anyone else apart from his immediate family. Each wars against the other until everyone is finally destroyed. No one group is self-sufficient, nor will others accept a role of permanent bondage to those with greater immediate power at their disposal.
All this is obvious enough on a social level but we often do not apply it in our private lives. Until we have the time to reflect on our past attitudes in our present distress, and pray humbly for forgiveness and a strengthened will, we will not be healed of our disabilities. When Jesus told the cripple he had healed to leave his sinful ways, he was urging him to adopt a way of life that transcended his past selfish attitude: he was told to give more to others as he in his turn had been given new life by Christ. To whom much is given, much is expected. The fees charged by a competent doctor are a fit reward for his expert help in relieving distress and restoring function to a previously disabled part of the body. By contrast, God charges no fees at all for his supreme healing work: ours is the donation to make. If we give nothing, we will relapse into ill-health. But if we give nothing less than ourselves to him, we will move from death to life of a new dimension in which our greatest joy will be to bring health to others. It is a law of the spiritual life that stagnation invariably proceeds to regression into old, destructive ways of thought. Conversely, the movement forward in faith is the only way of progress to the new life of the future.
It is nevertheless important to acknowledge that the unaided human will is more likely to lead to destruction than to a renewed life. Acting on its own, the will cannot move the personality out of the rut of past conditioning. The more we believe we are changing our way of life, the more obvious it is to the outside world that we are merely altering certain superficial approaches while deep down within there is the same selfish, fearful personality at work. Therefore the human will must be infused with the divine power that flows to it in the person of the Holy Spirit. In other words, the fallible, rather crude, native will is spiritualized through the action of prayer. In prayer we bring ourselves by a willed effort to the heavenly grace of God; this we cannot grasp but only seek in self-giving faith. But, as Jesus reminds us, to knock is to have the door opened, to ask is to receive, and to seek is to find (Mat. 7:7-8). In prayer we are filled with God's love and infused with his Spirit. Our will is spiritualized - indeed a foretaste of the spiritualization of the whole personality at the end of time - and then we can do the work that God has set before us. This is to collaborate with him in the re-creation of the world in the image of Christ. God needs us in the sustenance of our world no less than we need him; the proof of this divine grace is shown in the incarnation, when the Word itself became fully flesh and dwelt among us. It was to the end that we might bear witness in our transformed lives to his presence that he came to us and participated fully in the human pageant of glory and suffering.
For the will to be incisive and clean in its action there has to be a progressive opening-up of the whole personality. The unconscious part where the debris of the past lies concealed has to be brought to the light of day where it can receive the word of life and be healed. When Jesus was baptized by John, then alone did the Holy Spirit descend fully on him in preparation for the great ministry ahead. But that same Spirit led him, not immediately to the heights of glory but first to the valley of darkness. In the wilderness he remained for forty days tempted by Satan. He was among the wild beasts; and the angels waited upon him (Mark 1:12-13). The wilderness is the darkness of unenlightenment, of ignorance, which surrounds the earthly consciousness of mankind. The prince of the unredeemed world, Satan, governs that consciousness whose watchword is, "For me first". What happens to the others is at most of marginal concern. Though without sin, Jesus became intimate with the sinful environment that envelops our world. There was nothing in man's nature that was foreign to him, so close was his psychic empathy to mankind and his spiritual nature to his Father. The forty days are, of course, symbolic of a long period of time - in fact his entire ministry on earth. The wilderness experience culminated in passion, crucifixion and a descent into hell, so that no depth of human despair was left untouched by his presence, no person too insignificant or evil to have escaped his concern and identification. It could in truth be said of Christ's ministry that by his wounds all wounded people are healed, an exact reproduction of the life and death of the Suffering Servant, portrayed in Isaiah 53.
All this has to be repeated as an interior experience in the lives of those who are striving towards a total healing. The cause of a failed healing is often ambivalence in the basic attitude to life: one half of the person wants to move onwards and scale the spiritual heights while the other half prefers the seductive comfort of inertia. If the will is not active, the attractions of the status quo will triumph over the urge to move on in life. As Jesus says, "No one who sets his hand to the plough and then keeps looking back is fit for the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). It is the unresolved complexes in the unconscious that especially act as agents of subversion, deflecting the full attention and commitment of the person to travel onwards towards completion. They speak seditiously in the language of fear, resentment, defeat and failure if any new venture is proposed. It is this aspect of self-deprecation and doubt that is especially baneful to any further progress in the path of life. Doubt about the claims of others is the seed of wisdom; doubt in the rightness of one's own movement towards healing is the darkness of death. The life moving towards that salvation which is the measure of true healing is one of self-denial in the service of God; this service shows itself in self-giving to the neighbour in distress who, as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats demonstrates, is the unknown Christ constantly with us as we traverse our own road to Emmaus. "Anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me" (Mat. 25:40). The Emmaus road was one of pain and disillusionment to the bereft disciples until they noticed the stranger on the way and took him into their company. They did not know at first who that stranger was, but they were able to say, with hindsight, after the Master and revealed himself to them at the breaking of the bread, "Did we not feel our hearts on fire as he talked with us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:13-32).
The will that has entered into the darkness of the unconscious and has brought to the light of day all that obstructs the power of God from working the fullness of his healing within the personality is also the will that leads the person to the beatific vision. The way to heaven is always through hell, for the vital reason that the way to God is one that redeems and heals all fallen elements on the path. In the economy of God all is sacred, no matter how far it may have fallen from its pristine glory in the perversion wrought by human nature. We cannot rise to God until we have taken all that appertains to us along with us and brought it to the throne of the heavenly grace. And then comes the miracle: the sordid article of earth is seen to be a sacrament of God's glory. It becomes a sacrifice worthy of the highest praise.
No one who enjoyed Christ's fellowship could escape his searing scrutiny. He was no liberal sentimentalist or condoner of any action other than the highest. But the perfection he represented was that of God working within the soul of the individual sinner, for he saw the divinity that lay within the meanest members of his society, typified by the prostitutes and the venal tax-gatherers. When we read of God's jealousy for his people Israel, God was not concerned about himself and the constant rejection he received during their frequent periods of apostasy. He was concerned about them and the betrayal of the highest within them they so often wrought by their treacherous disregard for the Law and the life it demanded. This jealousy is similar to that of a parent who guards the reputation of its child during periods of temptation and insult. In order to fulfil itself and its charge, that parent will not flinch from disciplinary action: "for those whom he loves the Lord reproves, and he punishes a favourite son" (Prov. 3:12). Therefore we are told not to spurn God's correction or take offence at his reproof.
Healing requires the entry of the whole person into a new way of life, in which the seductive ease of the past is sacrificed in favour of service for all creatures in the future. If even one part of our desire is for the allurements of self-indulgence, we will remain anchored to the past. There can be no forward movement that does not encompass the whole of the personality. And this is the essential human dilemma, so often repeated in the history of ancient Israel as recounted in the Old Testament: the earnest will to follow God's commandments was invariably betrayed by the seductive attractions of the present scene. The essential need of man is commitment: the "lower nature" of the body is committed to physical comfort and security which find their fulfilment in the acquisition of money, the forging of advantageous social and professional relationships, and the grasping after power. The "higher nature" of the soul, informed by the spirit within, lies all too often in complete abeyance. It is made to feel something of an unnecessary, if not unwelcome, intruder in the path of assurance devised by the intellect and pursued by the body. But what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world at the expense of his soul? This terrible question is posed in one way or another by all the great world religions, but by none more starkly than Jesus himself (Mark 8:36). The whole world is an ephemeral illusion if it is divorced from the spiritual love that sustains and transfigures it. Until there is a commitment to the life that builds and sanctifies, the person himself remains confined to the darkness of futility and mounting fear, because all that is tangible in this world is also mutable and destructible. As Jesus tells his disciples, "You must work, not for this perishable food, but for the food that lasts, the food of eternal life" (John 6:27).
It must finally be emphasized that in the person attaining integration there is only one nature, the full personality facing the uncreated light of God where it is transfigured into his likeness from splendour to splendour (2 Cor. 3:18). The body is lifted heavenward to partake of the intimations of immortality that surround it, in contrast to which the attractions and comforts of this world are merely ephemeral sensations. The soul, at the same time, incarnates more deeply into the flesh so as to learn the mighty lessons of service and renunciation in the limitation of a time-space milieu. The body teaches the soul some vital lessons of availability and punctuality, while the soul progressively transfigures the body from a purely animal structure to a spiritual vestment of finest quality through which the whole world can be charged with spiritual power. In other words, both the lower and higher natures are of God, and when they are integrated in obedience with the divine will, they bring nearer the promise of resurrection of the whole person into something of the measure of Christ.
To return finally to the man who was paralysed for thirty-eight years and unable to enter the pool at Bethesda in time to avail himself of its healing power, we see in him the paradigm of the previously uncommitted person who has unconsciously taken refuge in ill-health. His healing by Christ shows us not only a bodily cure, but also a strengthening in inner resolve with a renewed mind and a refashioned will. He is a sacrament of the total person re-created in the likeness of Christ, now responsive to God and responsible in his actions to serve all those around him as he once was served in his infirmity.