Thirty-Eight Years in the Porch

There was a pool in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate, with five covered porches built around it, and the porches were full.

John lists who was lying there. A great number of the sick, the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. People who couldn’t see, people who couldn’t walk right, people whose bodies had stopped working. They weren’t passing through. They lived there, in the shade, on mats, waiting.

What they were waiting for is explained in a line most modern Bibles leave out of the main text, and it’s worth saying plainly why. The oldest manuscripts of John don’t have it, which is why the verse numbers in a modern Bible skip from 3 to 5. Older English Bibles include it: an angel came down at a certain season and stirred the water, and whoever got in first after the stirring was healed. Either way, it tells you what the people in the porches believed, and the man himself talks about the stirred water a few lines later. The water moved sometimes. When it did, the first one in got well. Everyone else went back to waiting.

One man there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.

Thirty-eight years is a whole adult life. The text doesn’t say how many of them he’d spent at the pool, only how long he’d been sick. But he’d been there long enough to have a routine, and long enough to have an explanation.

Jesus came through during a feast, with the city full. Out of all those people lying in all those porches, he stopped at one. The text says he saw him lying there and realized that he had spent a long time in this condition. Nobody told him. He knew.

Then he asked a question that sounds almost rude. Do you want to get well?

To a man who’d been lying beside a healing pool for years. The obvious answer is yes. The man didn’t give it.

Maybe the question isn’t as strange as it sounds. The text doesn’t say what the man’s days were like, but it’s not hard to picture what getting well would have cost him. The mat was his place. The porch was his address. Whatever he lived on, he lived on it as a sick man. Getting well would mean a new life with none of the old arrangements, at an age when most people are settled. Nobody asks a question like that unless the answer might be complicated.

Sir, the invalid replied, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am on my way, someone else goes in before me.

He answered a yes-or-no question with a reason. It was a true reason. He really had no one. He really was too slow. Every time the water moved he started crawling, and every time someone quicker got there first. He’d probably said that sentence so many times he didn’t have to think about it anymore. It had stopped being an answer and turned into a description of who he was. The man with nobody. The one who’s always too late.

Jesus didn’t argue with the explanation. He didn’t offer to wait for the water with him, or carry him down to it, or find him someone. He went around the whole arrangement.

Get up, pick up your mat, and walk.

Immediately the man was made well, and he picked up his mat and began to walk.

No water. No race to the edge. No one else had to be slower that day for him to get well.

It would be a clean story if it ended there. It doesn’t, and the man isn’t a hero in what follows.

It was the Sabbath. On his way out, carrying his mat, he was stopped and told it was unlawful to carry his mat on the Sabbath. His answer was to point somewhere else. The man who made me well told me, “Pick up your mat and walk.” Not my idea. Talk to him.

They asked who that was. He didn’t know. But the man who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away while the crowd was there.

Read that again slowly. Thirty-eight years sick, and when it finally ended he didn’t even get the man’s name. He never asked. Nothing in the text says he said thank you. He picked up the mat and left.

Later, Jesus found him again, this time in the temple. See, you have been made well. Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you. The text doesn’t explain what the worse thing was, or what sin was meant, and it’s wiser not to guess.

Notice the verb, though. Jesus found the man. The man wasn’t looking. He didn’t know the name to ask for. He had gone off to the temple with his mat and his new legs, and Jesus went and found him there, a second time, to say one more thing to him. The first meeting had been Jesus choosing him out of a crowd. So was the second.

Then the man did what he did. The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. John doesn’t say why. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was trying to get clear of trouble. Maybe he was simply answering the question he’d been asked. What John does say is what came next: the trouble shifted off the man and onto Jesus, and it grew from there.

So look at what he brought to the healing.

Not faith. The text never mentions any. Not a right answer, because the question was do you want and he gave an excuse. Not gratitude, as far as anyone can tell. Not loyalty afterward. Not even a name to put to the thing that happened to him.

He brought thirty-eight years and a sentence about why it would never work.

And it worked anyway. Grace didn’t wait for the right answer, or for his name. The explanation he’d been giving for thirty-eight years was true, and it didn’t disqualify him. It just wasn’t the last word.

Where this meets your week

The explanation that happens to be true. Everyone has one. I can’t go back to that because of my knees. I can’t call my brother because he never calls me. I can’t start that because I don’t have anyone to help. None of these are lies, which is what makes them so durable. The man’s explanation was true, and Jesus didn’t correct it. He just didn’t let it be the answer. Say your explanation out loud once this week, all the way through, and listen to it the way a stranger would. Then ask whether it’s a reason or a place you’ve been living.

The porch you know. The porches weren’t comfortable, but they were familiar. Shade, a mat, people who understood, a routine built around something that almost never happened. A lot of lives settle into a porch like that. Not the life that was hoped for, but a known one. If you’ve been waiting a long time for a particular door to open, the water to move, the call to come, the question he asked is worth sitting with. Do you want to get well? Not whether you should want it. Whether you do. Answer it honestly, even if the answer is I don’t know anymore.

The person who never said thanks. Maybe you helped somebody through something hard and they walked off without a word. Maybe they made trouble for you afterward. The man at the pool is in the record exactly as he was: nameless, ungrateful, quick to point the finger. The healing wasn’t taken back. If there’s someone you’ve helped who never acknowledged it, let it be finished this week. Don’t send the note you’ve drafted in your head. Just stop keeping the account.

Being found a second time. The first meeting was at the pool. The second was later, somewhere else, when the man wasn’t looking for anyone. If you’ve had a moment years ago when something reached you, and you walked off without asking what it was, that isn’t the end of the story either. He found this man twice. Nobody asked him to.

Take one step you’ve been explaining.

Pick the thing you’ve spent the most years saying you can’t do, and find the smallest version of it that you actually could. Not the whole thing. The bed, not the pilgrimage. One phone call, one form, one walk around the block, one page. Do it before the explanation has time to start talking.

You don’t need to know who you’re doing it for yet. The man didn’t know the name of the one who told him to get up. He got up.

When they asked Jesus why he’d done all this on the Sabbath, the day God rested, his answer was one sentence.

To this very day My Father is at His work, and I too am working.

Thirty-eight years in a porch, waiting for the water. The whole time, somebody was already working.