Rise, Take Up Your Mat, and Walk
“Do you want to be well?”
— John 5:6—
Do you want to be well? At first glance, this question seems easy to answer. Anyone who suffers from chronic illnesses of any type would probably say, “Of course!” But the word of God is a mystery. It portrays universal stories, but the way they unfold is unpredictable yet extremely intentional. The Word of God is an ocean so deep you can never exhaust its depth and so vast no one can traverse its breadth, yet its waves touch the shore of every man’s life. A single question, “Do you want to be well?” from the incarnate Word of God is like a drop of Holy Water: seemingly insignificant in its initial contact, yet it extinguishes the demons of Hell and is like rain on the most arid soul.
Do you want to be well? The man does not give the answer we would expect. He proceeds to explain to Jesus that he is unable to reach the healing water of the pool. According to the text, the water would be “stirred up” but the crippled man is unable to reach the pool in time. Someone else always beats him to the waters.
Once again, the theme of water has appeared. When Jesus encounters the Samaritain woman, he says, “…whoever drinks of the water I shall give will never thirst…” Now, we see a pool, a bountiful source of water when compared to a well, but the man is unable to reach it on his own. He is too weak. He is a sign of the effects of sin in the life of every man and woman. We need healing, but we are too sick to obtain the remedy for ourselves. Worst of all, we can see the healing we need. It’s right in front of us; if only someone would pick us up and take us to the water. But Jesus, as usual, exceeds our expectations.
What if, rather than being carried to the healing waters, the waters that “well up to eternal life”, were to come to us and heal us where we lay, in our sin and our crippled souls? What a grace that would be.
Would we cooperate with this grace? What would it cost us?
Rise, Take Up Your Mat, and Walk
Christ’s ministry is the contrast between the spiritual and the physical. When talking to Nicodemus, Jesus says, “What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of the spirit is spirit” (Jn. 3:6). Jesus himself is a living image of the spiritual and the material united in one being. He is conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the flesh of the Immaculate Virgin Mary.
Throughout the Gospels, we see Christ’s ministry as bringing the spirit and the flesh back into unity. We see this first in the Blessed Mother, who is not God, but is the example of the saint, the perfect disciple of Jesus. She cannot become the Mother of God without God’s assistance. It is the Holy Spirit that overshadows her, but it is her fiat, “Let it be done to me according to your will,” that is the image of man’s will cooperating with grace. We see the same thing with the cripple at the pool. Like Mary, the man receives a “Word from the Lord”, not from an angel, but from the Lord himself. But unlike Mary, he is experiencing the effects of sin within his body. Without the grace of God, he will never be healed.
Belief and desire are not enough; It is not enough to “want to be healed.” Jesus’s call combined with the cripple’s place, is an example of God’s grace moving first in the form of the question, “Do you want to be well?” The cripple must cooperate with this grace; he must obey the Word of God; he must rise, take up his mat, and walk.
This formula is very similar to a formula Jesus gives in the other Gospels, specifically Matthew 16:24-26, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” This is the exact opposite of what he says to the cripple:
Cripple - “Rise.”
Disciples - “Deny yourself.”
Cripple - “Take up your mat.”
Disciples - “Take up your cross.”
Cripple - “Walk.”
Disciples - “Follow me.”
So how are we to make sense of this? It is this: belief alone is not sufficient for salvation. One must obey the Son of God. As Jesus said in John 3, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life…” If the man does not take up his mat, he will never experience life. Fortunately for him, he does and is immediately interrogated by the religious authorities.
Counting the Cost of Grace
Do you want to be well? To follow Jesus will cost us something, but staying in our sins by the pool will cost us much more. We were not made for this world; we were made for a home where there are many mansions. We were made for the Father’s house.
As we will see in the coming chapters, the teachings of Jesus will become even harder to accept, and the persecution will intensify. His word is sharper than a two-edged sword, and it reveals the divide in man’s soul between his will and God’s. To reject the teachings of Jesus is to reject God. To willfully reject the Church that Christ established is to reject God’s plan for salvation.
Do you want to be well? As my friend said before I became Catholic, “It’s going to cost you, but you will gain so much more.”
Mary, Mother of God, ora pro nobis.
— DR