Sunday Breakfast: Radical Action

'When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath… 'But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.”'

John 5:5-6,8-9,17

“Do you want to be healed?” This question confronts the man lying lame on his mat, inviting a decision. After being called an invalid for 38 years, he might have thought, “Of course I want to be healed! Don’t you think I’d have done something by now?” While all of us may not be subjected to being called invalid—literally “not valid”—we may all recognize a wounding that we all share. A collective grief, a long-suffering that plagues us all. We observe the world and see hardships that seem beyond repair, insurmountable injustices, and spaces where hope is rarely seen. How are we to respond, whether we’re living in these spaces or on the outside looking in? Do we want to be healed?

”Find our way along the healing path does not consist of striving for some far-off goal that we may or may not attain but rather a way of discovering a secret hidden deep within our hearts.”

—James Finley, Ph.D.

Often recorded in scripture are commands given by God to humanity, but instead of an imperative given, it is as an invitation. These are jussives, commands that are meant to advise rather than order, giving us agency over our destination. In this encounter, Jesus invites the man on the mat to make a decision—one that, if he knew the outcome, seems like a no-brainer. The healing occurs when the man obeys Jesus’s jussive: “Take up your mat and walk.” For it is this invitation that prompts his decision to participate in his own redemption. The healing of our wounds occurs when our willingness to move collides with God’s nature. By our own will, we receive healing when it is offered, and take part in the kingdom to come.

This matters because God desires to be one with us and, through us, to introduce the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. When we look out and see a cruciformed world, seeing Christ's presence among us, it is then we start to experience the hope of healing. In this unveiling, through our submission, we are made a tabernacle with God to dwell in our spaces. "My Father is still working, and I also am working." By recognizing God's dwelling within us, we can then extend that same question to others, "Do you want to be healed?”

"Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

―Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Just as God invited Adam to rule over creation, God is inviting us to take part in its healing. This reconciliation occurs when we extend our hand to the broken, marginalized, and poor. We forge a new community when we take care of the least of these. Even if the man’s healing, as told in the Gospel of John, seems to have happened instantaneously, we know the work we are invited into is not done overnight.

"Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability — and that it may take a very long time”

—Teilhard de Chardin

This new creation begins here and now, in the brokenness of the world. Radical action takes place when we understand what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”—and knowing that we get to participate in the bending.

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