The story in John 5 of the man waiting at the pool of Bethesda for the right moment to receive a healing miracle who received it after Jesus told him to take up his mat and walk is sometimes told as if it was the man’s fault that he had not been healed before.
This person told Jesus that he had been at the pool for 38 years, trying to be the first person to get into the water when it was stirred. The legend was that the first person to be in the pool when angels moved the water would be healed. But he could never move fast enough to get that healing.
I heard a sermon once that said the man at the pool had been making excuses; his laziness and lack of initiative were the real reasons he had not been healed. Likewise, all we need to do is “get up and walk” to get the things we want or need.
But nothing in a plain reading of the passage points a finger of blame at the man waiting to be healed. If anything, what the man was doing is strikingly similar to what our economic system encourages us to do today.
Think of the lottery, Millions of us are financially lame. Work is increasingly precarious and increasingly not designed to enable us to build financial security. (One example: Over the past two decades, according to a Cornell Law School study, the percentage of US jobs that are low-wage/low-hours increased from 52.7 percent of nonsupervisory positions in 1990 to 63 percent. Businesses increasingly relying on gig workers and just-in-time scheduling are key factors.) But dangled in front of us is a promised troubling of the waters, in the form of a Powerball payday. As long as we are focused on pursuing that fantasy, we won’t be challenging the systems that keep us sick financially, sociologically, physiologically, or physically.
Here again, Jesus is disruptive. He tells the man to reject the system that has him waiting helplessly and fruitlessly by a pool for a rationed necessity that should be freely available to all. He also encourages the man to buck rules that have been twisted away from their true purpose. The sabbath, Jesus said in Mark 2, was made for man—an opportunity to rest from our labors as God rested in the Genesis creation story—and not man for the sabbath. This enranges the religious authorities, who argued that a man could not legally carry his mat on the sabbath. That rage approaches the boiling point when Jesus answers their accusation of a sabbath violation by saying, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.”
Of course it is true that we too often remain stuck in a state of dis-ease when all we have to do is trust Jesus and “take up our mat and walk.” But it is also true that taking up our mat is not just a matter of individual initiative; it involves the willingness to disrupt narratives and structures that keep us trapped chasing scarcity when we should be collectively living in abundance.