Bethesda, the House of Mercy

John v. 2, 3

“Now there is at Jerasalem bj the sheep-market a xpoolt whioh is called in the Hebrew tongue ‘Bethesda,’ having five porches. In these lay a great maltittide of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water.” — John ▼. 2, 3.

OUR Lord’s miracles may be looked at from three points of view. They are proofs of His mission — a view which, though much discredited at present, is perfectly valid; they are revelations of His heart; they are parables of His work. He has set us the example of regarding them from that last point of view. For instance, in this gospel, His discourse about Himself as the Bread of Life is His commentary on the feeding of the thousands; and He appends to one of His miracles of giving sight to the blind, the sad statement that He was come into the world “that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be mside blind.” I venture to apply that method, and to take that point of view, in dealing with this miracle.

You know the details. We can picture to ourselves the sad crowd gathered in the ample porticoes, and presenting all the varieties of chronic impotence: “Blind, lame, withered.” We see the intermittent spring in the midst, and the eager rush down the narrow steps when it bubbled up. We know how long this man had lain

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there, and how hope had died down, and jet he lay, having before him the insoluble problem that, in ordei to be well he must do what he could only do if he were well — viz., rise and walk. We know the question that the Master put, seemingly superfluous, almost grating upon the suflFerer’s ear: “Wilt thou be made whole?” as if he had lain there for eight-and-thirty years for anything else I And we remember the apparently impossible conmiand, “Arise, take up thy bed and walk,” in the effort to obey which the healing came.

Now, I venture to take this story from the point of view which I have already mentioned, and to look upon it as being a parable or symbol in the material region of principles that belong to the spiritual order.

I. I ask you to look, first, at that sad, sick crowd.

There was gathered a “great multitude of impotent folk, blind, halt, withered.” That is a parable of humanity, looked at from the highest point of view, and considered in the deepest reality of their condition. People talk about the gloomy views that Christianity takes of mankind. The question is not whether the views are gloomy, but whether they are true. Whilst I thankfully recognise all the abundant flood of joys and blessings which God pours upon mankind, and recognise to the full the manifold — and some of them noble — activities which fill the lives of men; still I go back to this picture and say that, beneath all these there lie, in every human experience, facts corresponding to the symbol of my text For, after all, brother, it is a sad world that we live in; and every man’s life, as we all know, and, as it is the commonplace of disappointed cynica to say bitterly at the end, “is vanity,” if it is separated from God.

I ask yon to go into the depths of your own hearts and to be honest in recalling your own experience, and to say if, notwithstanding all the gladness of a godless life, there does not lie, grim and silent for the most part, but there, and felt to be there all the same, a great yearning and consciousness of nnrest. It seems to me that the alternative for as all, is, will yon have central gladness and surface trouble, which is what the world brings to a man that loves God and does His wHl, or will you have surface gladness and central sorrow?

For every good has in it some fatal flaw and incompleteness. There is always a break in the circle; always a stone missing out of the bracelet. There is always one unlighted window in the Aladdin*s palace. There is always a Mordecai sitting dark as a thunder-cloud and unparticipant of the common emotion, who makes Haman say, “All this availeth nothing.” There is always disappointment in earthly fruition. The fish never proves so big when it is lying panting on the grass as it did in the water, when the fisher was struggling with it. The chase is always better than the capture. In all earthly good there is a fatal disproportion between it and the heart that seeks to solace itself with it; so that after all satisfactions there is the old cry of the heart, “I hunger still.” And, above all, there is the certainty which pushes itself in — like the skeleton at the feasts of the Egyptian kings, or the mocking slave that walked behind the conqueror in his triumph as he went up the steps of the Capitol — tin certainty that we have to leave them all behind ui. And what is the naked soul going to do when it “flares forth into the dark “?

The world is a sad world, brother; but that is not the deepest thought about it. There is a far graver thing, of which that crowd of cripples is the symbol. There is a more tragic word to be said about the condition o universal humanity than that it lacks perfect and continual joy. Men are sinners, and therefore they are sorrowful. The diseases of these people at Bethesda were all, as I said, chronic impotence of certain faculties. They were blind, lame, and withered. Again, I appeal to conscience. Are there not in all of us powers that are dormant and all but dead? Are not our eyes blind to the realities of the universe, blind as moles to the light? Are not our feet lamed to run in the way of righteousness and of all heroic and noble life? Are we not smitten with a paralysis in regard to much that is good, which co-exists with a feverish activity in regard of much that is evil?

The disease ii xmiversal, brethren. God knows I do not want to exaggerate. I should gain nothing thereby, because your own consciousness would not respond. 1 do not charge you with gross sins. No doubt you are respectable people, most of you, and have kept well within the laws of the land. I have no doubt there are some outcasts here, men who have not only been sinful, but criminal; men whose lives the average morality of the world condemns. But that is not true about most of us. But this is true about us all, that we have lived to ourselves, that we have taken our own wills instead of God’g will as our direction; that “the God in whose hand our breath is, and whose are all our ways, we have not glorified.” Is that true or is it not? Do not let ua lose ourselves in generalities about universal sinfulness. I am trying, dear friends, to deal with you as if you and I were alone, and to get at each man, God helping me. I come to yon, old and young, rich and poor, cultivated and ignorant, respectable and criminal, and say to each what I say to myself. Thou art the man: Thou art the woman. Sin is a universal disease. Humanity is bound in one because it has the great gift of speech, the great gift of consciousness, the great gift of will. And it is bound in one, because all of us are in these porches, and among the multitude of impotent folk gathered there. As when boils and blains broke out in Egypt when Moses tossed the dust in the air, the blain is there on every skin, whether of Pharaoh or the slave grinding at the millstone, or the outcast on the dunghill.

And, then, this disease is unconscious. The man has the plague pustule well developed under his arm-pits, purple and venomous, and he says, “Oh 1 I am perfectly well I nothing is the matter with me.’’ But my notion of what I am is by no means infallible; and these consciences of ours the more need they have to speak, the less they do speak. They tell us that the electric light, brilliant as it is, is the worst possible thing to put into a lighthouse in a fog. And the light of conscience gets wonderfully obscured by the fogs that rise from the undrained swamps of our passions. So, because every sin tends to diffuse a cloud of ink, like the cuttle-fish when it is in danger, beneath which it manages to escape; and because we are all apt to be lenient with ourselves, and to use two sets of weights and measures, one of which we apply to the fanlts of our brother and the other to our own; and because many of ns are so little accustomed to an hour — an hour did I say? to five minntes — of honest thinking about what sort of people we are in God*s sight, therefore a great many of you this evening, when I am talking in this fashion, think I am only rolling out the correct pulpit platitudes, and talking about things that have no application to you. Ah I brethren, it is not so. Again I say, I beseech you to make acquaintance with yourselves, and you will find that the disease is there. The manifestations are various; the corruption is universal; and “there is none righteous; no, not one.”

II. Notice where this sad crowd is housed.

Do you know what Bethesda means? “House of Mercy “; perhaps so named to commemorate some benefactor that had built the portico; more probably to suggest to the poor sick creatures a gleam of hope from the thought that God had love and care for them. There seemed a sharp contradiction between the condition of the people and the name. But we are gathered, as they were, in the House of Mercy. That is to say, though we have all departed from the right way, GJod’s love encompasses ns still, and this earth, seamed and stained as it has been by man’s sin, is, notwithstanding, the chosen field in which He will manifest the tenderness of His compassion and the love of His heart. If any of you ever saw St. Peter’s in Rome you will remember the great sweeping colonnades which extend from its front and reach out their arms as though they would embrace the city and the world; and in the midst there springs and sparkles a pure fountain. So God’s love oompsaseB all ns sick folk, and in the midst there rigea the fountain which will heal. We are in the House of Mercy.

Does not that make our sin and forgetfalness of Him the darker, the more criminal, and the more tragical? And does not the assurance that God’s great love is not turned away from men by their transgressions, but embraces them all and holds them still, feed the hope — nay, rather, inspire the certainty — that for all the cripples there is a cure, and for all the sick there is healing? It seems to me that any man that believes in a God who is not a devil ought to believe in a God who reveals Himself. And there, as I take it, is the very weakness of what nowadays is called Theism, that, asserting the existence of a Supreme Being who is love and righteousness, it maintains that that Being has never said a single word to men, and never done a single thing to lift them out of the mire. Whosoever may believe that, I cannot; and it seems to me that the doctrine of Christianity, that God has had compassion upon men, and has spoken to them, is far more in consonance with the assurance that He is love than that dreary creed that the infinite and loving God has not spoken, and never will nor can speak to His world. Carlyle, in one of his bursts of melancholy, said, speaking about the Deity as he conceived Him, “And He has done nothing 1” He has done something. He has opened “a fountain for sin and for uncleanness.” And He must have done it, if it is true that we are cripples and blind, and that we dwell in the House of Mercy.

Bnt forther, the thought that we are there explains the sadness which I have ventured to assert is the

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groond-tone of human life, because righteous Love cannot but punish where sin has disturbed the relation between Him and men. The shallow optimism that said that all things were for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and went hop, skip, and jump, with eyes shut, over the darker facts of humanity, is hopelessly discredited to-day. And the world is rushing into the extreme opposite belief which they christen by the name of pessimism, which means what the Preacher said long ago, “Vanity of vanities! all is vanity! It is the only creed possible for a man who has any deep knowledge of the facts of human life, unless he says “Nol we dwell in the House of Mercy; and, being sick, the loving Father sends the drastic medicine of sorrows that we may be healed.” He loves us too well not to smite; and the explanation of man’s Kiisery is man’s sin, fought against by God’s loving chastisement.

III. Further, note the vain expectation of healing.

I do not need to go over the pathetic story again, of how this man, for long weary years, had sat there watching, vrith hope growing fainter after each disappointment, for the bubbling up of the intermittent spring, and every time had been anticipated by one that had stepped down before him. But what I ask you to notice is that the conditions of the problem which was presented to him for solution were perfectly impossible. “If you can go down into the water you will be healed. But you cannot go down into the water. You would need to have been healed in order that you should.” Now, brethren, that is exactly what every ethical system but Christianity says in regard to man’s sin and man’s sorrow. Wise teachers, great moralists, the law of our

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own consciences, bid as get up and walk. Bnt my lower limbs are atrophied, and I cannot. “If there had been a law that could have given life, then righteousness had been by the law.” There is any quantity of noble precepts, fine exhortations — abundant as blackberries are these things that moralists say to us. But what is the good of all the talk, if there is no power to do the thing which the moralists tell us to do? “Break off your habits.** Yes 1 how am I to break off my habits?” Lift yourselves above your lower selves.** Yea 1 can I take myself by my own ears and lift myself up? There must be something outside of me to lift me. It is no use telling me what to do unless yon give me the power to do it. And I want to know where is the power; where, in all the teachings that fill the world? Nowhere, except in the one word of the great Master.

Brethren, there are certain very speedily-reached limits within which a man, without any help consciously from Jesus Christ, may better himself. I am not going to deny that. But the limits are very easily reached, and the improvement is very superficial, and the experience of the man out of whom the seven demons were cast, and whose heart was left swept and garnished, and empty, and therefore filled speedily with another contingent of demons, is the transcript of what comes of all attempts to deal with man’s sin, except the dealing with it by Jesus Christ. Every man his own saviour is a very popular idea nowadays. It is absolutely impossible of realisation. The attempt is vain because, in order to its success, yon must have the very thing the want of which makes the attempt necessary.

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lY. Lastly, note the Healer who comes to them that cannot come to the healing.

Jeans Christ drew near to this man. His attention was not attracted by any call from him. Hope was too far dead in him for that. It was not attracted by any intercession of others. He was passing by, and His eye rested, and His heart went ont, to that poor, longdisappointed sufferer, and He said to him, “Wilt thou be made whole?”

Does not that teach ns the spontaneous love of Jesas Christ to sinfol men? The very same thing which led Him to speak to this paralytic brought Him from heaven. Not that He was asked to come, not that anything here on earth, in the nature of longing or yearning, brought Him down, but simply that His own heart impelled Him. He does not wait to be besought; before we call He will answer.” Like the dew upon the grass, that waiteth not for men, nor tarrieth for the sons of men or like the sun that pours out its rays, not because the dancing planets around it send up their petitions for illumination, but because light must flow from it, and heat must circulate and impart itself, Christ*s spontaneous love falls upon us all.

And does not the incident suggest to us, too, the individualising knowledge and appeal of Christ to each heart? He loves all because He loves each. Not only are universal and special affections perfectly harmonious in Him, but His universal affection is only the aggregate of His special affections. He individualises us. I would fain bring the message to each single soul in my audience. I would isolate you, dear brethren, as He isolates ub in His regard and in His appeal. We stand, each of us alone, on the insnlating stool, in connection with the fnll-ch&rged battery of Hie love. And He says to thee, thee, thee — to each one of us, “WOt thou be made whole?” Do not lose yourselves in that crowd. The Gospel is for the world, but it is for you, and you have to deal with it for yourself, and by yourself.

Does not this incident teach us, too, the one condition that He requires from us for His healing power to operate upon us? “Wilt thou be made whole?” The question no doubt kindled a faint flicker of hope in the embers in the poor man’s heart It might sound superfluous to him, but there was something in the tone that asked it, which was more than half a promise that, if he would, he should be healed. The same question is put to us and has the same force. Christ cannot heal unless we will; He cannot but heal if we will. He can no more put His healing power into your heart without your desire than gold can be put into a casket that is closely shut, or food into lips that are firmly locked. Bat the misery is that men do not want to be healed. You would all like to escape hell, as you conceive it. But I am afraid there are a good many of you that have not the least wish to be cured of your faults and of your sins. So Christ can do nothing with you; and unless you want deliverance from guilt and from the love and the practice of sin, it is nothing to you that He is ready to save. Some of us are like soldiers in the hospital, who would rather be ill than turn out to fight or work. The desire is required if Christ’s healing power is o come.

And then comes the commandment. “Arise t take up thy bed and walk” That sonnds as if it involved the

U very same contradiction and impossibility which was involved in the condition of getting healed at the pool But it is not 80, because when He bade the man walk He gave him the power to walk; and, in the effort, the limbs were restored to their vigour, and motion was possible once more.

The parallel does not serve us altogether, for it does not reveal to us that greatest of all truths, and most blessed of all mysteries, that He bare our sins in His own body on the tree; and Himself took upon Him our infirmities and our sicknesses. The world is gathered round the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness. It is not intermittent, like its prototype in the miracle, but evermore His blood avails for us. It is not exhausted by one cure, or by two or three; but there is enough for each and enough for all; enough for thee and me and all our fellows. Christ is coming to you, dear friend, by my poor unworthy lips now, and saying “Wilt thou be made whole?” Do not ignore your disease. Do not try to patch yourselves up with quack medicines that your fellow-patients recommend. Take Christ for your Healer, for your healing, for your health. His name through faith in His name, can cast out the most inveterate and mortal sicknesses, and give perfect soundness to each of Tis. Nothing else can cure your disease, or stop it from running its course to its end in death.