The fifth chapter in the Gospel of John begins with Jesus traveling to Jerusalem for a feast.  As he is journeying into the city, he passes a pool.  Far from our idea of the local YMCA, this pool did not have children splashing or athletes doing laps for exercise.  This pool was surrounded with people suffering from every physical ailment imaginable.  Some were blind, some had deformities, and some couldn’t walk.  This pool was known far and wide to have a healing effect, and this great multitude of people were waiting for their opportunity to be healed.  As the story goes, at a certain season an angel would go down into the pool and trouble the water, and only then the first person who stepped into the water would be healed of whatever disease they had.  You can imagine that these people were in for a long wait having to compete with a huge crowd lunging for the waters whenever they moved.

One such man laying beside the pool had been unable to walk for thirty-eight years.  Jesus approached him and asked what might sound like an obvious question, “Would you like to get well?”  “I can’t,” he replied, “for I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I am trying to get there, someone else always gets in ahead of me” (John 5:7 NLT).  In other words, of course he’d like to get well, but he couldn’t reach the pool in time, and he kept missing his opportunity.  Jesus’ response is one of the most surprising and revolutionary statements ever made.  He said “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.”  I’m sure you can imagine that the lame man might have had some choice words for Jesus like “what do you think I’ve been trying to do these past thirty-eight years!”  But he didn’t have a chance to respond this way, because as soon as Jesus spoke, the man was healed.  He took up his sick bed and walked.

Jesus saw that this man’s opportunity to be healed didn’t depend on circumstances that were out of his control.  The opportunity for him to experience his God given right to health was there all along.  Jesus’ statement “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk” awoke the man to this spiritual fact of being.  This healing shows us that opportunity is not something we have to wait for, opportunity is what God is giving us in every moment.  Join us this Wednesday, March 15th at 7:30pm for readings from the Bible and the Christian Science textbook on the topic of “Opportunity.” Then we’ll hear testimonies from folks who are working this out in their own lives. Can’t come in person? Join us on the phone:

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