Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 24 · January 24
Thirty and Eight Years
“When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?”
Jesus walked up to a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years and asked him whether he wanted to get better.
The question is strange enough that people rush to explain it. Perhaps he had settled in. Perhaps a beggar's pitch by a famous pool was a living, and thirty-eight years is long enough for an illness to become an arrangement. That is guesswork, and John supplies none of it. What he supplies is that Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case. He knew. He asked anyway.
Be careful what you build on the setting. The line about an angel going down to trouble the water is missing from the earliest manuscripts, so the mechanism people believed in at Bethesda is not something Scripture is teaching you. What stands is one sick man's account of it, and it is the saddest sentence in the chapter. Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.
That is not an answer. He was asked whether he wanted it and he replied with why he has not got it, which is a different question and a thirty-eight-year-old habit. He never says yes.
He is healed anyway, and does not even know who did it. He that was healed wist not who it was.
The question is still on the table and it is a real one. Wilt thou be made whole. You are allowed to answer with the mechanism, with the reasons it has not happened, with the name of everyone who stepped down before you. He heard all of that once and gave the man his legs back. You are also allowed, this morning, to simply say yes.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 24 is The Greatest (1 Corinthians 13:13).