There is a kind of wound that stops being something you have and becomes something you are. You did not plan it. It began as pain, and pain earned attention, and attention felt a little like being known. Years pass. The people around you learn how to speak to you, and you learn what to say. Your account of what happened becomes the way you introduce yourself. Then one day someone offers to take the wound away, and you notice, with some alarm, that you have to stop and think about it.
John gives us a man who may know this feeling. Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for a feast, and John takes us to a pool near the Sheep Gate, with five covered colonnades. Under them lay a great number of the sick, the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. Out of that crowd John picks one man and gives us the only measurement he offers: "One man there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years." We get no name and no history. We get a number and a condition.
Then comes the sentence that this whole reading turns on: "When Jesus saw him lying there and realized that he had spent a long time in this condition, He asked him, 'Do you want to get well?'"
Read it slowly, because it is an odd thing to ask. Nothing about the man's state is hidden. Jesus can see it, and John tells us Jesus knows how long it has lasted. He does not ask what is wrong, or how it happened, or who is to blame. He asks about wanting. The question is aimed past the body and at the person lying on the mat.
We should be careful with the answer. Nothing in the text says the man is lying, or making excuses, or hiding. He may be entirely accurate. "Sir," he says, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am on my way, someone else goes in before me." That is a plain report of how things work for him. But notice what it is a report of. Jesus asked about desire, and the man answered with circumstances. He does not say yes. He tells the story he has been telling for thirty-eight years, the one that explains why nothing has changed and why that is not his fault.
Most of us have such a story. It may be entirely true. The trouble is not that it is false but that it has become the only thing we say. When a wound has been explained often enough, the explanation starts to do a job for us. It tells us who we are, what we are owed, and what we are excused from. Getting well would mean giving up the explanation, and that can feel like losing something more than the pain.
