2025.05.25 | Freedom to Heal
Freedom to Heal
A sermon preached at Eden United Church of Christ
in Hayward, California,
on Sunday, May 25, 2025,
by the Rev. Brenda Loreman.
Scripture: John 5:1-9
Copyright © 2025 by Brenda Loreman
There is an old joke out there about a Sunday School teacher—or maybe a preacher doing the Children’s Gathering—giving the children a little lesson about being industrious and prepared, and she said to the children, I’m going to describe something, and I want you to raise your hand when you know what it is.” The children were excited to show her what they knew and leaned forward eagerly. “I’m thinking of something that lives in trees and eats nuts …” No hands went up. “It can be gray or brown and it has a long bushy tail …” The children looked around the room at each other, but still no one raised a hand. “It chatters and sometimes it flips its tail when it’s excited …” Finally, one little boy shyly raised his hand, and the teacher breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Oh, good. What do you think it is?” “Well,” said the boy, “it sure sounds like a squirrel to me, but I know the answer’s got to be Jesus!”
Jesus may be the answer for Church School children, and lots of other people, but if one really looks at the Gospels and the ministry of Jesus, we might say instead that Jesus is the question.
Jesus asks a lot of questions.
In fact, asking questions is central to Jesus’s life and the way he teaches and interacts with everyone he meets. Jesus is not the Answer Man. He doesn’t offer tips living in a nice easy top-ten list like some sort of spiritual Dear Abby. Instead, he’s more of the Great Questioner. In fact, Jesus asks many more questions than he is asked. People who like to count things like this have figured that, throughout the four Gospels, Jesus asks 307 different questions. In contrast, he is asked only 183 questions.
More remarkably, he directly answers only a small handful of the questions he’s asked. Depending on how one counts, Jesus answer a mere three, or as many as eight of those 183 questions. However you look at it, it’s a decidedly small number. Jesus definitely prefers to ask questions rather than to provide direct answers.
It makes sense that Jesus would ask questions. Asking questions is a time-honored practice for everyone from educators to therapists. The teachers out there know this. Good questions produce good results. Questions can help check for the effectiveness of your lessons—or they can open up space for creativity and exploration.
Questions can be closed-ended or open-ended, and different types of questions will elicit different responses. A closed-ended question implies that there is a preferred answer … a right answer. How many planets are in the solar system? Well, that might actually be an open-ended question, depending on whether you’re still upset about Pluto being demoted a few years ago. How many moons orbit the planet Mars? The answer is two. How do I look in this outfit? If you know what’s good for your relationship, you know this is a closed-ended question, and the answer is always, “You look wonderful.”
Open-ended questions are different. Open-ended questions have no one correct or implied answer. Each person might answer an open-ended question differently, based on their knowledge, experience, and context. The answer to an open-ended question can change over time. It can expand our thinking. It can send us in a new direction. Where shall we go on vacation this year? What would happen if California seceded from the Union? What should I do with my time after I retire?
Open-ended questions can make us uncomfortable. They often have no easy answer. An unanswered question produces anxiety—a sense of discomfort and disruption. But in the space that opens in our unease, new creative possibilities can emerge. I have a friend who says that for her, open-ended questions don’t even have to be answered for them to have an effect on her. Merely having asked the question puts her into that creative space of the possible. Such probing, open-ended questions are very much like the other favorite teaching tool of Jesus: the parable. Like a good parable, a probing question communicates indirectly; the person who hears a parable or a good question must listen carefully, and has to do the work themselves to figure out the answer.
The question that Jesus asks the man at the pool, “Do you want to be made well?” seems to be at first a closed-ended question. There’s only one expected answer, and the answer is, “Yes.” But the man's response to Jesus’s question indicates that this might be a more open-ended question than we might think. The man doesn’t say he wants to be healed, but he does give an excuse for why the system of healing that he is participating in is not working for him.
To make sense of his answer, it helps to have a bit of context. The New Revised Standard Updated Edition text for verses 2-3 reads, “Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people.” If you have a good study Bible with footnotes, at this point in the text, you’ll see this footnote: “Other ancient authorities add, wholly or in part, waiting for the stirring of the water, for an angel of the Lord went down from time to time into the pool and stirred up the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had.”
In some older translations of the text, such as the King James Version, this explanation is verse 4. In the versions of the Bible we currently read here at Eden, verse 4 is omitted. The verse is not included in the earliest manuscripts we have for John, and most biblical scholars believe that this verse was a later addition by scribes trying to make sense of the paralyzed man’s situation and why he answers Jesus’s question the way he does: “The ill man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way someone else steps down ahead of me.’”
It feels like the man is answering the subtext of Jesus’s question, rather than the question at face value. It’s obvious to Jesus that everyone at the pool has a desire to be made well—they wouldn’t be there otherwise. But perhaps the question at the heart of Jesus’s interaction with the man is, “What’s getting in the way of you being well?”
This story of the paralyzed man points to two understandings of the freedom to heal. By asking his question, Jesus encourages the man to consider what barriers stand in the way of his path to wholeness—and then he gets rid of those barriers by offering the man a direct line to wellness.
Sometimes, the freedom to heal is the freedom we need to discern and get rid of the impediments to our own healing; sometimes, the freedom to heal is the freedom we can offer to others by addressing the barriers to their healing.
It may be that the first barrier to overcome on the wellness journey is just recognizing that we are actually in need of healing, whether that be in body, mind, or spirit. It may also be that the barrier lies outside us, in the narrow definitions of wellness that society holds, and the barriers created by the human-built environment.
The Rev. Justin Hancock, United Methodist minister, author, and disability rights advocate, lives with cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair for mobility. He sees his condition not as a disability, but as an embodiment of the way he was fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. Rev. Hancock once wrote about an encounter with a Christian stranger who asked to pray with him after encountering him outside near his church. Rev. Hancock responded by saying “You should know that God and I have had many conversations and as of now, God is perfectly comfortable with me in a wheelchair and I am perfectly comfortable in the wheelchair.” The stranger, unable to accept this refusal of prayer, stomped off in a huff. For Rev. Hancock, the barriers to healing are other people’s attitudes and ignorance about his embodiment, along with the human-built environment that ignores the needs of those in wheelchairs.
Freedom to heal isn’t granted by passively making space for it—it involves doing the work to remove the obstacles that get in the way. What is ours to do in removing those barriers to healing so there is freedom? Or, what if we could imagine a worldview that didn’t see different embodiments as needing healing in the first place, but instead could perceive these embodiments as having unique values and gifts—not objects of pity but fully realized and blessed children of God?
There are many ways each of us needs healing. What blocks have we created to our own and others’ healing? Sometimes the freedom that is needed is within our power to offer. Sometimes the freedom that is needed is within our power to receive if we but ask. What we need from God is the strength to ask and the courage to act. Amen.