SURPRISE ENDINGS
“…Do you want to be well?” – Jn 5:6
When I meditate on today’s Gospel, I become a sick man that Jesus finds near healing waters in Jerusalem. Jesus asks this of me, “Do you want to be well?” I want to simply say “Yes.” Instead, I answer with a long explanation about why I cannot be well: "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me."
Stalemate.
I can’t make it down to the healing water, but still I stay.
Still I wait.
Why?
I think it must be hope.
Something will get me down to the water somehow, so I wait for this happy ending.
The notion of God answering our prayers in unexpected ways is cliché to me, yet God does exactly that, over and over.
A man I don’t recognize comes up to me and tells me to “rise” and somehow, by some miracle, I believe that I can do as he asks – and I am made well.
I’m surprised.
After all this waiting… nothing about how this played out involved water at all. Jesus didn’t bring me water to drink. He didn’t carry me down to the pool. He didn’t shout at the others to make room for me. I thought I knew how this would end.
I can see Jesus break stalemates like this in my own life.
I’ve waited.
I waited to meet Rae, who’s now my wife. All it took was letting go of the means that I thought were necessary to meet her in the first place. I waited for our son Ollie, nearly stillborn, to make a full recovery. All it took was letting go of the future I thought he would have – and “settling” for my only prayer for him during those scary moments of his first month of life: that he would know that he is loved. I waited for reconciliation with my parents, a relationship that seemed on course for estrangement. All it took was my mom’s death. In my heart, I waited by her death bed for a full year after she’d already passed learning to let go of being loved by my parents the way that I wanted to be. Letting this go led to an unexpected posthumous reconciliation with my mom and a more real and growing relationship with my dad than I ever thought possible.
During this Lenten season, what are we waiting for now? What happy endings are we invited to let go of? Are we leaving enough room to be surprised by God?
Kevin Izquierdo