Excuses, Excuses, Excuses . . . and Miracle!

The Lord Jesus in today’s Gospel encounters a man at the five-porticoed pool of Bethesda who has been “lying there”---surrounded by “a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled”---for thirty-eight years.  Christ’s question is bracingly straightforward:  “Do you want to be well?”  But His query is met by the paralyzed man’s egregiously---pardon the pun---“lame” excuse that “I have no one to put me into the pool.”  For almost the span of years that the Israelites were trudging through the desert, this guy can’t network with anyone to get help?  Come on!  After the man is finally cured by Jesus, the Lord must seek him out again with some salutary follow-up scolding:  “Look, you are well; do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”  Clearly there was a more serious spiritual paralysis which had come to underlie this invalid’s physical limitations.

On my first visit to the Piper Clinic for an initial consultation about my chronic TMJ problem, I had to spend several hours watching videotaped “pain lectures” produced by Dr. Mark Piper.  In these presentations, the doctor described how the different systems of joints and nerves and muscles were inter-related.  A malady in one of them quite frequently, if not inevitably, cascaded into problems with the others.  Of particular interest to me were the facial photos of patients who had suffered chronic pain for many years; their mouths had a tendency to form into a permanent frown.  The drooping at the sides of the lips gradually but inevitably became the most comfortable position for the damaged muscles and nerves to be in.  Put another way, for those suffering jaw problems for a long time, it became---for many reasons---virtually impossible to smile.  And, as one might imagine, this physiological condition led in turn to emotional and (although the videos did not allude to them) spiritual problems.

My ultimate diagnosis from the Piper Clinic was two-fold:  I had slipped cartilage disks in my jaw joints, but I also had a “syndrome of pain patterning” that had to be addressed as well.  Fortunately in my case, the latter was not as advanced as the former.  I was actually amused to find out that Dr. Piper’s initial observations of my “nice smile” and happy looking face were not at all small talk or polite niceties intended to put me at ease; they were in fact physiognomic medical descriptions of what was going on “underneath” my skin.  Much of my post-surgical recovery involves the reversal of this syndrome of pain patterning through a temporary regimen of anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxing medications, combined with physical therapy exercises I can do on my own.  I expect to be fully back to easy smiling---exteriorly and interiorly---over the course of the next few months.

The Lord Jesus knows as our Divine Physician that we have more than one single problem that needs to be cured.  He also knows that any serious sin---or chronic indulgence of the same, small bad habits---in fact typically catalyzes a whole “syndrome of pain patterning” which threatens to deform every aspect of our lives, paralyzing us in the endless negative feedback loop of limitations followed by excuses, followed by more limitations followed by more excuses. . . .

Only in recent years has the five-porticoed pool of Bethesda been re-discovered and systematically excavated.  It is one of the few places in contemporary Jerusalem where one can literally descend to the very depths at which Jesus Christ moved in His public ministry to work His cures.  Today the Lord wants, so to speak, to excavate the rubble of years (and perhaps decades) of excuses under which we have been lamed or paralyzed or even crushed. 

Our Savior allowed Himself---Isaiah prophesies---to be “crushed for our iniquities” (Is 53:6) that we might be made whole.  The Lord enters our pain to reveal its patterning and to propose His sacramental remedies leading to fully restored life in His Church.  Jesus wants to repeat His miracle in us of making a zealous evangelist out of a half-hearted beggar.  To accomplish this, Christ gives us St. Peter as the “Rock” on whom He will build His Church, so that we can have a foundation of people to help us in our need.  Thus we pray fervently for the Cardinal electors as they gather in Conclave today to select a new Pope under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  In the historic drama of this particular day---in this pivotal Lenten moment in our life---the time for lying around is passed:  Thanks be to God, Christ will accept no more of our lame excuses.