25. Healing at the Pool of Bethesda (Jn 5:1-9)

John Chapter 5:1-9
After these things, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. (2) And at Jerusalem is a pool at the Sheep Gate which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. (3) In these was a great multitude of the infirm lying, blind ones, lame ones, withered ones, awaiting the stirring of the water. (4) For an angel at a certain time descended in the pool and agitated the water. Then the one first entering after the agitation of the water became well, whatever disease he was held by. (5) But a certain man was there, being in infirmity thirty eight years. (6) Seeing him lying, and knowing that he had already spent much time, Jesus said to him, Do you desire to become well? (7) The infirm one answered Him, Lord, I do not have a man, that when the water is agitated he may throw me into the pool; but while I am coming, another goes down before me. (8) Jesus said to him, Rise up, Take up your cot and walk! (9) And instantly the man became well, and took up his cot and walked. And it was a sabbath that day.

Arcana Coelestia 10083 by Emanuel Swedenborg
The Lord often said, when sick people were being healed, that they should have faith, and, ‘Let it be to you according to your faith’, as in Matt. 8:10-13; 9:2,22,27-29; 13:57,58; 15:28; 21:21,22,31,32; Mark 5:34,36; 10:49,52; 16[:16]; Luke 7:9,48-50; 8:48; 17:19; 18:42,43. The reason why He said it was that the very first thing a person needs to do is to acknowledge that the Lord is the Saviour of the world; for unless he acknowledges this no one can receive any truth or good at all from heaven, or therefore receive faith from there. And since it was the very first and most essential thing, therefore in order that He might be acknowledged when He came into the world the Lord questioned the sick, when He healed them, about their faith; and those who had faith were healed. This faith was that He was the Son of God who was to come into the world, and that He had power to heal and save. Furthermore every healing of sickness by the Lord when He was in the world served to mean a healing of spiritual life, thus served to mean the things that belong to salvation, 8364, 9031(end), 9086.

[6] Since acknowledgement of the Lord is the first thing of all belonging to spiritual life and is the most essential feature of the Church, and since no one, unless he acknowledges Him, can receive any truth of faith or good of love at all from heaven, the Lord also often says that whoever believes in Him has eternal life, and whoever does not believe in Him does not have it, as in John 1:1,4,12,13; 3:14-16,36; 5:39,40; 6:28-30,33-35,40,47,48; 7:37,38; 8:24; 11:25,26; 20:30,31. But at the same time He also teaches that they have faith in Him who live according to His commandments, so that the life which results from doing so goes to compose their faith. These things have been stated to cast light on and corroborate the truth that acknowledging the Lord and acknowledging that all salvation comes from Him constitute the beginning of the life from God with a person.

Apocalypse Revealed 137 by Emanuel Swedenborg
“a bed” signifies doctrine is from correspondence, for as the body rests in its bed, so does the mind rest in its doctrine. But by “bed” is signified the doctrine which everyone acquires to himself either from the Word, or from his own intelligence, for therein the mind rests and, as it were, sleeps. The beds in which they lie in the spiritual world, are from no other origin; for there everyone’s bed is according to the quality of his science and intelligence, magnificent for the wise, mean for the unwise, and filthy for falsifiers.

Apocalypse Explained (Whitehead) 163.
The Lord saying to these sick, “Arise, take up thy bed, and walk,” signifies doctrine, and a life according thereto; “bed” signifies doctrine, and “to walk” life (that ” walking” is living, see above, n. 97). “The sick man” signifies those that have transgressed and sinned;


 

Last week we explored the healing of the noblemans son and saw that this related to the removal of evils in the exterior man through a process of self examination that is motivated by a desire to have the Lord’s love more fully expressed in our life. We saw that for the Word to have an impact on us we need to acknowledge that it is the Lord and that in and of ourselves we are in a state of sickness and unable to live the spiritual life. This recognition to have any affect must be made in how we live, for without a response from the will there can be no healing of our spirits. The proper response is to look to the removal of evils from our life for this alone is what invites the Lord’s power to come down into lower level of our minds where natural truths from the Word are held captive by the feverish lusts of the natural man and heal our relationship to them.

By looking to the Lord in this inner work He is able to bring His life to them so that we can love wisely. We also looked at the significance of the fact that this healing of the son took place in Capernaum, which means “field of repentance” and so the truths that this son represents in us belong to our memory of the literal stories of the Word that once opened through our reception of the Lord’s life are able to reveal our inner states of life. When these are healed by the Lord, that is when we come to understand how they apply to our life we are empowered to move forward in our ability to recognise our evils and so have them removed.

“After these things,” we read in the opening verse, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. The healing of the nobleman’s son occurs between feasts. If you recall it was a feast Jesus had been at previously, where He was seen by the Galileans and because of this they were open to receiving Him when He arrived in Galilee. So “feasts” have to do with reception, in fact we still call the wedding feast a reception. Spiritually the idea of a feast has to do with the reception of what is good and true into ones life. Now the delights with which the spiritual senses are stimulated are the things that have to do with our desires and thoughts. In the spiritual life it is only as we remove evils because we see them as sins against the Lord that we grow into a delight for the goods and truths of the Word. This delight is associated with our spiritual senses and when we look to the Word as the means for the removal of our evils (selfish desires) then the Lord is able to open our spiritual perceptive facultities through which we are able to perceive Him more clearly as the Word and receive what is of Himself into the life of our minds.

This opening of our spiritual perception or senses is what is being described in our story this morning. When the Scripture says Jesus went up to Jerusalem we have described in natural language spiritual realities. Jesus is the Lord’s desire for our salvation, and the principle here is that as we acknowledge Him in the externals of life so the Word is able to work on a deeper level of our minds. This is what is mean’t by the Lord going up, for to go up to Jerusalem is to be elevated, and for something to be elevated spiritually is to see it more inwardly. The Lord’s going up is the indrawing of truths into the deeper recesses of our being through our obedience to them. In its use of natural language and ideas the Word here lays before us a spiritual principle that is seen when we choose to work inwardly on ourselves in response to our understanding of the Word in the light of the Heavenly Doctrines, which points us to its internal or spiritual meaning. Jerusalem is our understanding of Word in the light of what the doctrine teaches concerning love to the Lord and love to our neighbour. And it is here, in this part of our mind, that the Word now begins to work to bring it into a more perfect image of heavenly order.

We read firstly of the structural elements connected to the mind to do with this understanding of doctine, and it is described in the following way…

(2) And at Jerusalem is a pool at the Sheep [Gate] which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches.

Then we read of the condition or state of mind that exists there…

(3) In these [i.e. in the five porches] was a great multitude of the infirm lying, blind ones, lame ones, withered ones, awaiting the stirring of the water.

And following this the process by which a kind of limited healing takes place…

(4) For an angel at a certain time descended in the pool and agitated the water. Then the one first entering after the agitation of the water became well, whatever disease he was held by.

Let’s look at the description of the setting first. At Jerusalem is a pool, which is at the Sheep Gate and is called Bethesda, and it has five porches. Jerusalem is what we believe concerning the Word and the Heavenly doctrines and within these there is something described as a pool which is associated with the Sheep Gate and is called Bethesda. We’ll come to the five porches in a moment. Now a pool is a still body of water gathered together in one place and because water corresponds to truths, so this pool represents the knowledge we hold in our memories of something specific within the Word that is revealed in its name, Bethesda.

So what does Bethesda mean? It means, “house of mercy.” Mercy is what the Word is for it contains, as a house, the fulness of the Divine itself being the manifestaion of the Lord’s Divine Love and Wisdom in a form we can grasp with our limited finite faculties. When read with a view to responding to what it teaches in the light of the Heavenly Doctrines we are introduce to the Lord in His Divine Human, and it is this that is the mercy of God for by means of this alone is a person saved from their hellish states of life. The reference to sheep adds to our understanding as to where or upon what the Word operates within our minds. For sheep represent pliable obedient affections for spiritual things drawn into our life from the Word.

We now turn to what the five porches are, and it is to be noted that it is within these there is found the great multitude, the infirm, the blind, the lame and the withered. Of course in the literal sense these are people suffering from various ailments and conditions but spiritually they describe the condition or state of those things that sit in the porches that lead into our inner world. This infirm populous within us are the ideas and affections that are in need of the Lord, in need of being brought into connection with His Human so that we might be raise up into the fulness of what it is to be truly human ourselves. And what is it to be truly human, it is to have a mind centred on the Word that it too might be a house recreated in the image of mercy, compassion and love, a house in the image and likeness of God.

What prevents this is our unbelief, or the limitations our self centred demand to live life as we want, and not as the Word teaches, that fills the porches of our perceptive faculties with infirm natural ideas and desires that cloud our ability to see the Word in spiritual light. Our spiritual senses lay infirm, unable to operate in the clarity that they should due to our affections and thoughts suffering from the diseased perpectives the loves of self and the world promote. What are the 5 porches, they are our spiritual senses, and they are filled with the infirm when we look to self rather than to the Lord. Just as we have five natural senses so we have spiritual senses to which they correspond. The sense of touch corresponds to the affection for goodness, the sense of taste to the affection for knowing, smell to the affection for perceiving, hearing to the affection for learning that leads to obedience and seeing to the affection for learning and growing wise.

But self interest closes us off to what is spiritual and our faculties become filled with a disorganised mass of negativity that resists the spiritual life and renders us infirm or weak of will in that we can’t seen to find the motivation to obey the truths we see before us. Warpped perspectives energised by our own self centred agenda’s leave us blind and unable to see things from the true perspective that the goods and truths offered in the Word are able to bring, we are unable to live or walk in those truths and so are lame and, under the heat of our selfish lusts, what is heavenly and has entered the mind soon withers away. These are the infirm, the blind, the lame and the withered that rob us of the goodness the Lord seeks to instill into our lives.

When our senses are peopled with this multitude who are afflicted with the proprium’s pride in its own false sense of self sufficiency we serverly limit the operation of the Lord’s mercy in our lives because we fail to see that the Word holds the fulness of the Lord’s power to overcome any affliction in the human condition that affects our spiritual well being. Nothing, nothing you suffer from is beyond the Lord’s ability to manage and turn to a good outcome. His mercy knows no bounds and as the Psalmist declares, it endures forever. The limitations our beliefs in regard to the Word place upon its power to bring wholeness into our lives is seen in the waters being stirred and one of these afflicted aspects of our inner world being healed. It speaks of a state of getting temporary relief from what troubles us, but it seems we are soon troubled again and are left waiting for the waters to be stirred once more so that we can find some relief. But something is continually frustrated in this state of life and this is captured in the one who cannot get to the water for he has no man to carry him.

There is more to this man’s statement that appears on the surface. Firstly the man is that part of us which the Lord or Word can come to and engage with. The Word or the Divine Truth represented by Jesus questions him, as it does us when we come to it in an attitude of humility and with a willingness to be opened up by it, to bring us insight into the cause for our inablity to find wholeness. We need to read this conversation with attention for it reveals why the spiritual infirmities we struggle with remain and it also reveals what it is that opens the way for the Lord to heal them.

Joh 5:6-9 (6) …Jesus said to him, Do you desire to become well? (7) The infirm one answered Him, Lord, I do not have a man, that when the water is agitated he may throw me into the pool; but while I am coming, another goes down before me. (8) Jesus said to him, Rise up, Take up your cot and walk! (9) And instantly the man became well, and took up his cot and walked. And it was a sabbath that day.

Firstly the Word asks us, “Do you desire to become well?” This is such an important question, for if we truly desire this, not as we think it should be but on the Lord’s terms we will see what the problem is and He will show us what we must do. The man answers saying, “Lord, I do not have a man who can throw me into the pool when the water is stirred, so that when I am coming another goes down before me.” There is a realisation that without the help of a man there is no hope of salvation. This realisation is an acknowledgement that in and of ourselves we don’t have any power to advance our regeneration one step, that it is something the Lord alone accomplishes for us. But we know this. Yes we know it, but knowing it and living from it are two very different states of life. Whenever we grow impatient, anxious, or angry with how things are for us we are given a window into the fact that we are living from another belief that is self derived, for our states of negative emotion arise from a tendency to lean to our own understanding as to how things should be, revealing that the roots of self reliance and self sufficiency are alive and well within us.

On a literal level of the story we hear the man’s frustration, it is every man for himself, first in first served. This is the attitude that surrounds this pool, its a selfish attitude. But for this man putting his hopes in getting from the pool what he needs, let alone getting to the actual pool is an impossiblity. We too are like this. The pool is a static body of water that is stirred every now and again. This is our knowledge of the Word in our memory and yes we can go to this and be inspired with some small insight but it is always on our own terms. To have the Word merely as something of the memory is not enough because when the Word is seen and held in this way it isn’t recognised as being the Divine, and if we don’t see that it is divine then we limit its ability bring wholeness into our life.

Until we see it as the Divine so we truly don’t have a man who can carry us. The Greek word here is that we don’t have “a human” to carry us. The Word is the true Man, the true Human, for it is the Divine Human of the Lord, but for it to become so for us in a real way we have to acknowledge this as a matter of life. It becomes our Saviour and Redeemer when we see it as the living God, the Lord Jesus Christ in our midst. The Word as a pool of knowledge is dead and in this man’s statement is a realisation that every person has to come to if they are to be made whole and it is that unless we are prepared to live from the Word we cannot be helped. We need the Lord’s Divine Human active and alive for us as the Word understood in the light of the heavenly Doctrines if we are to have our spiritual perceptions opened up and the proches cleared of what obstructs the free flow of the Lord’s life within us.

Until we live from the Word we don’t have a human to carry us, we are powerless in spiritual matters. This human, is the mercy and compassion that the Lord is and from the perspective of Spiritual Christianity this human that can assit us are the teachings found in the Heavenly Doctrines that open up the inner meaning of the Sacred Scriptures. Yet there is also something else revealed in the man’s statement, that he a desire to be carried and so while on the one hand he recognises that he is powerless, a realisation we all need in regard to spiritual matters, it is only half the story. Whatever his affliction is he lacks motive power, the abiliy to move himself to the water quickly enough.

What is interesting here is that the Lord doesn’t pick Him up and carry him to the waters. There is a profound truth here and it is such a fundamental aspect to the teachings of Spiritual Christianity in regard to a person’s regeneration and it is the principle of “as if of oneself”. Yes, it is true, we are powerless in spiritual matters, however the balance to this is that the Lord gives us power to act as if of ourselves in these things. So we can respond to truths and live from then but our ability to do this is from the Lord. As long as we think we act from ourselves we remain infirm and passive waiting for someone or something to carry us. This is not how it works.

The Word with all its truths is available to us but until we choose to live from it we remain infirm sitting by a pool waiting for someone else to carry us to the waters. It won’t happen. The answer doesn’t lie in our being carried as a passive player in our spiritual life. It lies in our responsiveness, our actions from our will empowered by the truths of the Lord’s words…,

Jesus said to him, rise up, take up your cot and walk…

To rise up is to move toward what is higher, to move out of what our senses would have us believe and lean upon the Word as the basis for our perception of things. This is a conscious choice on our part. To rise up, or step up (Gk) is to act on what we know and to walk is to live our life from the truths of the Word and Doctrine we carry with us represented by the bed or pallet. To elevate things in the spiritual life is to live from them which is what the Word commands of us as Jesus commanded of this man. If we would commit our lives to doing this we will be made whole. To cease from our own labours, from our own ideas and cast ourselves upon the Lord is to enter into the sabbath…

And instantly the man became well, and took up his cot and walked. And it was the sabbath that day.

Amen.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Subscribe
Notify of
1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Marian Fraser
Marian Fraser
7 months ago

Im enriched by these comments about the senses and what they correspond to, and how that leads to the insight into the cause of our inability to find wholeness.
That it is no good being a passive player in our spiritual life.