Too often, some Christians seem determined to prove “the surly bird gets the worm.”
Perhaps an answer begins to emerge when one considers the question asked by Jesus of the man with the crippled legs, “Do you want to get well?”
In other words, do you want to be whole?”
Not “Do you want to walk again?” That was obvious. Otherwise, why would he have come to the pool of Bethesda
It is not that Jesus did not realize how important the healing of the legs was.
It was just that he wanted the man and those around to realize how important was the healing of his soul.
He was aiming at a really important want list. Put it this way - heal just a man’s legs, and not his soul, and his legs can straightway get him in more trouble than he could ever have gotten into when he couldn’t walk.
By way of example…
A man who had once claimed Christ, and then through bitterness had left the church and his faith, was asked by a friend, “What do you miss the most?” The reply was instant, “I miss the trumpets in the morning.”
We all want Gabriel’s bugle blast.
We all want forgiveness for our sins.
We all should want with equal zeal a super strength to forgive others who have sinned against us.
We all want to hear heavenly music and even make a little by our attitudes and actions.
We all want those special attributes that can make our souls glow and glimmer and even bring a tear to our eyes as we feel the power of the Holy Spirit come to call.
The kind of super spiritual strength that led an old man over eighty years to finally seek and acquire to give the forgiveness he had long known he must show andgive.
Tears streamed down his face as he related his tale. “I was seven years old when my father died in a small private plane crash at a local airport. I had been out riding my bicycle and since I hadn’t gone back home, I didn’t know.
One little boy who had always disliked me came riding by.
“Your daddy is dead. Your daddy is dead. You don’t have a daddy anymore,” he gleefully taunted and rode away.
That was how I learned about my father’s death.
It is why I was consumed with hate for this boy, now grown to be a man, all these years.
We’re both old men now and it’s time I forgive him. And I have!”
And think upon what it did for him and to him.
It closed up his classroom of on-going revenge.
It repealed his inner law of vengeance that had become so much a part of him down through the years.
His little vicious mind so long alive now was dead on arrival.
If we practice and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole
world will be blind and toothless.
world will be blind and toothless.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Matthew 18: 21-22
Then Peter went up to him and said, "Lord, how often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times? Jesus answered, "Not seven, I tell you, but seventy seven times."
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