The old hymn asks: “Art thou weary? Art thou languid?” Many of us are. Some suffer from diseases that are not necessarily fatal or even debilitating but that nonetheless plague, weaken, and distract. Others suffer quietly from miserable relationships, broken hearts, or lost children. The death of a close family member or friend often leaves a wound that never entirely heals, a sense of loss that never quite dissipates. A particular sin is your constant tormentor. You seek a cure, with greater or lesser intensity, but it lingers, haunts, paralyzes. Sometimes you think victory is won, but in a moment of weakness, the old enemy topples your pillar of confidence and returns you to the valley of despair. You may be waiting: for your marital relationship to heal, for your children to stop breaking your heart, for a better vocation, for financial stability, or for a suitable marriage partner, someone to love. Each one of us, no matter what our outward circumstances, suffers from a lifelong battle with indwelling sin, a contagion that is slowing sapping our energy and vitality, literally killing us as we rot away from the inside. So, yes, many of you will honestly affirm, “I am weary.”
As Jesus was walking in Jerusalem, he came to pool at the sheep market near Bethesda. At this pool lay a great multitude of sick and despairing folk. Their personal stories would melt the hardest heart: blind men, lame women, sick children – in an age without support groups and social nets beyond the family, among men who usually equated personal tragedy with personal wickedness, thus compounding the loneliness and contributing to the destitution. These miserables gathered at this pool to seek healing. An angel occasionally touched the water. Thereafter, the first one to step into the pool was healed. When this divine visitation began or how it occurred is unimportant; John records it as a simple fact. That God occasionally visited his people in such ways should not be surprising to us, for in that long epoch of waiting for the Messiah, he gave testimonies to the daughter of Zion that he had not forgotten her cries or abandoned her to despair. At this pool lay a lame man, a man who had been unable to walk for thirty-eight years: thirty-eight years of waiting, of misery, of watching life go by, of expectation and dashed hopes. How could he hope to reach the pool before others? He could not walk. But he continued to come, hoping for a miracle, believing, perhaps, that God would have mercy upon him.
Jesus came to the pool. He always sought out the weak and helpless: one of the most compelling aspects of his earthly ministry. We might be surprised at the many tens of thousands of these despairing ones, perhaps multiplied many times over, Jesus sought out or received, then healed. Jesus saw the man lying by the pool. O, if this man had known what this gaze would soon mean for him, his soul would have been elevated to heaven even as he lay on helpless on the ground! For Jesus to look upon us with compassion, his pity joined with power, his soul-penetrating look, knowing and feeling our misery in a moment, is life itself. Note that he looked specifically at this man. A multitude lay nearby, but his merciful gaze fell upon this particular man. Why? Sovereign grace and goodness. He knew the man had been in this condition for a long time. He set his love upon him. He spoke to him.
“Do you want to be made whole?” As this was Jesus’ first public visit to Jerusalem, the lame man had no way of knowing who addressed him. “I have no one to take me to the water after the angel troubles it,” he said. He had often tried to make it on his own: “while I am coming.” How? Crawling. How else could a lame man move? Imagine the thoughts in his heart when he saw the water move, how he must have scrutinized the water until he could count almost every drop. Each step between him and the water was measured. Healing was a few steps away; he could not make it. He had tried repeatedly. The physical effort must have been as nothing, however, in comparison to the torment of soul as he saw others, who had diseases that did not impair their movement, rushing toward the pool. Despairingly, he must have the halted the effort many times. In an instant, Jesus knew all this. Enough. “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.” Immediately, the man was made whole, took up his bed, and walked.
Unlike some of Jesus’ other, more personal encounters, we are not told anything about this man’s faith, response, or subsequent efforts to tell everyone about Jesus. There was no opportunity, for Jesus “conveyed himself away.” He did not want to be thronged by the multitude. Thus, the healed man had no opportunity to learn the name of his benefactor, of the one who completely altered his life. After an encounter with some furious Jews, for Jesus had done this work of mercy on the Sabbath, Jesus found him in the temple. “Sin no more,” he told him, “lest a worse thing come upon you.” Jesus hereby encouraged him to view his healing as a call to seek the true healing of soul without which physical health is hardly a blessing. The man went and told the Jews that Jesus had healed him, information, I pray, more prompted by righteous zeal than any malice.
We cannot be reminded often enough that the compassion of our Savior is our salvation. Whatever our personal miseries may be, however long we may have suffered from them, or how much effort we may have expended in pursuit of a remedy, he looks upon us with compassion. He entered into our world of despair and suffering, all brought on by sin. He himself bore our weakness and carried our burdens – because he loved us and would deliver us. A great deal of our victory is simply looking to him, knowing that he looks upon us with his special love and concern, is always ready to help us, prays for us, and exerts all of his blood-bought dominion to bring the comforts of grace to our haggard hearts. Consider Jesus. Think again and again of his compassion upon the nameless thousands and millions who have looked to him for help, when all other helps failed, because there was no other help. Remember that he gave you the faith to look to him in the first place, for he knew you could not, would not bring yourself to him. He came to you. If you know him at all, it is because he singled you out in love and pity – not because you were worthy but because you were helpless and hopeless. Do not despair, then. Be of good cheer! The Son of God has looked upon you and, having looked, he never turns his eyes away.
Think, then, of your causes for despair. Have they not paralyzed you time and again, filled you with fear, dampened your zeal, and left you at times hopeless? Yes, you can try to forget them. Virtually all of the world’s offerings are designed to lure you into forgetfulness – of your true self, of the true source of your despair, of your true and only Savior. Or, you have tried to cure them yourself. God uses means, we think, so we must use them all. Yet, how often have we used these means with a spirit of self-reliance, without casting ourselves upon the compassion and goodwill of our Savior? Means are ineffectual if pursued independently of him. So, the despair deepens. We try to nail the cross to our own back. We can make it to the pool this time, we think to ourselves. We fail.
Deliverance from the tyranny of despair is found only by turning full-face to Jesus Christ, the lover of our souls, the Lord over despair. He is more powerful than your suffering. You have endured quietly, perhaps to such a degree that you have grown introverted into an existence of self-pitying despair. Repent of this. The Lord Jesus calls you to look to him and run the race with patience. He may not change your circumstances all at once; perhaps he will not change them at all. He will show you that he is Lord over them, intends to bring good from them, and even more, will show you his power in your weakness. And here we reach the fountain of despair. We do not really know ourselves. Our suffering, we think in some deep crevice of our selfish hearts, is really undeserved. I have been treated badly. No one really understands me. God has not really treated me fairly. Pride this is, sheer pride, and God hates it. And pride is the great quicksand of the soul, for it deceives, embitters, and swallows alive. You see, we always deserve worse than we receive. Yet, let us once look at the holy, majestic God, and we shall be done with all self-justification and cast ourselves upon his promise of mercy. We can then turn from self-pity to self-loathing, as the prophet says, which leads us to the only one who can make us beautiful despite our sin and weakness, Jesus Christ. He makes us whole, but only when we are emptied of any sense of self-reliance and self-worth, when all our vain hopes are dashed, and we rest upon him as our only hope.