![]() He sees our friend hanging out at the pool, enacting his daily, disappointing ritual. Other days the water bubbles up and Hangnail Hank gets into the water first. Some days the angel takes the day off and the water doesn’t bubble up at all. Our friend just keeps going back to the magical pool every day. Guess I’ll stop cleaning the house.”īack to our scripture lesson. There’s a meme I saw that captures one of my frustrations: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Over 45 times! And yet Charlie Brown keeps running. This gag was a favorite of the Peanuts creator, Charles Schultz. So the ball is snapped to Lucy, Lucy places the ball on the ground, Charlie Brown runs and kicks, and just as he kicks, what happens? Lucy pulls back the ball, and Charlie Brown lands flat on his back. He doesn’t trust Lucy to hold the football, but she says something to convince him to trust her. Charlie wants so desperately to kick the game-winning field goal. Think of Charlie Brown and Lucy playing football. No wonder he was frustrated.ĭo you ever feel frustrated? You keep doing the same thing over and over and nothing changes? Being unable to walk made it difficult to be the first one into the pool.Īnd yet he sat. The guy with chronic halitosis would jump into the pool at first bubble. Hoping to be the first into the pool to be healed. Waiting for the whim of the pool-stirring angel. And whenever the pool would begin to bubble, the first person in would be healed. So local mythology about the healing waters of Beth-zatha sent all manner of people to sit by the pool and wait for the whim of the pool-stirring angel. you can read it in John 5:4 in the King James Version: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” A scribe somewhere along the way added this explanation in. But later manuscripts, like the one used for the King James Version, offer an explanation. Why did he think the pool at Beth-zatha had magical powers? Something interesting about our scripture text today is that the earliest Greek manuscripts (the manuscripts used for most modern translations of the Bible, like the NRSV we read from) don’t give us an explanation for why this pool is believed to have magical powers. And so every day, this fellow sits poolside, hoping for a miracle. This pool was thought to have magical healing powers. ![]() You see, he (for some reason) thinks that by sitting beside the pool at Beth-zatha, he might one day be healed from his infirmity. ![]() ![]() Now, we can have empathy for this man while at the same time recognizing he’s locked into a pattern that isn’t helping his situation at all. Today in our scripture text we meet a textbook example of someone exhibiting the “Definition of Insanity.” For 38 years, this man has been unable to walk. What habits are keeping you from some hope or dream or goal? We get locked into habits that run counter to our hopes and our goals: with our health, in our relationships, in our workplace. Wherever this quote originated (I’ve seen a couple of different ideas about this), this quote remains popular because most of us are caught up in some kind of cycle of “insanity”-doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This maxim is often attributed to Albert Einstein. ![]() You know what the definition of insanity is, right? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The ill man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk._ Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ![]()
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