The paralytic was shocked, and awed, and vehemently appalled. Out of everyone in the God-forsaken miracle pool, no one, not even in thirty-eight years, thought that he could be healed from such a horrible disease! Who would dare challenge him to such an enormous tourney!? Who is that ingrate that does not consider the poor man’s chronic illness? Oh, how horrible for a man who loses his faith in the prime of his years!
“Sir”, he lamented, “I have no one to help me get in the pool. While I try to get inside the pool as fast as I can, some sick Ethiopian’s faster than me and gets there first. I’ve tried tying my body into a huge slingshot-and failed. I’ve attempted to dash with my sister’s cart all the way from the valley’s biggest hill-and failed. I’ve even paid a couple of strangers from a nearby tavern to carry me and throw me to the pool- but someone with chronic diarrhea got there first, while I conked my head at the imported marble pool fringe.
“I’m dying, sir-I feel like I’m dying! It’s been thirty-eight years trying to find a cure, thirty-eight years of spending all my wages on incompetent doctors who mooch me out of having a normal life. It’s been thirty-eight years of listening to people damn well say that I can’t walk for the rest of my life! Do you think I don’t want to be healed!?” The sassiness of the paralytic’s words moved the Master.
Not that he had anything left to lose- he had no family, no friends, and Jewish law practically treated the man like an undesirable piece of human feces on a lawn chair. Nevertheless, he still looked at him with eyes of love. He knew that the paralytic wanted to give up on himself. For he knew every part of his fragile being-every part, nook and cranny. He knew this man wasted the last of his money on buying imported wine from Tuscany. He even knew that an eight-ring noose was waiting for him when he returned to the homeless shelter. Or a low-grade butcher’s knife, a sable full of wild horses, or a bag full of rocks from the Jordan River. He knew; oh, he definitely knew. He knew that the paralytic needed to regain his own sense of worth.