Holistic Medicine

“Do you wish to get well?”  John 5:6  NASB

To get well – Yeshua is making his way through the crowd at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem.  To do so he has to pass by a pool.  Today, just like every day, it is surrounded by those who cling to life by a thread of hope, for this pool sometimes becomes the channel of God’s grace.  Legend has it that the first one to enter the water after an angel stirs it up will be cured.  So the square is full.  There are blind, lame, diseased, dumb, paralytics, amputees.  The vestiges of an occupied society.  The outcasts, the homeless, the beggars.  All of them waiting for a chance at new life, to be freed of their special form of imprisonment.

Suddenly the Master stops.  There is no particular reason to stop; in fact, there is every reason to get through this jumble of decrepit people as quickly as possible.  Yeshua stops in front of a man who has been waiting for thirty-nine years.  He asks perhaps the most ludicrous question imaginable.  “Do you wish to get well”?  If we stood in the crowd, we probably would have laughed.  Why else would this man be lying here every day for more than thirty years?

But there is more to Yeshua’s question than a qualification of willingness.  The Greek makes it clear that Yeshua does not ask simply if the man wants to be healed.  The question really says, “Are you willing to be generated whole?”  The word translated “be generated” means “to begin to be” or “to come into existence.”  It is the Greek word genesthai.  We recognize it from its transliteration – genesis.  Are you completely willing to begin to be?  Are you totally committed to a new existence – a genesis – a new beginning starting right now?  And that’s not all.  The Greek word that we translate “well” is hugies.  It means “healthy, sound and whole.”  Although the New Testament does not place the same emphasis on health that the Greek world did, the fact that Yeshua brought wholeness to many as a sign of God’s grace and power underlines His role as the liberator of a new life that embraces the whole man.  That is what we would expect in Hebraic thought.  There is no body/mind/soul separation.  There is nephesh, the embodied person in relation to the Creator.  Yeshua asks this man about his motives, his passion and his commitment to restoration.  But He may well have intended more than the obvious recovery of this man’s well-being for the question reaches far below the surface. Yeshua is asking him if he is ready to be reborn into a whole person, the person God intended him to be.

Just how ready are we to do whatever is required to be generated whole?  This man was ready.  The encounter with Yeshua changed everything about his life.  The most absurd question was exactly the one that needed to be asked.  Are you willing?

Well, are you?

Topical Index: willing, well-being, whole, genesthai, heal, John 5:6