After these things, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And at Jerusalem is a pool at the Sheep Gate which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these was a great multitude of the infirm lying, blind ones, lame ones, withered ones, awaiting the stirring of the water. For an angel at a certain time descended in the pool and agitated the water. Then the one first entering after the agitation of the water became well, whatever disease he was held by. But a certain man was there, being in infirmity thirty eight years. Seeing him lying, and knowing that he had already spent much time, Jesus said to him, Do you desire to become well? The infirm one answered Him, Lord, I do not have a man, that when the water is agitated he may throw me into the pool; but while I am coming, another goes down before me. Jesus said to him, Rise up, Take up your cot and walk! And instantly the man became well, and took up his cot and walked. And it was a sabbath that day. (John 5:1-9)
The Lord often said, when sick people were being healed, that they should have faith, and, ‘Let it be to you according to your faith’, as in Matt. 8:10-13; 9:2,22,27-29; 13:57,58; 15:28; 21:21,22,31,32; Mark 5:34,36; 10:49,52; 16[:16]; Luke 7:9,48-50; 8:48; 17:19; 18:42,43. The reason why He said it was that the very first thing a person needs to do is to acknowledge that the Lord is the Saviour of the world; for unless he acknowledges this no one can receive any truth or good at all from heaven, or therefore receive faith from there. And since it was the very first and most essential thing, therefore in order that He might be acknowledged when He came into the world the Lord questioned the sick, when He healed them, about their faith; and those who had faith were healed. This faith was that He was the Son of God who was to come into the world, and that He had power to heal and save. Furthermore every healing of sickness by the Lord when He was in the world served to mean a healing of spiritual life, thus served to mean the things that belong to salvation, 8364, 9031(end), 9086. Since acknowledgement of the Lord is the first thing of all belonging to spiritual life and is the most essential feature of the Church, and since no one, unless he acknowledges Him, can receive any truth of faith or good of love at all from heaven, the Lord also often says that whoever believes in Him has eternal life, and whoever does not believe in Him does not have it, as in John 1:1,4,12,13; 3:14-16,36; 5:39,40; 6:28-30,33-35,40,47,48; 7:37,38; 8:24; 11:25,26; 20:30,31. But at the same time He also teaches that they have faith in Him who live according to His commandments, so that the life which results from doing so goes to compose their faith. These things have been stated to cast light on and corroborate the truth that acknowledging the Lord and acknowledging that all salvation comes from Him constitute the beginning of the life from God with a person. (Arcana Coelestia 10083{5&6))
“a bed” signifies doctrine is from correspondence, for as the body rests in its bed, so does the mind rest in its doctrine. But by “bed” is signified the doctrine which everyone acquires to himself either from the Word, or from his own intelligence, for therein the mind rests and, as it were, sleeps. The beds in which they lie in the spiritual world, are from no other origin; for there everyone’s bed is according to the quality of his science and intelligence, magnificent for the wise, mean for the unwise, and filthy for falsifiers. (Apocalypse Revealed 137)
The Lord saying to these sick, “Arise, take up thy bed, and walk,” signifies doctrine, and a life according thereto; “bed” signifies doctrine, and “to walk” life (that ” walking” is living, see above, n. 97). “The sick man” signifies those that have transgressed and sinned. (Apocalypse Explained 163)
Last time we explored Jesus’s healing of the nobleman’s son of his fever. We saw that this related to the removal of evils in the exterior man through a process of self examination which is motivated by a desire to have the Lord’s love more fully expressed in our life. We also saw that for the Word to have an impact on us we need to acknowledge that it is the Lord and that in and of ourselves we are in a state of sickness and unable to live the spiritual life. If this recognition is to have any affect it must be made in how we live, for without a response from the will, from the heart, there can be no healing of our spirits. So our response to the Word must be to use its truths to examine the selfish tendencies that exist in our life and recognise them as belonging to the hellish proprium. It this type of inner work which invites the Lord’s power to come down into the lower levels of our mind into our awareness and so heal our relationship to the feverish lusts of the natural man.
We also looked at the significance of the fact that this healing of the son took place in Capernaum, which means field of repentance or metanoia, the latter of which means change of mind. And so this indicates that the truths that this son represents in us need to be seen in a new way because they belong to our memory of the literal stories of the Word. But when these literal aspects of the story, of person, place, time and space are revealed as to their spiritual application to the life of our mind, then the Text is able to reveal our inner states of life. So when these more exterior truths, the son, are healed by Jesus, by the Word as the Lord, we come to understand how they apply to our life and so are empowered to move forward in our ability to recognise our evils. These evils and the false ideas that flow from them can then be pushed to the periphery of our thinking with the spiritual application taking its place in the forefront of our mind instead.
After these things, we read in the opening verse of the portion of Text that we are looking at today, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. The healing of the nobleman’s son occurs between feasts. If you recall it was a feast at the Passover that Jesus had been at previously, where He was seen by the Galileans and because of this they were open to receiving Him when He arrived in Galilee (John 4:45). So feasts have to do with reception, in fact we still call the wedding feast a reception. Spiritually, the idea of a feast has to do with the reception of what is good and true into one’s life. Now the delights with which the spiritual senses are stimulated are the things that have to do with our desires and thoughts. In the spiritual life it is only as we remove evils because we see them as sins against the Lord, that we grow into a delight for the goods and truths of the Word. This delight is associated with our spiritual senses and when we look to the Word as the means for the removal of delights that are self-focussed, then the Lord can open our spiritual perceptive faculties. As this happens, we are able to perceive Him more clearly as the Word and receive what is of Himself into the life of our minds.
This opening of our spiritual perception or senses is what is being described in the story we are looking at now. When the Scripture says that Jesus went up to Jerusalem, we have spiritual realities described in natural language. Jesus is the Lord’s desire for our salvation, and the principle here is that as we acknowledge Him in the externals of life, so the Word is able to work on a deeper level of our mind. This is what is meant by Jesus going up, for to go up to Jerusalem is to be elevated, and for something to be elevated spiritually is to see it more inwardly. So Jesus going up is the indrawing of truths into the deeper recesses of our being through our obedience to them. In its use of natural language and ideas the Text here lays before us a spiritual principle that is seen when we choose to work inwardly on ourselves in response to our understanding of the Word in the light of the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity. Jerusalem is our understanding of Word in the light of what the doctrines teaches concerning love to the Lord and love to our neighbour. And it is here, in this part of our mind, that the Word now begins to work to bring it into a more perfect image of heavenly order.
We read firstly of the structural elements connected to the mind to do with this understanding of doctrine, and it is described in the following way…
And at Jerusalem is a pool at the Sheep Gate which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches.
Then we read of the condition or state of mind that exists there…
In these was a great multitude of the infirm lying, blind ones, lame ones, withered ones, awaiting the stirring of the water.
And following this the process by which a kind of limited healing takes place…
For an angel at a certain time descended in the pool and agitated the water. Then the one first entering after the agitation of the water became well, whatever disease he was held by.
Let’s look at the description of the setting first.
At Jerusalem is a pool, which is at the Sheep Gate and is called Bethesda, and it has five porches.
Jerusalem is what we believe concerning the Word in the light of the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity and within these beliefs there is something described as a pool which is associated with the Sheep Gate and is called Bethesda. Now a pool is a still body of water that has gathered together in one place and because water corresponds to truths, so this pool represents the knowledge which we hold in our memories of something specific within the Word that is revealed in its name, Bethesda.
So what does Bethesda mean? It means house of mercy and mercy is what the Word is for it contains, as a house, the fulness of the Divine itself being the manifestation of the Lord’s Divine Love and Wisdom in a form that we can grasp with our limited finite faculties. When we read the Word with a view to responding to what it teaches about spiritual life then we are introduced to the Lord in His Divine Human, and it is this that is the mercy of God for it is by means of this alone that we can be saved from hellish states of life. The reference to sheep adds to our understanding as to where or upon what the Word operates within our minds. For sheep represent pliable obedient affections for spiritual things drawn into our life from the Word.
We now turn to what the five porches are, and it is to be noted that it is within these there is found the great multitude of the infirm, the blind, the lame and the withered. Of course, in the literal sense these are people suffering from various ailments and conditions but spiritually they describe the condition or state of those things that sit in the porches that lead into our inner world. This infirm populous within us are the ideas and affections that are in need of the Lord, in need of being brought into connection with His Human so that we might be raised up into the fulness of what it is to be truly human ourselves. And what is it to be truly human is to have a mind centred on the Word so that it too might be a house recreated in the image of mercy, compassion and love, a house in the image and likeness of God.
What prevents this is our unbelief. It is the limitations that our self centred demand to live life as we want and not as the Word teaches, that fills the porches of our perceptive faculties with infirm natural ideas which cloud our ability to see the Word in spiritual light. Our five porches, that is, our spiritual senses lay infirm, unable to operate in the clarity that they should due to our affections and thoughts suffering from the diseased perspectives that the loves of self and the world promote. So just as we have five natural senses, so also we have spiritual senses to which they correspond. The sense of touch corresponds to the affection for goodness, the sense of taste to the affection for knowing, smell to the affection for perceiving, hearing to the affection for learning that leads to obedience and seeing to the affection for learning and growing wise.
But self interest closes us off to what is spiritual. Our perceptive faculties become filled with a disorganised mass of negativity that resists the spiritual life and renders us infirm or weak of will in that we can’t seem to find the motivation to obey the truths which we see before us. Warped perspectives energised by our own self centred agenda’s leave us blind and unable to see things from the true perspective that the goods and truths offered in the Word are able to bring. We are unable to live or walk in those truths and so are lame. And under the heat of our selfish lusts what is heavenly and has entered the mind soon withers away. These are the infirm, the blind, the lame and the withered that rob us of the goodness that the Lord seeks to instil into our lives.
When our senses are peopled with this multitude who are afflicted with the proprium’s pride in its own false sense of self sufficiency, we severely limit the operation of the Lord’s mercy in our lives. We fail to see that the Word holds the fulness of the Lord’s power to overcome any affliction in the human condition that affects our spiritual wellbeing. Nothing we suffer from is beyond the Lord’s ability to manage and turn to a good outcome. His mercy knows no bounds and as the Psalmist declares, it endures forever. The limitations that our beliefs place upon the Word’s power to bring wholeness into our lives can be seen by the limited healing that is described.
For an angel at a certain time descended in the pool and agitated the water. Then the one first entering after the agitation of the water became well, whatever disease he was held by.
It speaks to a state of getting temporary relief from what troubles us for we are soon afflicted again and are left waiting for the waters to be stirred once more so that we can find some relief. Something is continually frustrated in this state of life, and this is captured in the one who cannot get to the water for he has no man to carry him.
The infirm one answered Him, Lord, I do not have a man, that when the water is agitated he may throw me into the pool; but while I am coming, another goes down before me
There is more to this man’s statement than appears on the surface. Firstly, this infirm one is that part of us which the Lord as the Word can come to and engage with. The Word, the Divine Truth, represented by Jesus questions him, as it does for us when we come to it in an attitude of humility and with a willingness to be opened up and given insight into the cause for our inability to find wholeness. We need to read this conversation with attention for it reveals why the spiritual infirmities that we struggle with remain and it also reveals what it is that opens the way for the Lord to heal them.
Jesus said to him, Do you desire to become well? The infirm one answered Him, Lord, I do not have a man, that when the water is agitated he may throw me into the pool; but while I am coming, another goes down before me. Jesus said to him, Rise up, Take up your cot and walk! And instantly the man became well, and took up his cot and walked. And it was a sabbath that day.
The Word asks us, Do you desire to become well? This is such an important question, for if we truly desire this, not as we think it should be but on the Lord’s terms, we will see what the problem is, and He will show us what we must do. The infirm one answers saying,
Lord, I do not have a man who can throw me into the pool when the water is stirred, so that when I am coming another goes down before me.
There is a realisation that without the help of a man there is no hope of salvation. This realisation is an acknowledgement that in and of ourselves we don’t have any power to advance our regeneration one step, that it is something which the Lord alone accomplishes for us. ‘But we know this’ we might say… yes we know it, but knowing it and living from it are two very different states of life. Whenever we grow impatient, anxious, or angry with how things are for us we are given a window into the fact that we are living from another belief that is self derived. For our states of negative emotion arise from a tendency to lean to our own understanding as to how things should be, revealing that the roots of self reliance and self sufficiency are alive and active within us.
On the literal level of the story we hear this this infirm one’s frustration – it is everyone for himself, first in first served. This is the attitude that surrounds the pool, it’s a selfish attitude. And the hope of getting from the pool what is needed, let alone getting to the actual pool, seems an impossibility. We too are like this. The pool is a static body of water that is stirred every now and again. This is our knowledge of the Word in our memory and we can go to this and be inspired with some small insight, but it is always on our own terms. To have the Word merely as something of the memory is not enough because when the Word is seen and held in this way it isn’t recognised as being the Divine, and if we don’t see that it is Divine then we limit its ability bring wholeness into our life.
Until we can see it as Divine, we truly don’t have a man who can carry us. The Greek word here is that we don’t have a human to carry us. The Word is the true Man, the true Human, for it is the Divine Human of the Lord but for it to become so for us in a real way we must acknowledge this as a matter of life. It becomes our Saviour and Redeemer when we see it as the living God, the Lord Jesus Christ in our midst. So the Word as a pool of knowledge is dead and unable to help us unless we are prepared to live from the Word. We need the Lord’s Divine Human active and alive for us as the Word if we are to have our spiritual perceptions opened and the five porches cleared of what obstructs the reception of the Lord’s life within us.
Until we live from the Word, we don’t have a human to carry us, we are powerless in spiritual matters. This human is the mercy and compassion that the Lord is and from the perspective of Spiritual Christianity this human that can assist us, is the teachings found in the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity which open the inner meaning of the Bible. Yet there is also something else revealed in the infirm one’s statement that he desires a man to throw him into the pool. While on the one hand he recognises that he is powerless, a realisation that we all need regarding spiritual matters, it is only half the story. For whatever his affliction is, he lacks motive power, the ability to move himself to the water quickly enough.
What is interesting here is that Jesus doesn’t pick him up and carry him to the pool. There is a profound truth here and it is such a fundamental aspect to the teachings of Spiritual Christianity regarding our regeneration and it is the principle of as if of oneself. It is true that we are powerless in spiritual matters however, the balance to this is that the Lord gives us power to act as if of ourselves. So we can respond to truths and live from them but our ability to do this is from the Lord. As long as we think we act from ourselves we remain infirm and passive, waiting for someone or something to carry us and throw us into the pool. This is not how it works.
The Word with all its truths is available to us but until we choose to live from it, we remain infirm sitting by a pool waiting for someone else to carry us to the waters. It won’t happen. The answer doesn’t lie in being carried as a passive player in our spiritual life. It lies in our responsiveness, our actions from our will empowered by the truths of the voice of the Word…,
Jesus said to him, rise up, take up your cot and walk…
As we saw at the beginning in Jesus’s movement up into Jerusalem, to rise up is to move toward what is higher, to move out of what our senses would have us believe and to instead lean upon the Word as the basis for our perception of things. This is a conscious choice on our part. To rise up, or step up as it translates in the Greek, is to act on what we know and to walk is to live our life from the truths of the doctrine from the Word which we carry with us as represented by the cot. To elevate things in the spiritual life is to live from them which is what the Word commands of us as Jesus commanded of this infirm one. If we would commit our lives to doing this, we will be made whole. For to cease from our own labours, from our own ideas and cast ourselves upon the Lord is to enter into the sabbath…
And instantly the man became well, and took up his cot and walked. And it was the sabbath that day.