Speaking to Him often
Friends in Christ, Today we see in the gospel, Jesus finds this man at this pool of water. The water there apparently had some kind of curative power, but not always. Now this man had been sick for 38 years! That’s a long time. Our Lord asks him: ‘Do you want to be cured?’ For sure he did. And Jesus did cure him.
But it is interesting that later on, Our Lord tracks this man down, and speaks to him again: “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”
In this incident, we can see a lesson about the Christian life. When the man is cured, this is analogous to a person first becoming Catholic, or it could be a big religious experience of faith, that we might have at one point in our life.
Sometimes people stray from the Church, even for many years, but then something happens – God grants them a special grace, a certain circumstance – and….they are on fire with Faith! In some ways we may all have had some manner of awakening of Faith at some point in our life.
But that experience, which may involve a lot of emotion – it may not be built on rock, sometimes it is more like sand; when feelings wane, or difficulties come in life – when we don’t FEEL God’s consolations every day, our faith-life can slacken.
In the gospel, we see that after this man is cured of his disease, Jesus returns to him later. He tells the man not to sin any more, so that nothing worse might happen. Jesus is implying that sin leads to sickness of the soul; and that if, after our soul is healed, we should go back to a sinful way of life: Look out! It will end even worse for us.
We see then, that rather than living off of one ‘spiritual experience,’ we need more visits from the Lord in life. Jesus went to see the man again; so should we. To remain ‘cured,’ we need to call on our Savior often, pray daily, meditate each day, aspirations, examine our conscience, asking his help – as they say, ‘it’s a work-in-progress.’
Many of us have known a person who had a ‘born-again’ experience, but later in life is found living in a pagan way, long-forgetting that experience. On the contrary, we should invite Jesus into each our of our day, and if we do, we will find he is there with us at the end of our life.
