She is beautiful and tall, this European woman sculpted by Joseph Hugues-Fabisch in 1864 and placed in a grotto in the Pyrenees, not short and Middle Eastern, as we might expect. But this was the Mary that Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen, the statue that still stands in Lourdes, the great shrine that has been caricatured by some as the Disneyland of the Roman Church.
In normal times, about 350,000 of the desperately ill will bathe in the waters of Lourdes during the pilgrim season from Easter to All Saints Day, each seeking a miraculous cure. Countless others will visit the shrine, drinking water from the taps and purchasing what the late English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called “tawdry relics, the bric-a-brac of piety.”
Now, we can dissect everything from Bernadette’s claimed visions to the scant seventy miraculous healings recognized by the Roman communion since the shrine opened as a pilgrim site in 1860, but I’m not sure that gets us very far. We’re skeptics by nature and we like science, but sometimes something becomes holy simply because enough people decide it is holy, and even the most hard-core rationalists among us recognize the mysterious power in art and music and love, the mystery of being itself, and especially the weirdness that happens at the intersection of our brains and our bodies. Miracles are real, but the category “miracle” is a human one.
It is Lourdes that comes to mind when we read today’s gospel, which comes from the tradition associated with the apostle John. On the surface, it is just one more healing miracle among the many healing miracles of Jesus, and in the context of John, which offers us signs that Jesus is the Messiah, it is just one more sign. But there is a bit more depth to the healing stories in the gospels, to this story in particular.
This healing takes place at a pool called Bethsaida. This is not the Bethsaida mentioned elsewhere in the gospels, a town on the Sea of Galilee traditionally believed to be the home of the fisherman apostles, but is instead a location in Jerusalem. The Sheep Gate is long gone, but is believed to have been one of the northern gates, placing us north of the Temple Mount.
We can infer two things from the text, that the waters in this pool were believed to have had healing properties like Lourdes, and that in order for these healing effects to occur, the water must be “stirred up.” And that is pretty much all we really know. Whether people could “stir up” the water manually or whether it was a natural phenomena is unclear from the text. It does indicate that only one person can fit in the pool at the time.
Which brings us to this man who needs healing. He has waited for years, because he doesn’t have anyone to help him, and healing is a limited resource in this scenario. The pool is not constantly stirred up and has a capacity limit of one. He must compete for healing, and without family and friends, he simply can’t compete. For thirty-eight years he has done everything he can do on his own to be made whole, and it has not been enough.
Jesus does not engage the system in which healing is a limited resource. He doesn’t play the game in which the strongest and fastest get healing, in which those who know somebody gets healing. He doesn’t order the disciples to help the man into the pool. He simply heals the man.
Let me say that again. We can spend all day dissecting two thousand year old notions of illness and healing, can snark at exorcisms and Lourdes, but the bottom line is this: in an environment where healing was treated as a finite resource, where you needed to be strong or rich or have connections in order to get into the pool when the waters were stirred, Jesus refused to even engage the system. Instead, he short-circuited all the rules, and healed the man.
Because that is what love does. Essential healthcare is a human right.
Jesus heals people. He heals the demoniac living in the cemetery of a Gentile town. He heals the epileptic boy. He heals the Centurion’s servant. He heals when he doesn’t even mean to heal, as when the hemorrhaging woman touched him. The one time he intends to withhold healing, when the Syro-Phoenecian woman asks that her daughter be healed, she calls him out for his racism, and the daughter is healed. After he has been murdered by church and state, his disciples heal.
Because that is what love does. Essential healthcare is a human right.
Last weekend, a mentally ill 18 year-old named Payton Gendron used weapons designed to slaughter other humans to slaughter other humans.
We can rightly focus on the insanity of laws meant solely to preserve the constant threat of white male violence, for make no mistake, that is the real purpose of our gun laws, and always has been.
We can rightly focus on the mainstreaming of racist hatred by politicians and white nationalist propagandists like Tucker Carlson. Both of these should be matters of grave concern.
But there is that third matter, the fact that this young man was mentally ill, and we do not provide healing or care for the mentally ill, for our healthcare system makes the gross competition to get into the pool at Bethsaida look positively benign.
Our healthcare system is oriented not around healing, but instead around profit. If it isn’t going to make someone rich, some CEO or shareholder or hedge fund, we are not interested, for the only god our culture really worships is money. There are good humans in the system, but the system is not good.
I have zero interest in whether or not the police should have red-flagged this young man so he could not purchase guns. The guns shouldn’t have been available, true, but he also should not have been left untreated and at-large in the community.
He said his goal was to commit murder-suicide, and if we treated essential healthcare as a human right, he’d have had access to the help he needed, or if necessary, there would have been a facility to constrain him, for his own safety and for ours.
For the safety of 77 year-old Pearl Young who volunteered at her church’s food pantry.
We can pay off the medical debt of thousands, and it is an act of kindness to do so, but ultimately this ministry of compassion simply reinforces a system that is absolutely evil, for healthcare can never operate as just one more good in the ruthless predation of free market capitalism.
Insurance companies and courts may assign dollar values to lives, but in the end, life is priceless. We did not create life. We did not create our own lives. I oppose the death penalty, both the state-murder of accused criminals and the every day execution of people denied lifesaving treatment because they were poor or simply could not navigate this evil system.
There are ten mentally ill people in a prison bed for every treatment bed in the United States. Imagine that. Never mind the sheer financial stupidity, for it costs far more to incarcerate than to treat.
Never mind the cost on people like you and me when the untreated mentally ill, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, commit crimes, putting their lives, our lives, and the lives of law enforcement at risk. People like Heyward Patterson, a lay leader in his church, who often helped others get their groceries from Tops.
Never mind that the system we have is completely insane and pretty much every other economically developed nation does it better.
In the end, it comes down to this: essential healthcare is a human right.
Jesus heals. Jesus calls us to be agents of healing. No one should die from a treatable or preventable disease. There are enough diseases out there we cannot prevent, enough that we cannot treat. Life is short and beautiful and mysterious. And we’re just throwing it away.
Do not let the media control the narrative. Racism? Yes. Gun? Yes. But also healthcare, and especially mental healthcare.
Back to Lourdes. It may be snake oil and a Disneyland tourist trap of healing, but at least no one is there closing the door, denying pilgrims healing they believe in. All can come to the waters, even if it is under the watchful care of a white-washed Mary.
Amen.