25 May 2025
Reading the Room.
There’s a modern-day phrase called ‘read the room’. It means that when you are going into a situation or a meeting, or a conference to speak, you know a little something about your audience and the mood they’re in.
So, for example, when someone goes into a wedding reception to make a speech, you can be fairly sure that everyone is happy, onside and that they will receive you pretty well and even allow you the odd mistake.
For example, ‘Thanks for all the presents, some of them are really nice’. True. That actually did happen. Everyone laughed, toasted the happy couple more than a few times and then danced like no one was watching. The room had a particular vibe to it and was pretty easy to read.
If, however, you are having a blow torch of an interview with a hard-hitting media person, then… that also is an easy room to read but not nearly as much fun or dancing as the wedding reception.
In today’s gospel, however, I’m a little puzzled about the Master’s ability to read the room.
The place he goes to is a place where a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralysed. It’s not a happy place. It’s not glamorous and sexy and jovial.
The people there are depressed and gloomy.
The gentleman that Jesus approached is particularly dejected because he has been an invalid for 38 years. Jesus knows this, so you would think that the Messiah who has compassion and perception as some of his key selection criteria would have a better opening line than “Do you want to get well?” The question is so obvious that it is offensive.
I would have understood if the man had responded. With something like
“Well, what do you think, sunshine? I’ve been lying here for 38 years now. What does that tell you? Work it out”
It’s almost as if Jesus is telling this guy it’s your fault that you haven’t been healed. You clearly don’t want to be made well. From a cursory first glance, The Master has not read the room well.
But scratch the surface a little, peel back the layers, and we see that the problem is not whether the man wants to be healed or not. The problem is that there is no community, no helpmate, to get him down to the healing waters. It seems that only one person at a time gets helped and only when the waters stir.
“I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
And here we learn again the importance of community, of reaching out to others who are in need and being fiercely honest with ourselves of the times when we need help.
You and I can probably all recall times when we have been paralysed by something or someone or some circumstance.
We have been immobilised by the fear of what might happen, the memory of the past error of judgment, the things that we can do nothing about. Like the guy at the pool, sometimes we are frozen by our own weariness or by loneliness or by the ignorance and misunderstanding of others who have not taken the time and energy to read us properly even if we allowed them to in the first place.
And so often the outward and visible need is only a small part of the problem. In order to read the room properly we have to ask ‘what else is going here’… What other needs does this person have and we have to be incredibly patient and silent before we get answers.
Reading the room is not easy and often we have to wait a long time before healing and wholeness can properly begin to the one who is not well but more especially when it is us who need the healing.
It is unfortunate and I know this painfully well, that the odd blunder, the rush to sound wise and discerning, the unintentional inappropriate remark, can set the whole process back. You can never unsay things; ask any honest person.
What if we learned from Jesus and simply sought to support, uphold, and partner with people who, in their own situation, are seeking wholeness and well-being? What if, instead of dictating what that wholeness and well-being must look like, we asked them what sort of healing is taking place and what sort of life they see God shaping for them, and how we might support them? What if we asked them what sort of support they might be able to give us, trusting them to have the gifts and ability and contributions to the body of Christ? Even though with God, no one is ever alone, God has put us together as his body for a reason. We see the blind, the lame, the paralysed and that’s all well and good and true. But how well do we read the room that is deep within our own souls? Our own paralysis, our own blindness.