21 March, 2023 | Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

 Gospel : Jn 5:1-16 

There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate

a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes.

In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled.

One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.

When Jesus saw him lying there

and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him,

"Do you want to be well?"

The sick man answered him,

"Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool

when the water is stirred up;

while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me."

Jesus said to him, "Rise, take up your mat, and walk."

Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.

Now that day was a sabbath.

So the Jews said to the man who was cured,

"It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat."

He answered them, "The man who made me well told me,

'Take up your mat and walk.'"

They asked him,

"Who is the man who told you, 'Take it up and walk'?"

The man who was healed did not know who it was,

for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there.

After this Jesus found him in the temple area and said to him,

"Look, you are well; do not sin any more,

so that nothing worse may happen to you."

The man went and told the Jews

that Jesus was the one who had made him well.

Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus

because he did this on a sabbath.

Reflections :

In today’s gospel Jesus cures a man who had been ill for thirty years. This man’s focus was on the pool and getting into it first after the angel stirred it. For Jesus it was an opportunity to show that the power of healing is not in the water but in God. Jesus was more concerned with the physical and spiritual well-being of the paralytic and thus he cured him. This speaks to us of our condition of spiritual paralysis. Often times we too are stuck in our own pools of Bethesda. Jesus was there but the sick man failed to recognize him. Jesus is right next to us in our lives. But we are often fixed onto our own pools of Bethesda. Jesus wants to heal us and to take our eyes off our own pools of Bethesda.

Activity: 

Today examine and see what your pool is? The place where you are stuck. The thing on which you are fixated. The false hope that takes your eyes off the Lord.

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