Gospel of 24 March 2020
Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
John 5:1-3,5-16
The healing at the pool of Bethesda
There was a Jewish festival, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now at the Sheep Pool in Jerusalem there is a building, called Bethzatha in Hebrew, consisting of five porticos; and under these were crowds of sick people – blind, lame, paralysed – waiting for the water to move. One man there had an illness which had lasted thirty-eight years, and when Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had been in this condition for a long time, he said, ‘Do you want to be well again?’ ‘Sir,’ replied the sick man ‘I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is disturbed; and while I am still on the way, someone else gets there before me.’ Jesus said, ‘Get up, pick up your sleeping-mat and walk.’ The man was cured at once, and he picked up his mat and walked away.
Now that day happened to be the sabbath, so the Jews said to the man who had been cured, ‘It is the sabbath; you are not allowed to carry your sleeping-mat.’ He replied, ‘But the man who cured me told me, “Pick up your mat and walk.”’ They asked, ‘Who is the man who said to you, “Pick up your mat and walk”?’ The man had no idea who it was, since Jesus had disappeared into the crowd that filled the place. After a while Jesus met him in the Temple and said, ‘Now you are well again, be sure not to sin any more, or something worse may happen to you.’ The man went back and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had cured him. It was because he did things like this on the sabbath that the Jews began to persecute Jesus.
Reflexion
Today, we have another healing story involving a sick man who had been waiting by the pools of Bethesda for 38 years, hoping for a break to be able to jump into its reputedly miraculous waters but the opportunity never came. What strikes us about this man is his resilient faith, his refusal to give up even though beset by failure after failure, albeit a faith that was misplaced.
His problem wasn’t just about missing the boat, but really about barking up the wrong tree. He failed to see that the one who had the ability to offer him a gift that would render him well, so well that he would no longer need to return to this spot, was standing in front of him and speaking to Him. Jesus had earlier told the Samaritan woman at the well that He was the unfathomable source of Living Water. Anyone who drinks of this water which He offers will never thirst again. In the first reading, the prophet Ezekiel provides us with a vision of the Temple and a river issuing forth to provide life giving waters. The Temple is a prefiguration of Jesus, the New Temple, who offers new life through the Sacrament of Baptism. In Jesus, the sick man had finally hit the jackpot, he had found his mark.
Not only was this man’s faith misplaced, at least till now, but the spectators, the armchair critics who stood watching this scene, had also missed the whole point of this event. They were so obsessed in finding fault, more troubled with the fact that Jesus had performed a miracle on a Sabbath, they could not see the importance or significance of this event. The evangelist St John tells us that this is the second “sign”, pointing to our Lord’s messianic mission. Their vision was obscured by their close mindedness and pettiness, for that they could not see the forest for the trees.
And because of this, these detractors had cut themselves off from that Source of Living Water, from the true Temple where God dwells among men. Jesus is the Temple. They thought that they were on target when they accused Jesus of violating the Sabbath prohibition, but never were they more wrong. They had entirely missed the mark and they were not even aware of it.
Now, this story is not just an example of mistaken identity or miscalculated judgment but a story about sin and its effects. The Greek word for “sin” literally means “missing the mark.” The verb “hamartano” was sometimes used in Classical Greek to refer to 'missing a target'. Homer uses it in the Iliad to speak of a man who failed to hit his opponent with a spear. This seems to be a strange metaphor for sin, but it does provide a splendid imagery that describes the nature of sin and its effect on us.
We could say that sin is not just making an error in judgment in a particular case, but missing the whole point of human life; not just the violation of a law, but an insult to a relationship with the One to whom we owe everything; not just a servant's failure to carry out a master's orders, but the ingratitude of a child to its parent. We were made for holiness, we were made for heaven, we were made to be saints. But because of sin, we have missed the mark, we have gone way off the track that leads to heaven and we have simply forgotten our identity and vocation.
How often have we missed the mark? We’ve looked for lesser substitutes to fill the emptiness in our hearts. We hope to live as kings on earth, forgetting that we are meant to live as sons and daughters of God here and in heaven. We’ve sought after various man-made solutions hoping that we would find a cure-all, a fix-all, a new fufill-all, to every trouble, challenge or difficulty we face. Failing to see that we have found the cure, the only One who can fix the mess in our lives, the only One who can satisfy our longing. But here’s the thing, the solution requires repentance on our part. If we want to hit the mark, it requires true repentance on our part. More than anything else, let us heed the words of our Lord to the sick man who had been healed, ‘Now you are well again, be sure not to sin any more, or something worse may happen to you.’