Wednesday - The Healing at the Pool of Bethesda
One of the most abiding memories of my time as a missionary in Congo was the plight of lepers and other disabled people in that poverty stricken country. Sitting on street corners they waved the stumps of their arms and legs at us as we walked by, trying to raise our sympathy for a gift of money. I am ashamed to say that at times I became quite hardened and wary of their pleas – as any donation made caused an avalanche of other more mobile beggars to descend on us, all wanting some help.
In this little series on the seven miracles in the Gospel of John we come now to the 3rd miracle. This tells of the healing of a man who had been crippled for 38 years, lying disabled at the five columned pool of Bethsaida in Jerusalem.
Jesus literally walked in on the situation and brought an immediate answer to the man’s problems – with the verbal command to get up and carry his bed on the Sabbath Day. Jesus did what the fivefold Pentateuchal Jewish Law and traditions could never do - he brought full healing to a man crippled for 38 years - the same number of years during which Israel wandered in circles in the wilderness.
That same power and authority, which enabled Jesus to heal a crippled man at a word, was immediately afterwards followed by a claim to the authority to overrule the contemporary Jewish teachings on the Sabbath, and claim a unique relationship with God the Father. The Jewish authorities immediately rightly recognised Jesus’ claims for what they were – they were a claim of deity.
As always in John’s Gospel, this miracle is not just about the healing of a crippled man, but about who Jesus is. Jesus’ admirable compassion for the poor, the sick, the blind and the disabled is accompanied by the strongest theological claims made by Jesus for himself as Lord and God. We cannot pick and choose the bits of Jesus we like and spit out the rest. However, if we embrace our strong theological convictions for Jesus as Lord and God and ignore his social concern, we do so at our peril.