A Glimpse of the Healing at Bethesda

— John 5:1-15 

Some time later came one of the Jewish feast-days and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. There is in Jerusalem near the sheep-gate a pool surrounded by five arches, which has the Hebrew name of Bethzatha (the Pool of Bethesda). Under these arches a great many sick people were in the habit of lying; some of them were blind, some lame, and some had withered limbs. (They used to wait there for the “moving of the water”, for at certain times an angel used to come down into the pool and disturb the water, and then the first person who stepped into the water after the disturbance would be healed of whatever he was suffering from.) One particular man had been there ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there on his back—knowing that he had been like that for a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to get well again?”

“Sir,” replied the sick man, “I just haven’t got anybody to put me into the pool when the water is all stirred up. While I’m trying to get there somebody else gets down into it first.”

“Get up,” said Jesus, “pick up your bed and walk!”

At once the man recovered, picked up his bed and walked.

This happened on a Sabbath day, which made the Jews keep on telling the man who had been healed, “It’s the Sabbath, you know; it’s not right for you to carry your bed.”

“The man who made me well,” he replied, “was the one who told me, ‘Pick up your bed and walk.’”

Then they asked him, “And who is the man who told you to do that?”

But the one who had been healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away in the dense crowd. Later Jesus found him in the Temple and said to him, “Look: you are a fit man now. Do not sin again or something worse might happen to you!”

Then the man went off and informed the Jews that the one who had made him well was Jesus.

In the moment… 

It is late afternoon by the pool of Bethzatha. The languishing daylight shines in hot from the west, cutting through the columns, casting shadows that seem as hot as the sunlight itself. The crowd around the pool moans and casts about. There are the sounds of vomiting, belching, gas released, plaintive cries, and, with some nearly lost souls, the rattle of nearly last breaths. The air is perfectly still over near the poolside.

From the southern fringe, a group of men and women—mostly men—enter the colonnade and arrive into the Bethzatha courtyard. One man seems to lead the rest. At the pool’s edge, he carefully steps over the bodies and bent limbs sprawled along the tiles; he crosses in and out of the stripes of afternoon sun and shade. Stopping, he stoops down next to “the old one”—a man in the business of lying next to the pool for nearly four decades. A quiet conversation ensues. The old man props himself up on his elbow, gesturing annoyedly.

  Moments later, his eyes grow wide.

  He rises to his feet, rolls his mat, and walks out.

  Bethzatha has never grown so quiet.