Healing on the Sabbath at Bethesda

(Gospel of John 5:1- 5:15)
Some time after, Jesus was in Jerusalem during one of the Jewish holy days.  There is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a healing pool called, in Aramaic, Bethesda.  It is surrounded by five porticoes under which would gather large numbers of ill and disabled people, the blind, the lame, and the crippled.  Among them was one poor man had been an invalid for 38 years.  When Jesus saw him and learned that he had been ailing for such a long time, he asked him,  "Do you want to get well?"

"I'm not able to, sir," the invalid replied.  "For you see, whenever the water is stirred up, there is no one to lower me into the pool, and when I try to make it there on my own, someone always gets there ahead of me and blocks the way."

"Rise up!" Jesus bid him.  "Pick up your mat and walk."

The man, at once cured, did pick up his mat and walked.

As this occurred on the Sabbath, the Jewish religious authorities reproved the man who had been cured, "This is the Sabbath.  It’s against the law to carry a mat!"

"It was the man that cured me who told me to 'pick up your mat and walk,'" the man explained.

"Who then is this man who told you to 'pick up my mat and walk'?'" they demanded.

The man who was cured had no idea who it was, for Jesus had already slipped away into the crowd.  Later, though, Jesus ran into the man at the Temple and spoke to him.  "Ah, so I see you are well.  But you must refrain from sinning, so that nothing worse may befall you."

The man then left and reported to the religious authorities that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Notes
1.  The pool at Bethesda possessed healing powers due to some supernatural agency that would, from time to time, stir up the waters.  Just afterward, anyone entering the pool would be cured of whatever affliction he suffered from.  (Many texts include this explanation.)  Bethesda, a name familiar to us as the city in Maryland that is home to the Walter Reed hospital, is also called Bethsaida and Bethzatha.  In almost all cultures water manifests healing and restorative powers.  Pools and springs are often places where numinous forces manifest themselves.  Bethesda reminds one of the most famous modern healing waters, those at Lourdes in France.

2.  The narrative does not specific what ailed the soon-to-be-cured man, save that he could not walk.  One gets the impression that his disability was due to disease rather than injury.  He was, however, well enough over a period of years to come to Bethesda to try his luck at the healing pool.  The later remark by Jesus, that he needn't to quit sinning so that no other tragedy might befall him, suggests a cause-and-effect connection between immorality and bad behavior and illness and misfortune. Belief in that connection is something we all wish to hold on to.  We wish bad things to happen only to bad people and nothing but good things to good people, yet experience constantly reminds us that such a connection often does not hold true. 

3.  The cured man, as the story is told, not only shows no gratitude to Jesus, but, when the opportunity presents itself, gets Jesus in trouble by reporting him to the religious authorities.  Of course, the man is present at the Temple, so we might concluded he had gone there to give his thanks to God.

4.  The religious authorities, zealous in their strict enforcement of Mosaic law, rebuke the healed man merely for carrying a mat on the Sabbath -- carry a mat?  After he was healed one supposed the cured man had no choice but to pick up the mat and carry it with him.  (If he left it under the portico, he probably would have been guilty of some other offense.)  Of course, doing any sort of work during the Sabbath is expressly in violation of the Ten Commandments.  Regarding carrying a mat as work is an extremely strict interpretation.