A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. On the occasion of a Jewish feast, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem, by the sheep pool, there is a place with the Hebrew name Bethesda. Its five porticos were crowded with sick people lying there, blind, lame, disabled, and they were all waiting for the water to be moved. There was one man there who had been sick for thirty eight years.
Jesus now notice this. Jesus, who knew the man had been sick a long time, said when he saw the man lying there now notice what he asks. You want to be healed? He'd been lying there thirty eight years. And Christ says, do you want to be healed?
Sir, the sick man replied, I don't have anybody to plunge me into the pool once the water has been stirred up. The first one in got cured. No one else. And by the time that I get there, someone else has gone in ahead of me. And then Jesus said, stand up.
Pick up your mat and walk. Notice this was a Jewish feast day. And can't picking up your mat and walking, that's labor. So the man was immediately cured. He picked up his mat and began to walk away.
The day was the Sabbath. Consequently, some of the Jews began telling the man who had been cured, it is the Sabbath, and you are not allowed to carry that mat around. The man explained, it was the man who cured me who said to me, pick up your mat and walk. This person, they replied, who told you to pick it up and walk, they asked, who is he? The man who had been restored to health had no idea who he was.
The crowd in that place was so great that Jesus had been able to slip away and not be seen. Well, later on, Jesus found the man in the temple precincts and said to him now listen to this again. Remember now, you have been cured. Give up your sins so that something worse may not overtake you. The man went off and informed the Jews that it was Jesus who had cured him of his disease.
It was because of the things that Jesus did such as this on the Sabbath day that his enemies began to persecute him. This is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. There are so many things that come to mind when you read this that you scarcely know where to begin.
I'm going to begin with my few well chosen remarks of last Sunday when I took up this theme of suffering and devoted my homily practically to an exposition of the latest apostolic letter of our holy father on the meaning of Christian suffering. And in the course of my remarks, I pointed out that you can't escape whatever be the explanation of suffering. You can't escape that in that in some instances, at least, it's tied along to sin. Here's an example. Christ says to this man, he said, no.
You have been cured, but look, don't go out and keep committing these sins. So you just cannot accept the New Testament and not admit that our blessed lord, or at least on some occasions, pointed out that the wages of sin is death. The second thing I wanna point out is it's the mysteriousness of this thing. We are told by Saint John that Christ knew the man had been lying around there for thirty eight years. Don't ask me how Christ knew it.
Saint John says he knew it, or he says he he Christ knew that he'd been lying around there for a long time. This pool is still visible. You can see it in Jerusalem. And yet, our blessed lord goes up to this man and says, what do you want me to do for you? He did the very same thing with a man born blind.
This man's going through all kinds and making all sorts of efforts to get close to Jesus because he knows if he can get close to Jesus, Jesus can help him. And so the man is making every effort to get close to Christ. He finally succeeds, and Christ says, what do you want me to do? Can you imagine, those of you who may have been to LORD or have heard about LORD, of an afternoon when you have that immense, immense area down in the valley near the river, with three and four rows of the ill, the crippled, the dying, the diseased, the blind, the deaf, three and four rows deep around that whole thing. And somebody gets up in the middle, and instead of saying the litany, they say, what would you like God to do for you this afternoon?
He says, is he out of his cotton picking mind? Is he being arrogant? Is he being insulting? It's exactly what Christ does with this man. He said, what do you want me to do?
Now people, as I've said some time ago, I have that the prayers are not answered. That gives me no problem at all because I I know the answer to that. But to the questions, why should I ask God for something? Because I know that God knows what I need. Why should I have to tell God I need some bread or I need some this, I need that, I need another thing?
He knows that. I know that he knows it. Then why do I go and tell him about it? And somebody some people never gets you'd never think they would finish telling god all that he ought to know. I hope he's grateful to them.
All I can say is that's the way god wants it. Give us this day our daily bread. Doesn't god know I need daily bread? Now here's another example. Our Lord wants to hear it from the man's own lips, I want to be cured.
He wants to hear it from the blind man, I want my sight back. Why? I don't know why. I only know that's the way Jesus operated. And I also know this, that in not a single instance did our lord ask the people he cured to do something extraordinary.
Not once, not a single time. I'm depending on a very fallible memory, but almost always, he they have to do something. Either they go and have they have to wash the mud off their eyes as the man did Sunday, or they have to go and wash in a pool, or he takes saliva and smears it on the ear, or he says, go and show yourself to the priests, the the the people who are cured of leprosy, and they were cured while they were en route. And I I've been told that, Lord, that there's never a single miracle that's been verified there that hasn't left a scar. Why this?
I don't know. But our blessed lord in all of these instances asked the people to do something very simple. Last Sunday, the man born blind, he takes saliva and makes some mud out of the the dust, smears it on the man's eye, and says, go and bathe in the pool. The man wasn't cured in the presence of Christ. He was cured when he washed the mud out of his eye.
And as I said Sunday, and the thought came to me only when I was up here, the man washed the mud out of his eye, then he saw. Suffering can be can be mud in our eyes. Suffering can make us opaque to god's goodness. Suffering can get bring people to deny god. There is no god.
The one argument at the age of 78 that I have heard day in and day out, how can you believe there's a benevolent god when look at the suffering around you? And you'll say, Jesus Christ came to liberate us from suffering? Where did he liberate us from suffering? Three or four people raised from the dead. A dozen may be cured of diseases.
Put that against the suffering of the world. It's nothing. Christ didn't eliminate suffering as an actuality of living. He didn't eliminate death as an actuality. He put mud in our eyes with suffering, and it comes in day in and day out.
And it has to be washed out of our eyes if we're to see Jesus because he has the answer to suffering. Not to remove suffering, but to save us from it. To save us from it. He gave sight to a few people. He cured leprosy of a tiny, tiny, tiny handful.
He gave hearing to of one or two or three people who were deaf. He cured leprosy of three or four. I don't care. Multiply it by 10. Multiply it by a 100.
It's nothing compared to the existence of leprosy in the world. He didn't remove leprosy. If there's any liberation that Christ came to give us, it's the liberation from sin. It's the liberation to be free to be saved, not to make earth a paradise. In the name of the father and of the son, holy spirit.
Amen.