NOTES for Joh 5:5-7

Gradually the Lord begins to reveal to the disciples, and not only to them, the mystery of His ministry. He came to earth to "do" what His Father "does." As the Father gives life to people on the Sabbath, so Jesus gives life to people with the life of the Father. He has the right to do this because He Himself is the presence of the Father, the executor of His work: to judge and to give life.

And the evangelist calls us to that breakthrough which he calls faith: to see the unobvious, to see behind what is happening in our life, whether healing or the sense of divine peace in the heart, the face of Jesus, who carries out the Father's will and leads us to the knowledge of the One whom we cannot see by ourselves, but whom we await and honor. And whoever honors the Father must treat the One whom He sent with equal reverence and love.

Judging by everything, the people who gathered near the pool of Bethesda were precisely those longing for healing. And Jesus asks the sick man what seems a foolish question: "Do you want to be made well?" Why, one asks, is he lying here if he does not want to recover? But not everything is that simple. At times doctors encounter this kind of situation: a person runs from doctor to doctor, scrupulously follows every instruction; it appears that everything is being done as it should be, yet there is still no improvement. And the illness, it would seem, is not serious, but nothing helps. Experienced doctors in such situations often say that this is work for a psychiatrist or psychologist: the person is simply comfortable being sick. The body refuses to recover because this is familiar, this is comfortable. The person has something to do: he is undergoing treatment. Having recovered, such a person would simply lose the meaning of life!

The same thing happens with our sins. Blessed Augustine described this attitude toward sin with remarkable wit and self-criticism: "Lord, grant me chastity! Only, please, not today." We come to God and ask, ask Him to heal us, to free us from sins... But in reality we simply do not see our life without sin. We are used to sinning and repenting, and do we in fact need the help we ask Him for? He asks a simple question: "Do you want to be made well?" And until our answer is a sincere "Yes" coming from the heart, no healing will be possible.

It is hard to imagine someone more single-minded and more certain of how and what must be done than the sick man who had lain for 38 years by the Sheep Gate. He had been there so long that everyone passing by had surely grown used to seeing him there and had long ago forgotten why he had ended up there. Even Jesus raises the question: "Do you want to be made well?"

Many years earlier this man had come here in the hope that someone would help him get down into the water as soon as the angel of the Lord touched it, but his hopes had never been fulfilled. During that long time, he himself had apparently forgotten that he needed healing, thinking only about how to get into this pool in time. To a direct question, instead of simply saying "yes," this man answers with a detailed description of why he is still lying on the bank.

But the Lord acts differently, not at all as the sick man had imagined for many years: He does not lower the paralytic into the water, but tells him to get up and walk, taking his mat. God works miracles without relying on human logic, overturning our ideas about the world, even breaking the Sabbath. And very often, like the Pharisees who were present at this healing, we find it hard to accept that He breaks familiar laws, doing what in no way fits our idea of Him.

Quite recently, we celebrated a “Christian women's day.” Today we have another feast of our own, one that might be called a “Christian health day”: the Sunday of the Paralytic. What does the Church tell us by choosing these passages for this day? She says that we are all sick, both physically and spiritually. And this is our good fortune, because “it is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick,” and Christ is our only “doctor”: He “came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (see Mt 9:12-13). Moreover, we are not merely sick. We are truly paralytics: we cannot obtain healing by ourselves. Only Christ can lower us into the water (see Jn 5:7). Only He will lead us to heaven.

The Torah, the commandments given by God, were always perceived as a guide along the path of righteousness. It is not surprising that Jesus turns to the Torah, and more precisely to the Decalogue, interpreting its commandments from the point of view of the Kingdom He brought into the world. And from the point of view of the Kingdom, what comes to the fore is not the action as such, but the intention behind it, the intent a person invests in the action he performs. And if the intention is present, the actual fact of performing or not performing the action changes nothing in principle. If, for example, a person hates his neighbor so much that he is ready to kill him, Jesus, as one can see, equates such hatred with murder.

At first glance such an approach may seem too strict. But it must be kept in mind that the inner Torah, about which many learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah spoke in those days, put precisely intention, intent, in the foreground. Getting rid of evil intentions was considered the most important step on the path to acquiring the inner Torah. But the issue is not only the inner Torah as such. The issue is also that intentions have special significance for the Kingdom. After all, the substance of the Kingdom is God's breath, and its fabric is formed by the relationships that bind a person both with God and with Christ, and with neighbors.

The quality of relationships determines not only the quality of a person's life in the Kingdom, but also the very possibility of remaining in it. That is why Jesus gives so much attention to intention: after all, every intention of ours, if we are inhabitants of the Kingdom, concerns not only us and the people toward whom it is directed, but the entire Kingdom as a whole, in all its fullness.