The Healing of the Paralytic

In Cana of Galilee, Jesus performed the archetype of the signs. In Cana of Galilee, Jesus performed the second sign. The beginning of signs is water that becomes wine, a sign of the new covenant inaugurated by Christ.

The second sign of Cana is the son who lives. An official of the king who lived in Capernaum reaches Jesus in Cana and asks him to hurry up to go to Capernaum to prevent his son from dying because he is seriously ill. Jesus told him: “Go, your son will live.” The man believed the word of Jesus and returned. He went back without Jesus accompanying him. The next day he met his servants who came to meet him announcing ‘your son is alive’ and asked them what time he had begun to get better; they answered, ‘yesterday at the seventh hour.’

It indeed corresponds to one in the afternoon. However, the timing according to our clock is not so important as the numerical indication. If the scene of the Samaritan woman is set at the sixth hour, the child’s healing is at the seventh hour. It is a sign of fullness, of fulfillment. Three times the same formula is repeated: ‘your child will live.’

The second sign that occurred in Cana closes the first circle, the cycle of institutions, and inaugurates the second part of the narrative, pointing to where Jesus symbolically works to show the creation of ‘new man.’ The son who lives is the image of humanity that regains life encountering Jesus. It is the creation of the new man.

This episode is at the end of chapter 4, while the entire chapter 5 of the Gospel according to John is centered on another sign, that of the paralytic. It is the sign that inaugurates the activity of Jesus upon people. John narrates only seven signs performed by Jesus. The number is already significant, and he chooses to describe some prodigious gestures operated by the Master because they are symbols of the realities that bring to mind another reality. A physical material fact is known to the witnesses, which refers to one deeper mysterious reality that indicates God’s work for every human person.

The healing of a paralytic who acquires the ability to walk is an important symbol. It is humanity blocked by sin, paralyzed, unable to move, to fulfill the law. By meeting Jesus, that paralyzed man becomes capable of walking on his legs. The whole chapter 5 will develop a lengthy discourse between Jesus and the Jews, in which the argument is precisely the law. Jesus shows his intervention not as contrary to the law but aimed at making it possible to live the law. First, he performed the sign of the healing of the paralytic and then explained that his work is the creation of a new capacity.

But let us follow the text. “There was, then, a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.” Accustomed to the narratives of the Synoptics Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have the impression that Jesus went to Jerusalem only once, because all three Synoptics narrate first, the ministry in Galilee, then the journey, and finally the arrival in Jerusalem where the arrest and passion of Jesus immediately occur. The fourth Gospel, instead, narrates several visits of Jesus to Jerusalem.

The story has a plot in which journeys are continually presented. In chapter two, we already said that Jesus went up to Jerusalem for the Passover, then returned to Galilee, passing through Samaria. He now returns to Jerusalem for an unspecified feast but is always linked to the Jewish calendar. “Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes. In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled.”

Strangely, the story begins with a verb in the present: “There is a pool in Jerusalem.” Why? The Gospel of John was written in the year 90. Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70. If this sentence had been written in the year 90, he would have naturally said there was a pool in Jerusalem. Instead, saying there is in Jerusalem means that whoever narrates this story does it in a moment in which Jerusalem is still standing, that is, before the year 70. This is a story among those first composed by the evangelist. Let us not forget that the detail of year 90 is that of the last definitive redaction. But the work of the evangelist lasted 70 years, from 30 to 100. In these years, the Gospel has grown and was reworked. John has preached, has told it countless times. Logically, over time he has integrated, updated it. The Gospel has grown organically as if it were a person, born small, slowly it reached the greatness of maturity.

Over 70 years, as a living organism, the Gospel of John has grown, and we find here and there some clues of growth, clues to the antiquity of the text. The information is of the first order. It describes a pool that was not known; he even gives the name: Bethesda, a strange Aramaic name that the various Greek copyists have deformed in every way because they no longer understood. ‘Bet’ means house, ‘hezed’ means mercy. In Aramaic, the article is put at the end, and ‘bethesda’ means house of mercy. It is a kind of hospice, a transit, a place where the incurables were gathered.

The pool, he says, is located near the sheep’s door. In Greek, it is said ‘probatica.’ ‘Probaton’ is the sheep. The door, ‘probatica,’ we must translate as the shepherd’s door; that is, it was the opening through which the animals that had to be sacrificed in the temple were passing. You can easily imagine that whole flocks of sheep were dirty, and therefore, could not pass through where people passed. That is, a service entrance, the sheep door where the animals destined for sacrifice enter, which are collected in various stalls or pens, purified, and then ritually sacrificed in the temple.

Why all these urban details? Because there is a theological and symbolic interest behind these details, John wants us, listeners and readers of his Gospel, to understand a more profound message. The sheep’s door recalls the flock, that is, the people, a people destined for slaughter. In that house of mercy, there was a pool with five porticoes. We find the symbol of five. It is the number of fingers of one hand, but above all, they are books of the Pentateuch, the Torah of Moses is divided into five parts. The Jews call it the five-fifths of the law. Five is usually a symbolic reference number to the law.

For this reason, many commentators said a pool with five porticoes is a detail invented by John as a symbol of the law. If you imagine a pool, inevitably, it is a quadrangle, and therefore there are four entrances. How could there be five? The archaeologists have discovered to the north of the temple of Jerusalem, a double pool with five porticoes, two basins, one lower than the other, surrounded on four sides with gates, and the central dam also had the entrance, and so it can be said that there were five entrances under which lay the people, blocked, a large number of the sick, who were lame and paralyzed.

It is the people who are sick. Imagine the scene of these porticoes under which so many sick are thrown, unable to move, to act, to live. It is a symbolic and tragic picture of impotent humanity. Those two tanks were connected with the hydraulic system of the temple. As we can easily guess, water was necessary for the sacrifices. It was required to wash the animals, and then it was needed to clean the utensils, dirty of blood. It was necessary to wash the linen clothes of the priests. By killing the animals, everything was stained with blood. The place, the instruments, the dress needs to be washed. But that blood is sacred; it is part of the ritual of the sacrifice whereby the wastewater was carried into these tanks on the mountain’s bank under the temple.

These large cisterns contained these wastewaters, and from time to time, the drain was emptied. The water entered the first tank that communicated with the second, producing a water transfer, and finally, the last one is emptied going down into the Kedron stream. This movement of the water was considered prodigious. Those sick, gathered under the porticoes, were waiting for the movement of the waters.

Verse four is placed in brackets in our text. In some editions, it is not even reported. It can be found in the note because it is not present in all the ancient codes. It tells that particular legend: an angel at certain times descended into the pool and stirred the water. The first to enter it after the water is stirred was cured of any disease. The sick were waiting for the moment of the stirring of the waters because it was considered a prodigious angelic fact. Probably instead, it would be simply the flow of the wastewaters of the temple. But they were sacred waters that carried all the residue of the blood. The first sick person who enters the water was miraculously healed.

There Jesus encounters a poor man who had been in that situation for 38 years and was never able to enter the water first because he had no one. It is not this sick man who seeks Jesus. It is important. The evangelist John often emphasizes how the initiative is of Jesus. The prodigious signs are not a response to the man’s request but an initiative of the Lord who sees the miserable condition of humanity and intervenes to help it. Jesus asks that man: “Do you want to be healed?” Indeed, he wants to be healed. But the answer is: “I have no one.” Literally in Greek, he says to him: ‘I don’t have a man’ “to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me. Jesus said to him, ‘Rise, take up your mat, and walk.’ Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.”

Here there is an important idea. It is Jesus who communicates healing, not the sacred waters, not this disturbance of the waters. The people lying paralyzed under the five porticoes represent humanity oppressed by the law. Rather, humanity under the law, five gates, is paralyzed; cannot save itself, cannot heal. Meaning, there is law, norms are given, but people remain unable to apply them. The novelty of Jesus is not new legislation but the healing of man’s wounded nature. It is that humanity unable to do good that is made capable.

The law no longer becomes oppression but a possibility of life. That man who was paralyzed by encountering Jesus becomes able to walk on his legs. He had been paralyzed for 38 years. The number must have significance. 38 recalls 40, short of two years for 40. Forty reminds the Exodus. The healed paralytic marks the beginning of Jesus’ exodus. After two years of ministry, Jesus will experience the Passover of authentic liberation and that man, enabled to walk, can become a disciple.

But it was a Saturday; it was a holiday; it was a day of rest when Jesus had said to that man, take your mat. The Jews block him. You are working on the sabbath; it is not lawful. The man defends himself by saying that the one who healed him ‘told me to take my mat.’ And here, the contrast is created. The word of Jesus frees from that oppressive law of the sabbatical rest which in God’s intention was for man’s good. In the practical application of the scribes, doctors of the law, it became oppression of man, and Jesus, the liberator, heals the body and interprets the law in favor of man. Jesus meets the one who had been healed and warns him: “Look, you are well; do not sin anymore so that nothing worse may happen to you.”

Here is the theme of sin, that is, the blockage that prevents humanity from moving. That man, instead of obeying Jesus, denounces him. He reports to the Jews that it was Jesus who healed him and who told him to take his mat. And because of this, the clash between Jesus and the Jews breaks out.

In the Gospel of John, we often speak of the Jews with a very controversial tone. We must be careful to understand this detail because it is not all Jews who are included in this saying. Jesus himself and his disciples are Jews. With the term Jews, the evangelist John intends to allude to a part of the group of Pharisees, polemical towards the Christian church, towards the last decades of the first century. It is the synagogue group stubbornly polemical towards the new church. So, it is not an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic discourse. It is a discourse within the same religious group but aimed against those accused of being obstinate in refusing him who, instead, is sent by God according to the Scriptures.

From the discourse that begins as a dialogue between Jesus and the Pharisees, we go to a monologue in which Jesus alone speaks and seriously reproaches the Jews who do not accept his role as Son and creator, capable of giving life and the resurrection of the dead. The great discourse ends with the testimonies. Jesus says: I have on my side the testimony of John the Baptist, not only the works that I do guarantee that I am the one sent by God, but furthermore, the Father himself gives witness of me. And fourthly, the Scriptures bear witness to me. You scrutinize them; you study them, and yet you do not want to come to me to have life. You do not even believe in Moses because if you believed in Moses, you would have believed me also because Moses wrote about me.

Jesus is the object of revelation. He is the law. Moses wrote about the Messiah as the liberator, and Jesus is the one who gives the possibility to realize the law. Whoever accepts the Scriptures and believes in Moses accepts Jesus as the one who completed the great work of Moses.