29 March 2022 - Tuesday of the fourth week of LENT – John 5:1-16

     The pool at Bethesda is located outside the city walls of Jerusalem. It was originally built to supply water for the Temple. However, at the time Jesus visits the pool at Bethesda, it no longer served this function of supplying Jerusalem with water. but was a pool where the sick came to be healed.  Jesus singles out one man from the many people who are gathered there in order to be healed in these healing waters.  This man acknowledges that he has no one to put him in the pool, that he has no family or friends to help him. It is difficult for us to imagine how he would survive there without anyone to help him.  The man did not know that it was Jesus talking to him, so he obviously did not anticipate being healed by Jesus.  Although he expects to be cured by the healing waters of the pool, Jesus bypasses the pool altogether and cures him directly, telling him to pick up his mat and to walk. It is interesting that, unlike some other healing miracles Jesus performs in the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t link the cured person with his faith.   Jesus cures the man because he needs healing. The man is cured because he merely wanted to be well.

      So often we take our faith for granted, don’t we?  In the Spanish classes I have been teaching here at St Jude on Thursdays and Fridays, I was telling one of the classes about my missionary work in the jungles of Ecuador.  In describing my weekly visits to the small villages located deep in the jungle, of which there were more than 100 villages served by our mission center, a parishioner asked me if they people there went to Mass each week.  I explained to them with only a couple of priests serving all those village and with their only transportation being wooden canoes, mostly without motors, they did not have access to Mass most of the time.  Some of those villages had chapels that did not even has Mass once a year.  Compare that to Hinds county which has 10 locations that have both daily Masses and weekend Masses.  We often take for granted the many opportunities we have to practice our faith.  

         The season of Lent is always an annual opportunity for us to grow closer to Jesus and to contemplate the great love God shows us through his beloved Son.  This year our Lenten journey takes on particular significance with the pandemic which has affected our commemoration of Lent for three years in a row.  May our Lenten prayer today be that we may be able to recognize the ways Christ is calling out to us in our reality.