DGeMs- Daily Gospel eMessage
Dear Friend in the Lord,
“Selfish Care” – Compassion: In today’s Gospel, the paralysed man was not “cured” for thirty-eight years, as no one helped him get into the “pool of Bethzatha”. Ponder on, “To receive God’s Compassionate Love, we must be wholesome and not ‘self-centred’ for our own needs, at the expense of other’s.”
Fr Philip Heng, S.J.
John 5:1-3a, 5-9, 16
There was a Jewish festival, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now at the Sheep Pool in Jerusalem there is a building called Bethzatha in Hebrew, consisting of five porticos; and under these were crowds of sick people, blind, lame, paralysed
One man there had an illness which had lasted thirty-eight years, and when Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had been in that condition for a long time, he said, ‘Do you want to be well again?’ ‘Sir,’ replied the sick man, ‘I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is disturbed; and while I am still on the way, someone else gets down there before me.’
Jesus said, ‘Get up, pick up your sleeping-mat and walk.’ The man was cured at once, and he picked up his mat and walked away. Now that day happened to be the Sabbath. It was because he did things like this on the Sabbath that the Jews began to persecute Jesus.