The Pool of Bethesda

The word ‘Bethesda’ translates as ‘House of mercy’ or ‘House of grace’. The pool of Bethesda was situated in Jerusalem and was renowned as a place of healing. It would appear that the waters of the pool bubbled from time to time. The King James Version speaks of an angel who came and troubled the water. The healing properties of this water were so well known that large numbers of the sick, the blind, the lame, and people with various physical ailments gathered there to await the bubbling of the water, believing that the first one into the water after it bubbled would be healed. In the Gospels, the word ‘impotent’ is usually translated as ‘sick’ but in the Epistles it is ‘weak’.¹ No doubt they were sick because weak, but the idea is that the weak gathered there to gain strength and healing.

The location of the pool has been a matter of debate for centuries, but archaeologists excavating the area discovered such a pool, having five arches or porticos, close to the Church of St Anne, near the Temple in Jerusalem, corroborating the biblical record.² This may very well have been a mikveh, which was a ritual bath where the sick would gather. The ruins show two separate pools, enclosed by four walls and colonnades surrounding the pools, but with a fifth wall dividing the two, yet letting water from the smaller pool into the larger one. It was here our Lord sought out the disabled man.

Over the years there have been all sorts of interpretations of the pool. It has been suggested the five porches represent the five books of Moses, upon which so much of Jewish religious life was founded and that the thirty-eight years of the man’s weakness reflects the thirtyeight years Israel wandered in the wilderness. We look at the record simply as it is written today.

The Gospel record of the healing of the disabled man at the pool is recorded in John chapter 5. It was one of the early miracles our Lord performed and shows us two important characteristics of His ministry. The first is His compassion for the sick and the helpless which He consistently showed in healing the blind, the disabled, the dying, and the leper. The second is His immense power over illness and disease. With some, He healed with a touch, others with a word or command, and one by power leaving His body by her touch of faith. Some He healed in their presence and some at a distance. We do not have that divine power, nor can we. But we can and should show compassion on those who are weak and needy in our society, however that need may be expressed.

Arriving at the pool, our Lord identified amongst the crowds a man who was unable to enter the water by himself. In most cases the sick and possessed came to the Lord seeking His help. Here, as with the Samaritan woman in chapter 4, our Lord seeks out someone in order to heal him. In the previous chapter, our Lord went out of His way to speak to a helpless Samaritan woman, a Gentile, and here He goes out of His way to meet a helpless Jewish man. Both had an appointment with God. The record is that the man had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years, though it does not say he had been lying at the pool for that long. Here was a disabled, possibly severely paralyzed man in desperate need of help. His reply to the Lord, ‘I have no man’ should surely have drawn out the compassion of those round about, but evidently not. Disabled as he was, unable to drag himself to the waters in time to be the first one in, he must have been a desperate man and also a disappointed one. How often had he struggled and failed to get to the waters in time!

One wonders what he thought of this stranger who came up to him, spoke to him, and then told him to arise. It would appear from the later record that he did not know who the stranger was for, when asked by the Pharisees who it was who had instructed him to carry his bed on the Sabbath Day, he replied, ‘He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed, and walk’, John 5. 11. Scripture records he did not know the man’s name, ‘for Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place’, v. 13. What marvellous faith this man must have had to obey the instruction of this stranger! Does this indicate his desperation, willing to try anything to get healed? Or could it be that, as soon as our Lord commanded him, ‘Rise, take up thy bed and walk’, he felt that inner power surging within him that enabled him to do so, just as the woman with an issue of blood knew within herself that she had been healed of her infirmity as soon as she had touched the hem of our Lord’s garment, Mark 5. 33. Whatever may be the explanation, the disabled man obeys our Lord’s command, rises, and does as our Lord told him. Is it not true that many, putting faith in our Lord for salvation, know instantly that surge of spiritual life that brings the knowledge of salvation, that sudden flood of peace that assures them God has accepted them and heard their prayer? Faith in our Lord followed the revelation of who He was. ‘Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, ‘Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus, which had made him whole’, vv. 14, 15.

Is it not a puzzle to us that our Lord asked the man the obvious question, ‘Do you want to be made whole?’ Why ask that, when the man has evidently been brought there and left there for that purpose? Perhaps the poor man had by now given up all hope and was resigned to dying desperate and disappointed. How many like him have given up on life, resigned themselves to a life of sin having sought help from any and every quarter and just given up? ‘I have no man’ is the sad confession of so many today.

But we focus on the positives rather than the negatives in the record. The healing of the man at the pool reveals to us the compassion of our Lord for the needy, the helpless, the ‘common man’. Not for him the self-satisfied, self-important, self-reliant Pharisees and Sadducees. Not for him the wealthy, the titled, the self-righteous. ‘I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance’, Luke 5. 32 ESV, and that is exactly what our Lord does to the man who has been healed. ‘Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee’. Surely this challenges us to seek out and help the needy amongst us, whether they be important or not. ‘Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence’, 1 Cor. 1. 26-29. What was a diseased, disabled, disappointed man to our Lord? He was everything that day! Unlike the many who came to be healed, our Lord sought him out. ‘What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?’ Luke 15. 4. And what lengths our Lord went to, seeking the weak and the lost!

The record of the incident in the Gospel shows not only our Lord’s compassion and power and the invalid’s faith and obedience, it also details the miserable carping of the Pharisees. Instead of rejoicing with the healed man – and we notice the piety he showed in going to the temple as soon as he could, no doubt to give thanks to God for his healing – they complained that he had broken the Sabbath rest. Following their petty rules, (for, in order to shield the common man from breaking the Sabbath, the rabbis had introduced thirty-nine types of work one could not do on the Sabbath Day and carrying anything was one of them) no one was permitted to carry anything on the Sabbath Day, for the Pharisees considered that to be work. Sadly, as we all know, legalism often drives out compassion.

This incident is introduced by John here to indicate the growing hostility that our Lord was to face by the religious establishment of the day. From here on, men would oppose Him to His face, mutter behind His back and make plans to kill Him because He was seen, not as a champion of the poor and the sick, nor as the Messiah who had come to set His people free, but as a threat, as a trouble-maker, a rabblerouser, a nuisance. This would later be expressed by the High Priest who would declare, ‘it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not’, John 11. 50. Our Lord would face the growing contradiction of sinners against Himself. Our Lord faces the Pharisees immediately after the man’s healing. ‘Therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore, the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God’, vv. 16-18. There follows our Lord’s profound declaration of His deity. ‘The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him’, vv. 22, 23.

It is surely no surprise that so many places of worship, chapels, and gospel halls, are called Bethesda. As those who were physically weak and sick gathered at the pool, so we long to see many spiritually weak and sick gathered in to receive spiritual regeneration and new life from the Lord. And let us not forget the plaintive cry of the paralyzed man, ‘I have no man’. The lost around us have no man to help them – but there is the Son of man, the Son of God, who can do so. Praise His name!