Tuesday 5th Week of Lent A 2026

There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
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.
One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lying there
and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him,
“Do you want to be well?”
The sick man answered him,
“Sir, I have no one 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.

Now that day was a sabbath.
So the Jews said to the man who was cured,
“It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” 
He answered them, “The man who made me well told me,
‘Take up your mat and walk.’”
They asked him,
“Who is the man who told you, ‘Take it up and walk’?”
The man who was healed did not know who it was,
for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there.
After this Jesus found him in the temple area and said to him,
“Look, you are well; do not sin any more,
so that nothing worse may happen to you.”
The man went and told the Jews
that Jesus was the one who had made him well.
Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus
because he did this on a sabbath.

 

How many times do we ask Jesus for the wrong thing?

 

The man needed healing and he only saw healing would come by the ordinary steps to get to the pool that healed. He was focused on the limitations and rules of this world. He had assumed Jesus was only able to help him as a human being could. He did not yet understand who he was talking to.

 

How often do we who know the Gospel do the same. We know who Jesus is. We know he loves us. Yet instead of asking for him to help us using his divine power, we ask him to subject his will and actions to ordinary things.

 

Our life can be so much more than ordinary. We can live in a world with rules and limits that the secular world binds us with…. or we can live in the kingdom of God right now.

Living following his way offers us peace now. True joy even during struggles now. Greater love for others if we only love God with all our might.

 

Suffering will always be with us. Miracles do happen. But greater than even healing and miracles is when we finally say yes to Jesus Christ and truly believe we are loved like no one on earth can love us and we align our will to the will of God.

 

That life in the kingdom goes beyond the limitations and ordinary and brings us the grace and blessings we could not have ever believed would come true.