Homily for Tuesday, 16 March 2021– Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 47:1-9, 12; Psalm 46:2-3, 5-6, 8-9; John 5:1-16

Do our readings today not give us, as is common especially during these high points of the Church’s year like Lent, an almost overwhelming amount of detail?

I visited the Holy Land and Jerusalem in 2013 during our Basilian Peace and Justice Pilgrimage with my confrère [and then-coordinator of the Basilian Centre for Justice and Peace,] Fr. Bob Holmes. I think the reason Pope Paul VI referred to the Holy Land as “the fifth Gospel” (Pope Benedict XVI echoed Paul VI in this sentiment more recently) is apparent for people who have visited the Holy Land: I will cherish memories of seeing these holy sites forever, or at least until (perhaps) my next visit…

The scene John’s Gospel sets for us today is near the Sheep Gate, at a pool whose Hebrew name is “Beth-zatha” or Bethesda. John plants in our minds a vision of a rather sophisticated pool, one with “five porticoes,” but also in this scene, John says, there “lay many invalids,” including the man who had been laying there “for thirty-eight years” and whom Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well”?

Since I enjoy finding out the meanings especially of names of people and places, I find it fascinating that “Beth-zatha” or Bethesda mean “house of mercy” or “house of grace.” This could be a touch of irony from John, since the Pool of Beth-zatha was known, as John points out, to be a gathering place for the sick, “blind, lame, and paralyzed.” Despite its sophisticated structure, and the fact it was a major water supply for Jerusalem in Jesus’ time, with multiple deep pools joined by a system of locks or dams, the presence of the sick made it a place of dis-grace to the more well-off people of Jerusalem of the time; it was the opposite of the “house of grace” that Beth-zatha’s name suggests.

But by his healing of the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel, Jesus turns the ironic dis-grace of this place, and that of the paralyzed man personally, into a moment and place of grace and mercy. This also brings me to a memory from my own ministry: When I lived in Rochester, I often said Mass at a homeless shelter called House of Mercy, in a hardscrabble part of the city. House of Mercy is still run by the indomitable Sr. Grace Miller, a Sister of Mercy. It is a present-day Beth-zatha, a House of Mercy and, well, a house of grace for more reasons than the name of its founder and director.

The Biblical Beth-zatha is also near the beginning of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Here, where Jesus healed the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel, he would begin his Way of the Cross. Again, a place of our dis-grace; our sin; our sickness would, starting from this place, be transformed—on a Sabbath, no less, as in today’s Gospel—into a place of grace, mercy, and salvation by our Lord.

Jesus, clearly, develops a reputation for transforming dis-grace; lack of mercy; sin; sickness; paralysis into grace, mercy, wellness, physical and spiritual movement and vigour. He does so for the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel and, soon thereafter, Jesus would do so for us, by giving his own life, beginning his Way of the Cross at the pool by the Sheep Gate called House of Mercy or House of Grace: Our Beth-zatha.