The Paralytic at Bethesda

In Jerusalem, at the time of a Jewish feast, near the Sheep Gate, the pool of Bethesda has five porches. Under these porches lie a great number of sick people, blind, lame, and paralyzed, waiting for the stirring of the water. One man there has been ill for thirty-eight years. Jesus asks him: “Wilt thou be made whole?” He answers that he has no one to put him into the pool when the water is stirred up: someone else always steps down ahead of him. “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk,” says Jesus. Immediately the man is healed. But it is the Sabbath, and the Jews rebuke him for carrying his bed. Jesus finds him afterward in the temple: “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.” The man tells the Jews that it was Jesus who healed him. They persecute Jesus, and all the more when he declares: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”