One man had been ill for thirty-eight years

St Augustine has an interesting comment in his Tract 17 on John about today’s reading on the healing of the man at the pool of Bethzatha. If Jesus was so powerful, Augustine asks, why didn’t he heal all the sick people there? He answers that what could be seen (the physical healing) was only a sign of an inner change, which is the real moment of revelation. Picking up his bed and walking, says Augustine, is a symbol of this man’s taking up the responsibility of caring for others, and it leads him to see what he had not seen before. The true healing—a contemplative experience, if you like—took place not at the pool but later in the temple:

[Jesus] went in to a place where a great number of sick people were languishing, the blind, the lame, the withered. And since he was the healer of both soul and body, who had come to heal the souls of all those who would believe, he chose to heal one of those languishing there, in order to signify unity. If we consider his action with a commonplace mind, with a merely human understanding and mentality, as far as power goes he didn’t achieve anything out of the ordinary, and as far as goodness goes he did too little, for many were laying there and only one was cured, when he could have raised them all with a single word.

What must we understand then, if not this: that power and goodness were at work more in what souls might understand in his deeds for their eternal health, rather than what their bodies might obtain for their temporary health? For the real healing of bodies which is expected from the Lord will come at last in the resurrection of the dead: what lives then will not die, what is healed then will not sicken again, what is satisfied then will not know hunger or thirst, what is made new then will not grow old...

[11] Now the man who was healed did not know who it was who had spoken to him, for Jesus, when he had done this and given him this order [to pick up his bed and walk], slipped away from him in the crowd. Look how this is fulfilled: We carry our neighbour and we walk towards God; but we do not yet see him whom we are going towards, just as this man did not yet recognise Jesus. The mystery which is confided to us here is that we believe in him whom we don’t see yet, and so that he may not be seen, he slips away in the crowd. It’s difficult to see Christ in the crowd: there is a certain solitude which is needed by our mind. God is seen by a certain solitude of contemplation. A crowd is chaotic, and this vision requires intimacy. So take up your bed, and you, who were once carried, carry your neighbour; walk, that you may reach your goal...

Since that man did not give up on carrying his bed and walking, afterwards Jesus saw him in the temple. He didn’t see Jesus in the crowd, he saw him in the temple. The Lord Jesus, indeed, saw the man both in the crowd and in the temple; but the sick man didn’t recognise Jesus in the crowd, he saw him in a consecrated place, in a holy place. And what does the Lord say to him? See, you have been made well...

Quote: St Augustine, In Ioannis evangelia tractatus 17.1, 11; trans. PAC
Ill.: Carl Bloch, Christ healing by the Pool of Bethesda (detail) (1875).