It’s interesting to compare in John’s Gospel for today the paralyzed man at the pool at Bethesda with the official from Capernaum who sought a cure for his son.  Obviously, the official had standing in his community. He knew how to get things done and came intent on getting Jesus to do something for him. He was a resourceful man.

The paralytic at Bethesda, on the other hand, seems utterly resourceless. For 38 years he’s come to a healing pool– archeologists identify its location near the present day church of St.Anne in the city– and he can’t find a way to get into the water when it’s stirring. He’s paralyzed, too slow, and he doesn’t know how to get anybody to help him. He doesn’t approach Jesus, but Jesus approaches him.

“Do you want to be well?”

Instead of lowering him into the water, Jesus cures the paralyzed man directly and tells him to take up the mat he was lying on and walk.

Through it all, the man has no idea who cured him until Jesus makes himself known later in the temple area. He’s slow in more ways than one.

“God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in this world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God,” St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians.

Here’s one of the weak, the lowly, the nobodies God chooses, and he will not be the only one.