Passage Viewer

After this, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now, near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, there is a pool called Bethzatha in Hebrew, surrounded by five covered colonnades.

In these colonnades, there was a multitude of sick people: the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed.

[[Everyone was waiting for the water to move, from time to time an angel of the Lord would descend into the pool and stir the water; and the first person to enter the pool after this movement of the water would be healed of whatever disease he had.]]

There was a man who had been sick for thirty-eight years.

Jesus saw him and, knowing how long he had been lying there, he asked:

“Do you want to be well?”

The sick man replied:

“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am trying to get in, someone else steps down before me.”

Jesus then said to him:

“Rise, take your mat and walk!”

Immediately, the man was healed, took up his mat, and walked.

Now that day happened to be the Sabbath.

So the Jews said to the man who had just been healed:

“It is the Sabbath, and the law doesn’t allow you to carry your mat.”

He answered them:

“The man who healed me told me, ‘Take up your mat and walk!’”

They asked him:

“Who is the man who told you: Take up your mat and walk?”

The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away among the crowd that filled the place.

Later, Jesus met him in the temple courtyard and said:

“Now you are well; don’t sin again, so that nothing worse happens to you.”

The man went and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Jesus’ Authority

So the Jews began to persecute Jesus because he performed healings like that on the Sabbath.