Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Lectionary: 245

They asked him,
"Who is the man who told you, 'Take it up and walk'?"
The man who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there.

 W e heard the Lord complain yesterday, "Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe." The sign he had given on that occasion was the simple instruction, "Go home. Your son will live." 

Today's sign is the healing of an old, disabled man followed by the Lord's immediate disappearance into the crowd. The man has heard the Lord's command and obeyed it, but his faith seems weak as he doesn't know who healed him; and later, when he learns, he dutifully reveals it to hostile authorities. Not knowing the Lord's holy name or its significance, he does not believe in Jesus. And when he has those questions answered, he does not switch his allegiance but returns to the Jewish authorities. 

We might remember the Lord's teaching in Saint Matthew, 

"...your heavenly Father... makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust."

Clearly the old man has much to learn as do the readers of this Fourth Gospel. The controversy that follows from the underplayed incident opens our minds to the intense and beautiful relationship of Jesus to God his Father. We do well to hear and contemplate this teaching. 

We have heard the complaints of many people about the word father. They cannot relate to God as a father since their own fathers were missing in action. Our engaging in wars in Europe and Asia during the last two centuries have cost the lives of many men, and those who survived the horror were often left spiritually disabled as they tried to return to routine family life. Faced with Achilles's choice between returning home as a failed warrior or dying as a legendary hero, they had returned to the homes with nothing to show for their time but haunted memories and a scarred psyche. Their biological children were spiritually orphaned by men who could not come home spiritually. God the Father sounded more like a dangerous stranger than the Abba whom Jesus knew. 

The Gospel of John, and his fifth chapter in particular, offer an entirely new understanding of the word and its importance for us. Immediately, upon being challenged about his healing of the old man, the Lord explains, 

“Amen, amen, I say to you, a son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees his father doing; for what he does, his son will do also."

If the Father gives healing to good and bad alike, so does the Son. Our Catholic website (USCCB) has attached several helpful links to that verse to show its connection to the entire Gospel and to reveal its depth:  3:34; 8:26; 12:49; 9:4; 10:30.

To know the Son is to know the Father. Disciples, regardless of their experience of their parents, must sit at the feet of Jesus and learn about his father. Our parents are sisters and brothers to us, and everything they teach us of life and grace must be purified and refined by the Son of God. Those who were given a stone when they asked for bread, or a snake when they asked for fish, must go with Jesus to be fed at the table of his Father with the flesh and blood of our salvation.