John 5:3

It Is in the midst of these colonnades that a large number of physically disadvantaged people are brought to lie down by the water—among them are the blind, the disabled, and those with all sorts of paralysis. John 5:3 EFP

Having worked with developmentally disadvantaged people for the better part of a quarter century, I can somewhat visualize what Jesus may have seen when he entered through the Sheep Gate.  Surrounding the pool in various places and poses, depending on their physical limitations, I would imagine are dozens of men and women.  Unless you can relate to their condition nothing can prepare you for the sights that assault your senses.

The people are laying, leaning, limp, listless, and at times lost in their own world.  Even in these days of social services for the developmentally delayed, it is still a sort of culture shock to enter a room filled with the blind, the lame, the disabled by ailments over which they have little, if any, fault.  Your eyes see the onslaught of physical ailments and it tugs on your heart strings.  Your smell is assaulted by those in the group who are unable to take care of their bodily needs, with no bedside attendant to assist them.  Your ears are assaulted by the grunts and the often intelligible groans for attention or help that fall on deaf ears in the cacophony of noise.  The men and women cannot help themselves.  They cannot walk.  They cannot move.  They cannot see or hear.  They have no control of their body’s movements.  They are brought to this place out of a sense of mercy or pity by those who know them and care enough to carry them here in the hopes that they will not feel so alone or simply to feed some distant glimmer of hope.

This is the world the Lamb of God encounters when he steps through the Lamb’s gate and enters this sickly, depraved, crippled, blind, and purposefully deaf world in rebellion.  He knows what he was getting into.  I have eyes but cannot or will not see.  I have legs and other limbs but refuse to do the things God designed them to do.  I suffer from sclerosis of the heart.  I am hopeless, sightless, and lonely; living a life of quiet and dark desperation.  I am among the men and women laying prone on the ground among other equally disabled individuals.  Disabled by life, by circumstance, by bad choices.  But Jesus has just entered my pathetic sphere of existence—uninvited, unnoticed, perhaps even unwelcomed; but he enters with Good News on his lips and Goodness to spare in his hands.  Maybe today….