John 5:1-16 shows why Catholics are grateful to God for putting His House in Order.
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Question 1: “How is Today’s Reading ‘The worst ingratitude’?”
Answer: “1,500 years ago, Ezekiel 47:1-9, 12 described what God’s Angel showed him of The Temple of The Lord. Since then, billions of people have had an idea of the complexity and blessings of Heaven. For the past thousand years, Believers have used Psalm 46:2-9 to gratefully understand: ‘The Lord of Hosts is with us; our stronghold is The God of Jacob.’ Many still repeat the plea of Psalm 51:12-14, ‘A clean heart create for me O God; give me back the joy of Your salvation.’”
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Question 3: “How does this lead up to who may be ‘The Most Ungrateful Person Who Ever Lived’?”
Answer: “John 5:1-16 tells us ‘There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.’ There, he found a crippled man who complained he had been waiting for 38 years to be the first to enter the pool at Bethesda when ‘the water is stirred up’. ‘Jesus said to him ‘Rise, take up your mat, and walk.’ Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.’”
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Question 4: “Why didn’t those in charge of the pool get people in line to be healed every day, instead of letting the donor who paid the most be healed?”
Answer: “That is why Jesus came to earth and Spoke One Church Into Being whose clergy would take Vows of Poverty, Celibacy, and Obedience with His Church-Creating Word to His First Catholic Pope! ‘And I say unto you thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I give you the keys to The Kingdom of Heaven.’”
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Question 5: “Was the man grateful to Jesus for curing him?”
Answer: “He was not ‘healed’ from being a sycophant to the same people who had kept him from being cured for 38 years! They criticized him for doing the ‘work of carrying his mat on the Sabbath’. When he discovered that Jesus cured him, he reported Him to the same authorities who had kept him crippled for the preceding 38 years while letting bigger donors be healed! That threat to their financial structure began the process described in John 5:16: ‘Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus because He did this on a Sabbath.’”
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Today’s Simple Rhyme: “It is a fact; a sad, sad fact, / A man he cured stabbed Jesus in the back.”
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