Progressive reflections on the lectionary #65

Monday 19th May 2025

John 5: 1-9 The healing at Bethesda

A short reflection today on the story of the healing at Bethesda, as I’m officially on a day off for reasons with which I shall not bore you.

This story is one of the few healing ‘signs’ in John’s Gospel, and as with the others does not appear in any of the synoptics. The writer of John’s gospel uses these stories as communicative devices - he’s interested in communicating bigger truths to his audience than can be contained in an attempt at factual narration.

There are seven ‘signs’ in John, three of which are healings - this is the second of the healing signs, bracketed by healing the royal official’s son (4: 46-54) and healing the man who was born blind (9: 1-12). Interesting comparative analyses can be made.

The other signs in John are the turning of water into wine, feeding the five thousand, walking on water, and the raising of Lazarus. I do not think that the writer believed that any of these things happened in the way they are described, rather he was (or they were) skilfully creating mythic narratives that explain aspects of Jesus’ character, nature, or importance in theological terms.

Many of the references that John makes are somewhat lost on us, now, their meanings having been absorbed somewhat into antiquity. In 3: 14-15, for example, Jesus apparently compares his crucifixion to the raising of a serpent on a pole: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up...” We may make the link with Moses, even though it may seem obscure - what we don’t always do is make the link with contemporary (first century) iconography.

The serpent on a stick motif was something well known to the Greek readers, though. (As it is within the medical profession today - it remains the symbol of the world health authority for example). It was/is the symbol associated with the deity Asclepius, the god of healing. (His story is a really interesting one, worth some wider reading.) It seems likely, then, that John is deliberately making the comparison between Jesus and Asclepius, or at least the role that Asclepius played in public life.

The cult of Asclepius was linked to imperial propaganda - Roman emperors would promote their own association with Asclepius in order to bolster their association with public health. As a result, Asclepian temples were built in major cities to symbolise imperial commitment to public health. For a world in which magical thinking was the norm, this was the equivalent of governmental spending on major hospitals today. The story of the healing at Bethesda takes place at a now indistinct location, but because it’s a place of healing, it has immediate associations with Asclepius.

The cult of Asclepius grew particularly strong in the aftermath of crises like plagues, this reflected collective anxieties and the reliance on divine/magical intervention. An example of this is the way that cult boomed after the Plague of Athens, an epidemic that killed something like 100,000 people, about a quarter of the population of the city, in 430BCE.

The worship of Asclepius was syncretised, or merged, with various other religious traditions in the ancient world, including in Hellenistic Palestine - this move suited the imperial push for influence in terms of governance and cultural integration. The more they could control, the better. Rome not only brings military peace, it also brings the power of physical healing too.

In the story of the healing of the man at Bethesda, then, Jesus is proposed as a powerful alternative to the imperial Asclepius. The Jesus tradition is compared with the imperial cults, and wins out. After all, in the story Jesus can, with a word, do for this disabled man what the lottery based system of Asclepius could not achieve in decades.

As usual with John, this is not simply the narration of an historical event in the life of Christ, in fact I don’t think it’s about that at all, instead it’s a statement about who, or what, has power in the world.

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Image: Statue of Asclepius, exhibited in the Museum of Epidaurus Theatre. Used under creative commons license.