Water That Moves
Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Ez 47:1-9,12 · Ps 46 · Jn 5:1-16
Imagine a city without water.
No rivers. No springs. No rain.
Nothing grows. Everything dries.
Water means life.
Every civilization knows this.
Where water flows, life appears.
Where water stops, desert begins.
And so a river appears in the vision of a prophet flowing out from the temple in Jerusalem.
At first a small stream.
Then deeper. Then wider.
The water keeps flowing east —
toward the desert, toward the Dead Sea,
a place where nothing lives.
But in the prophet’s vision something impossible happens.
Where the water arrives —
life returns.
Fish appear. Trees grow. Leaves heal.
The desert begins to live again.
The mystery of this river is sung in Psalm 46:
“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.”
Quiet. Steady. Life-giving.
Then the Gospel takes us to another water.
The pool of Bethesda.
Around it — the sick.
Blind. Crippled. Paralyzed.
All watching the water.
Waiting.
Because it was believed that when the water stirred the first one in would be healed.
One man waited thirty-eight years.
And never got there first.
Then Jesus comes.
No angel. No stirring water.
Just a word.
“Stand up. Take your mat. Walk.”
And the man walks.
Later Jesus finds him again.
And gives a warning.
“See, you are well.
Sin no more.”
Because the deepest sickness is not always in the body.
And the deepest healing does not come from a pool.
All these waters are pointing somewhere.
The river Ezekiel saw. The streams of Psalm 46. The pools of Jerusalem.
They point to another water.
The water of baptism.
Flowing from the pierced side of Christ.
A strange water.
It drowns sin but saves the person.
It buries the old life and begins a new one.
In those waters we die with Christ and rise again.
A new life. A new direction.
And that may be the greatest miracle of all:
Not that water moves —
but that a human heart can begin again.
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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