1 April 2025, Tuesday of the 4th week of Lent
Homily
One of the expressions that comes up quite often in the mouth of Pope Francis is that of ‘peripheries’. He also uses the word in the plural. He calls us all to go to the peripheries. And this word obviously has different meanings depending on the specific vocation of the people to whom he is addressing it or the context in which he uses it. His approach is evangelical before being sociological.
In today's Gospel we have a good example of the message of Jesus to which Francis refers. One day, Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. It was the Sabbath. Before going to the Temple, which was in the centre of the city, Jesus went through the outskirts. He passed through the Sheep Gate, and near that gate there was a pool, called Bethzatha, where a great number of sick people lay: blind, lame and paralysed. They were the outskirts, since they were rejected by society, left on the margins.
Jesus did not wait for any of them to come to him. He went to them. He enquires about their situation. He hears about one in particular, a man who has been paralysed for thirty-eight years. He does not impose anything on him. He asks him what he wants. ‘Do you want to get better?’ The other man no longer seems to have any desire. He has resigned himself to the fact that there is no one to look after him. Jesus restores his dignity. He does not say to him, ‘I will heal you’. He simply says to him, ‘take up your bed and walk’. And this man who does not know Jesus, who asks for nothing, who shows no other sign of faith than that of obeying the order he receives, is healed.
It is after having made this detour to the periphery, after having shown concrete kindness to a concrete, needy human being, that Jesus goes up to the Temple.
The lesson is obvious: worship of God is important. We must go up to the Temple to pray. We must gather in church to celebrate the Eucharist and our daily services. But this only makes sense if we have first passed through the periphery, if we have shown kindness, ‘tenderness’ as Pope Francis often likes to say, to our brothers and sisters.
And then we all belong, in one way or another, in a more or less obvious way, to this crowd of cripples sitting on the edge of the pool of Bethzatha. We may be waiting for a magical gesture, as all these cripples in Jerusalem were waiting for. Salvation, true healing, the encounter with God will come to us instead from someone in whom the tenderness of Jesus will have been incarnated and who will say to us: walk, continue on your spiritual path.
Each of our communities is a bit like a pool such as that of Bethzhata. We are gathered there in expectation of salvation. We are the periphery for which Jesus showed so much love. Let us learn to offer each other this divine attention and recognise Jesus whenever he comes to us in the form of one of our brothers or sisters.