I was at Doylestown Hospital not long ago for some routine tests, nothing serious, and they have something in the waiting area that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It was a short story dispenser. So you push a button and it spits out something that looks like a shopping receipt, and it has a very short story printed on it.
So the story was OK, but I saved it because I love what it says down at the bottom of the paper. It says, “The power of stories—like healing—can change the world.”
That’s exactly what we Christians believe about story-telling and about healing. We believe in the power of stories. The Gospels themselves are mostly a collection of stories about Jesus, what he did and what he said. And they show us Jesus himself often preached by telling stories.
And so much of what he did was about healing. It was the kind of healing that transformed the lives of individuals, and his healing is still changing the world.
So right in line with that, in today’s Gospel we hear a story about a healing.
Jesus is in Jerusalem for a religious festival, and he goes to a place where people who were in need of healing would gather. It was a pool of water it was said that an angel would visit from time to time and stir the water. And when they saw the water moving like that, the first ones into the water would be healed.
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