“In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water.”
Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. — the enumeration of the afflicted establishes the setting as a place of concentrated human suffering. The implicit question: why would God permit such suffering? Jesus will answer not by theodicy but by healing.
Church Fathers on John 5:3
After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
The feast of Pentecost. Jesus always went up to Jerusalem at the time of the feasts, that it might be seen that He was not an enemy to, but an observer of, the Law. And it gave Him the opportunity of impressing the simple multitude by miracles and teaching: as great numbers used then to collect from the neighboring towns.
The pool by the sheep-market, is the place where the priest washed the animals that were going to be sacrificed.
Read all 19 entries in the readerCatena Aurea · St. Thomas Aquinas, tr. J. H. Newman · public domain
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