Thursday, March 25

Scripture for the Week:

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Stand up, take your mat and walk.’ At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.

Now that day was a sabbath… Therefore the Jewish leaders started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is still working, and I also am working.’ For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God

. – John 5:1-9, 16-18

Who makes a clearing makes a work of art,

The true world’s Sabbath trees in festival

Around it. And the stepping stream, a part

Of Sabbath also, flows past, by its fall

Made musical, making the hillslope by

Its fall, and still at rest in falling, song

Rising. The field is made by hand and eye,

By daily work, by hope outreaching wrong,

And yet the Sabbath, parted, still must stay

In the dark musings of the soil no hand

May light, the great Life, broken, make its way

Along the stemmy footholds of the ant.

Bewildered in our timely dwelling place,

Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.

- Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

North Point Press, 1987