Jesus sees the man lying on his mat next to a pool and asks, “Do you want to be well?” The man says yes, and Jesus replies, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” Immediately, the man is healed. Bishop Robert Barron writes that things heat up at this point in the story. One would expect that everyone around the cured man would rejoice, but just the contrary: the Jewish leaders are furious and confounded. They see the healed man, and their first response is, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” Why are they so reactive? Why don’t they want this to be? We, sinners, don’t like the ways of God. We find them troubling and threatening. Why? Because they undermine the games of oppression and exclusion that we rely upon to validate our egos. In many peoples’ minds, the story of Jesus healing the ill man on the Sabbath was ample justification for God to punish him. You see, their God is vengeful, and since Jesus broke the law, they expected Jesus to “pay” for his transgression. Yet Jesus reminded them and us that God’s ways are not ours. God, who is love, seeks to nurture and care for them and to be in communion with them. Our challenge in this story is to determine how we see God. What is our image of God? Because that image is going to shape everything we do in our life.