Baptism: Where Our Hope Begin (Part 5)
The Hope in Jesus’s Christ healings
With this background of mikvoth and their importance to Judaism, some passages in the New Testament begin to take on new meaning and can be seen from a different perspective.
During Jesus Christ’s ministry, He healed many lame, blind, and deaf people. In fact, there are so many of these healings that John tells us:
“Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written (John 21:25).”
If Jesus Christ performed this many miracles as John wrote, then the ones recorded for us in the New Testament have been included for specific reasons.
Two examples of these healings, and Jesus Christ’s most well-known, are found in the book of John when He heals a man who could not walk for 38 years (John 5:1-8) and a blind man from birth (John 9:7). In reading both of these accounts, notice we are told both of these healings happened at pools, and those pools were directly involved in the healing or mentioned by Jesus. In the first healing, the man who could not walk says to Jesus,
“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me (John 5:6).”
The man is placing his faith in the pool to heal him, but Jesus’ response is direct. The pool will not provide the hope or healing the man seeks, but only the One the man is talking to can do so. Unlike the pool the man is putting his hope into, Jesus Christ only needs to tell the man, “Rise, take up your bed and walk” (John 5:8), and immediately he can. In the second healing, the blind man is not around a pool. Jesus Christ is the one who references the pool in this healing when He tells the blind man, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:7).” Notice in the first healing, Jesus says the pool is not needed for healing and performs the healing Himself; however, in the second healing He asks the blind man to take action by washing and uses the pool in the healing. Even though the pool is directly used in the second healing, the healing the blind man experiences still ultimately comes from Jesus.
Why is it significant that these two healings were performed near pools? Recently, according to Biblical Archaeology Society and other archaeological finds, it has been discovered that both pools mentioned in the healing accounts in John (Bethesda and Siloam) were mikvoth (or mikveh pools). Immediately, the symbolism of what Jesus Christ conveyed in these healings and miracles should become striking. The man who could not walk had been waiting at one of these mikveh most of his life, putting his hope there. Jesus Christ came and became that mikveh for him. The blind man from birth had to take action and use a mikveh to complete his healing in the thing that represented the hope of Jesus Christ. In both of these instances, we begin to see how and why the word initially used as “a collection [of waters]” was inspired by God to be used as “hope” later when the prophets wrote. Eventually these mikvoth would become prevalent around Israel, with their roots based in the hope of physical healing for chronic conditions, representing the future Messiah. Now these mikveh pools had become the places of Jesus Christ’s first public miracles of healing, showing that He was the Mikveh and Savior that Israel had been waiting for as Jeremiah stated,
“O you Hope of Israel, its Savior in time of trouble… (Jeremiah 14:8).”
Jesus Christ, the God of the Old Testament, was Israel’s and is our true “Lord who heals you (Exodus 15:27).”