Several years ago, early one Saturday morning during the Fourth of July weekend, our Associate Minister and I were called to the hospital because a member of our church family had suffered a rather serious heart attack. That's not so unusual, except that this time the hospital was Grady: Grady Memorial Hospital, the inner-city public hospital in downtown Atlanta.

To begin with, Grady is huge. We must have walked down a dozen different, twisting hallways and through more double-wide steel doors than we could count. Everywhere you looked -- in rooms, along the hall-ways, in large rooms with the letters of the alphabet posted around the walls so doctors and nurses could keep up with people, sometimes with police guards and leg shackles -- everywhere you looked there was someone in need.

Many were crying out for help, but the medical professionals were over-run with demands and simply couldn't get to everyone in a timely manner. Some were there because they had pushed life's envelope way too far in the realm of drugs and alcohol. Some were there because they had been involved in serious altercations the night before that had resulted in life-threatening injuries.

Most were there, though, because it was the only place they could go for help -- no insurance, no money, no help from family, no anything: just Grady. A friend of mine once described going to Grady as an experience roughly akin to visiting a Third World Country. I think he might be right.

It was my first visit to Grady, and never in my life had I seen such a mass of humanity with such serious needs. We were looking for just one person, and we finally found her. She was in a large room, against the wall, under the letter "L" waiting in a long line, hoping against hope there would soon be help.

Jerusalem's Grady

I tell you this today because in some ways, the pool known as Bethesda was Jerusalem's Grady. It was the gathering place for the sick and infirmed who had no where else to turn. Located near the Sheep Gate, it seems to have been the popular place for the sick in the first century world of Judea.

Archaeologists uncovered, late last century, the reservoir which formed this pool -- known in some places as Bethesda, which means house of mercy; and in other places as Bethzatha, which means house of the olive tree. It was surrounded by five great colonnades, which provided limited shelter from the elements.

Invalids of every kind were brought to this pool, because there was a belief that somehow help could be found there. In the remains of this pool, there was also uncovered a faded fresco on one of the walls which pictured an angel troubling the water. This naturally reflects the legend that people associated with the pool in the first place.

It was, in many ways, a place of final hope. According to John, there were many, many sick people gathered by the pool. He further describes the sick people, or invalids as some translations offer it, as being those who were blind, lame, and paralyzed -- a word which literally means "dried up." Quite a collection, wouldn't you say? Very much like walking down the halls of Grady Hospital, where you see every kind of disease imaginable, and then some, and in so many ways people have come there with the realization that if they don't find hope here, they won't find it at all.