John 5:1-18

¹ After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ² Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. ³ In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. [waiting for the moving of the water; ⁴ for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred the water: whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was healed of whatever disease he had[i]] ⁵ One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. ⁶ When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” ⁷ 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 going another steps down before me.” ⁸ Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” ⁹ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath. ¹⁰ So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” ¹¹ But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.'” ¹² They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” ¹³ Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. ¹⁴ Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” ¹⁵ The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. ¹⁶ And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. ¹⁷ But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” ¹⁸ This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

 

 

On January 30, 2000, a fascinating and controversial commercial by Nuveen Investments aired during Super Bowl XXXIV.  The commercial showed the late actor Christopher Reeve walking.  This would not have been controversial had it not been for the fact that Christopher Reeve suffered a cervical spinal injury after being thrown from his horse on May 27, 1995, and was, until his death in 2004, paralyzed from the neck down.  It was a shocking injury, especially to those of us who grew up watching Christopher Reeve play Superman in the movies.  But Reeve turned his efforts in the years after his injury to raising awareness for people who had suffered such injuries, and he won a lot of admiration and respect for doing so.

The Super Bowl commercial showed Christopher Reeve getting up out of his chair and walking.  Of course, it was a computer generated effect.  Christopher Reeve never walked again after his injury.

The commercial was controversial in some quarters because it seemed to offer false hope to many people suffering from incurable disabilities.  Others questioned the commercial being for an investment firm, wondering if perhaps Reeve was being shamelessly used by this company to play on people’s emotions so that the company could reap the profits.  One news source reported that a number of phone calls were coming into hospitals wanting to know how Christopher Reeve had been healed, apparently confusing the commercial for reality.

Regardless, Reeve said that he did the commercial because he believed that with enough money invested, attention given, and effort directed toward overcoming the effects of these injuries, those who had suffered them could, in time, be healed.

It was an interesting episode in American culture:   an image of a paralyzed man being healed leading to controversy among those who witnessed it.

It was not the first time such an episode had happened.  We find a similar situation in John 5, with the exception that the paralyzed man really was, in fact, healed.  The man healed in the beginning of John 5 actually walked again and without the benefit of computer generated effects.  What he had was an encounter with a mighty Savior who actually and really healed him!  In the aftermath, the man and the Savior found themselves in the midst of a storm of controversy.  What came out of it revealed a great deal about the man, but more so, about the Jesus who healed Him.

A Powerful Miracle

What sets this amazing scene in motion is the working of a powerful miracle by Jesus.  The historical exactness of the description of the scene of this miracle reveals that the place was well known.

¹ After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ² Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades.

Craig Blomberg, in his wonderful book The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel, tells of the archaeological discovery of this site:

“John 5:2 was dramatically corroborated by archaeological discoveries in the 1890s, as the site of the pool of Bethesda was located in Jerusalem…Identification of the name of the site was later made possible by the reference in the Copper Scroll from Qumran…to Bet esdatain.”[ii]

This is interesting, of course, but not nearly as interesting as what actually happened at the pool of Bethesda.  This pool was a gathering place of the sick, the infirm, and the suffering, as verse 3 tells us:

³ In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed.

There are many places in the world where the sick come in hopes of being cured or helped by healing waters.  This was one such place.  The scriptures tell us that “a multitude” gathered at this pool, but our attention, this morning, is going to rest on one man in particular:

⁵ One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.

Thirty-eight years?!  That is one year longer than I have been on the earth.  For thirty-eight years this man suffered as an invalid.  How very sad!  What had his life been like?  What indignities had he suffered?  How many dreams of a better life had he seen squashed?  There was an air of despair and resignation about this man, and Jesus saw it in his eyes:

⁶ When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?”

It is an interesting question, is it not?  “Do you want to be healed?”  We might protest:  “But of course this man wants to be healed!”  To which we might respond, “Not necessarily!”  After all, the world is full of people who do not want to be healed of their sicknesses.  Oh, they would never say it, but, deep down, some people become friends with that which is killing them and have no desire for healing at all.  Perhaps they prefer the pity and attention they get to the idea of being healed of the actual problem.

I once heard a joke in which Jesus goes up to a man who cannot walk and attempts to heal him.  “Don’t do that!” the man shouts as he recoils from Jesus.  “I’m drawing disability and you’ll ruin everything!”

No, some people really do not want to be healed.  But there was a reason Jesus approached this man out of all the crowd assembled there.  He did want to be healed, but he despaired of ever being so?  Why?  Listen:

⁷ 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 going another steps down before me.”

How very pitiful!  Yes, he wanted to be healed, but the reality was that the surging crowd blocked him from getting into the waters, so healing wasn’t an option.  His was a life of constant frustration.  He was close enough to the healing waters to see them, but, in reality, he might as well have been one hundred miles away, for the crowd kept him from drawing near.

⁸ Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” ⁹ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath.

Perhaps with the miracles of Jesus more than anything else familiarity has bred contempt in the modern Christian mind.  We read this so blandly, so matter-of-factly:  “And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.”

Church!  Hear me!  Thirty-eight years!  Thirty-eight years!  Thirty-eight years of pain and frustration and misery gone…in an instant!  Boom!  Just like that!  Thirty-eight years of suffering, of loneliness, of agony, gone!

Let us never grow accustomed to the miracles of Jesus!  It is an awesome thing that the Son of God could speak a word and a man could be healed in a moment!

When we look at this sudden, explosive event, let us remember that Jesus is displaying the nature of God.  It is as if He is saying, “This is what God is like!  You are healed NOW!”

I believe Jesus can do so today, and sometimes does, though not always. He may or may not do this physically in your case or in the case of a friend for whom you are praying, though He always does this with our hearts and souls.  It is how God saves us when we turn to Him in repentance and faith.  When we repent Jesus does not say, “Ok, the support group meets on Tuesday nights and, in twelve months, if you pull it off successfully, you’ll get your certificate.”

No, He saves in a moment, in an instant.  It is how God works.

Sometimes people are delivered from terrible habits in just this way as well.  I have heard many people say that they drank for many years, or smoked for many years, or used profanity for many years, only to have God deliver them from even the desire to do it in a moment!  That is an amazing thing.

Even so, others who come to Christ have to journey to recovery.  They are forgiven in a moment, but they have to walk to victory over a period of time in this or that area of their lives.  But this, too, is a miracle, is it not?

God works in various and sundry ways, but I would like to remind you all that this is one of the ways He works.

Jesus heals this man in one brilliant moment of glory!

An Outraged Protest

One would expect, of course, that the religious leaders of the day would be thrilled about this, right?  Surely those who studied the ways of God would rejoice at a movement of God, correct?

Hardly.  In fact, history has shown that “religious folk” are oftentimes the last to see exactly what God is doing in the world.  You can see this dynamic time and time again in the New Testament as people completely missed the point of Jesus, or ascribed His divine work to the devil, or saw Jesus as being in conflict with God instead of in concert with the Father.

Oftentimes, as in our text this morning, this happened around the Sabbath.  In fact, Jesus’ divine work on the Sabbath usually elevated the tension between Him and the religious authorities of the day.  This was because of how the Sabbath was understood by many Jews and because of what the Sabbath had been allowed to become.

For one thing, as Gerald Borchert has pointed out, “it was thought at least minimally that the coming of the Messiah was linked to the perfect keeping of one Sabbath.”[iii]  By linking the perfect observance of the Sabbath with the coming of the Messiah, the Jews were especially watchful of any would-be-Messiahs, particularly on the Sabbath.

Jesus knew this.  His healing work on the Sabbath was in no way accidental or incidental.  He oftentimes chose to heal on the Sabbath precisely because that day in particular provided Him a uniquely charged stage from which to challenge the mistaken understanding of the Sabbath and of God and of God’s Messiah that was held by the religious authorities.

The Sabbath was precisely that day that the religious leaders were most sure they understood.  If they knew anything, in their minds, they knew the Sabbath.  Likewise, it was precisely the day on which Jesus chose to challenge their errors.

Coupled with the heightened sense of religious tension that surrounded the Sabbath (especially in regards to the coming of the Messiah and the perfect observance of the Sabbath) was the absurd proliferation of stifling rules and regulations that had grown up around it.

God’s word called for the holy keeping of the Sabbath in the fourth commandment (Exodus 20:8).  This was and is right and good.  This is a divine commandment!  But the religious establishment had consistently attempted to define what it meant to keep the Sabbath holy by the multiplication of rules to assist in this endeavor.  Over time, these rules came to choke the very heart out of the fourth commandment and reduced this holy day of rest and worship into a stifling and impossible observance of multiple laws.

R. Kent Hughes has offered a list of some of the more fascinating rules and traditions that grew up around the fourth commandment.  For instance:

You were forbidden to look into a mirror on the Sabbath lest you spot a grey hair and be tempted to pluck it out.  Plucking grey hair would be working on the Sabbath.

You were forbidden to wear false teeth on the Sabbath lest they fall out and you pick them up and put them back in.  That would be working on the Sabbath.

You were not allowed to carry a handkerchief on the Sabbath.

There was an open question about whether or not a man with a wooden leg could carry it outside in the event his home caught on fire.

You were allowed to spit on the Sabbath, but not on the dirt.  If you spat on the dirt, and your foot scraped where you spat, that would be considered cultivation of the soil, which would be work.[iv]

On and on it went.  In the name of keeping the Sabbath holy, the day had been perverted into a legalistic circus of rule-keeping and judgment.  This can be seen in the fact that the Pharisees are outraged to find this man carrying his bed:

¹⁰ So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.”

Observe here the blindness of the religious leaders!  Here in front of them stood a man who had been an invalid for almost forty years.  It is almost impossible to imagine that they did not know who he was and what his condition was.  And here he is walking!  He is healed and walking!  And what do they do?  Do they marvel?  Do they rejoice?  Do they see that God has been honored on this most holy of days?  Do they praise God’s name because here, on the Sabbath, this man was now given a miraculous occasion for greater joy?

No.  No they do not.  What they do is immediately and instinctively bemoan his violation of the lesser laws they had encrusted to the fourth commandment.  “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.”

R.C. Sproul has offered the very interesting observation that “the rabbis…had enumerated thirty-nine specific types of work that were illegal on the Sabbath day, and the thirty-ninth rule of Sabbath observance – the very last one on the list – was the prohibition against carrying something from one place to another.”[v]

So there you have it.  This man has violated Rule #39.  So the Pharisees press him in their outrage.  The remaining conversation is intriguing:

¹¹ But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.'” ¹² They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” ¹³ Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place.

Seeking to defend his technical violation of the rules, the man points out that he is simply obeying the one who worked a miracle in his body.  There may be a subtle implication here from the man to the religious elites that perhaps he was simply obeying God since God had healed him.  But this is offered timidly.  The religious authorities were not to be trifled with.

Imagine the conflicting emotions in this man’s heart and mind!  He had been gloriously healed by God only to be smacked with a rule book.  He handles himself pretty well, all in all, though he obviously would prefer the leaders harass the one who healed him instead of harassing the one who was healed.  When pressed on the identity of his healer, the man cannot answer because he does not know Jesus’ name.

At this point, the man’s uncertainty as to the name of the one who healed him is incidental to the more outlandish point that the religious leaders were blinded to the work of God…by their religion!

Dear church, it is a sad state of affairs when people love religion more than God.  It is a sad condition to be in when we are so blinded by our traditions and secondary customs that we cannot see the work of God that is being manifest under our very noses!

How heartbreaking this is!  It is the very nature of legalism that it causes those perpetrating it and those suffering under it to focus on man-made rules more than God-worked miracles.

To be sure, there are rules, but God’s Word and the immediate and obvious implications of it should be sufficient in this regard without having to resort to an unending catalogue of contrived laws and customs.  We marvel that the Pharisees could miss God because, in their minds, they were serving God.  Even so, this happens all the time in our day as well, doesn’t it?

How often in our lives as individuals and perhaps in our life as a church have we been more concerned about the religious machine than about God Himself?  How often have we missed His mighty power and awesome strength because we were too busy reading the footnotes of our own religiosity?

We dare not cast off or minimize God’s Word because we find it difficult.  However, neither should we add to God’s Word because it makes us feel more righteous to do so.

Make no mistake:  the Pharisees were convinced they were doing the work of God.  The only problem was that they had become so blinded by their own devotion that they missed God in the name of God!

Beware, brother and sisters, the leaven of the Pharisees.  Beware the seductive whisper of self-righteousness.  Beware the sweet prison of legalism.  All of these things kill in the end.  They kill the spirit and they kill joy and they kill authentic relationship with Jesus Christ.

A Scandalous Claim

The Lord Jesus, of course, does not flee the controversy.  The controversy was no doubt one of the points.  He worked a miracle then used the occasion to teach more about Himself.

¹⁴ Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.”

This is a very interesting statement because Jesus reveals that this man’s physical condition was a result of sin in his life.  And, of course, sometimes sickness is a result of sin.  For instance, in addition to our text here, in 1 Corinthians 11:30, Paul tells the Corinthian believers that the reason many of them were “weak and ill, and some have died” was because many of them were making a public mockery of God in the way they were perverting the Lord’s Supper to their own glorification and their own physical gratification.

Clearly, then, sickness can be a result of sin.  But let us be careful here.  The fact that Jesus links this man’s sickness to his sin does not mean Jesus is teaching a universal principle for all sickness.  In fact, in John 9, when the disciples assume a blind man is blind because of his sin, Jesus responds, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” (v.2)  And, of course, we likewise have the example of righteous Job, whose sickness and suffering were the result of reasons other than sin.

But this man had sinned, and Jesus cautions him to do so no more.  In doing this, Jesus was making an amazing claim about Himself.  He was claiming to know the man’s spiritual condition, to have the authority to comment upon it, and to have the authority to forgive the man’s sins.  The forgiving of sins would get Jesus into hot water with the religious authorities elsewhere in the gospels, but certainly the implication was not lost on the man in this story.

So the man goes and reports back to the Jews on the identity of his healer:

¹⁵ The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. ¹⁶ And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath.

The Jews respond with incensed outrage.  This is one of the many episodes that heighten the tensions between Jesus and the religious establishment.  What Jesus says next does not ease those tensions in the least:

¹⁷ But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

Ah!  If only we could understand how unbelievably incendiary and offensive this statement was!  It is as if Jesus is setting fire to a powder keg.  But He does not do so arbitrarily.  Jesus is not trying to pick a fight or offend for offense’s sake.  He intends to teach them about the true nature of the one they hate.

This statement was difficult for the Jews for a number of reasons.  For one thing, Jesus calls God “My Father.”  It was not out-of-bounds to call God “Father,” but it was out of bounds to call God “My Father.”  To do so was to claim a familiarity with God that was deemed offensive and implied a status for the one saying it that was deemed blasphemous.

God was not “the Father” to Jesus.  He was “My Father,” Jesus’ Father, making Jesus the unique Son of God.  This was entirely inappropriate in the minds of the religious authorities.

More than that, Jesus said that His Father “is working until now, and I am working.”  In doing so, Jesus was entering an ancient religious debate that was raging among the Jewish religious elites about the nature of the Sabbath and how it was to be observed.

The question centered around the meaning of the word “rest.”  What did the scriptures mean when it said that God “rested” on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2)?  Some Jews interpreted rest as complete passivity.  Therefore, in their minds, God literally did nothing at all on the Sabbath.  Thus, to honor God, we must literally do nothing either.  So out of this understanding the various legalisms of the Jews arose.  The laws were there to assure that you likewise did nothing!

Other Jews, however, argued that God could not have literally done “nothing” since that would mean He would have failed to keep the created order going through the power of His providential hand.   In this understanding, “rested” meant that God consecrated this day and set it apart as holy.  This meant that we are to do the same:  consecrate the day and set it apart as holy.  This meant that the day was less about keeping legalistic minutia than honoring God in a spirit of rest and worship.

Jesus enters this debate by saying that God is always working.  He is saying that God did not literally cease from all activity.  He did not cease from being God.  He is God.  And here is the key:  God was also at work on this Sabbath in the healing of this man.

If the point of the Sabbath is to honor God, then what is more honoring than celebrating the miraculous work of God in this man’s life?  If the focus of Sabbath rest is to draw deeper in the presence of God, how better to do that than to see, recognize, acknowledge, and rejoice at where and how God is working in the world today?

“My Father is working until now,” Jesus says.  He then adds:  “and I am working.”  When, in other words, they see Jesus working, it is because God is working, and he who sees the Son sees the Father.

This was an astounding claim!  Jesus is claiming nothing less than that He and the Father are one (John 10:30).  The reaction to this statement was swift and extreme:

¹⁸ This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

Here, then, is the great decision of this passage:  do we see Christ as God or do we see Him as the devil who is warring against God?  Do we accept His work, even when it conflicts with our own assumptions about God, or do we deny His work?  Do we change for Jesus, or do we seek to make Jesus change into our understanding of what we think He should be?

God is at work.  He is at work in His Son Jesus.  You may reject Him or you may come to Him.  I do pray that you will come to Him today.