After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had.
The Lord God, has not left us to fend for ourselves. He has not at any time cast off the care of His people. Rather, in whatever situation we find ourselves, we may rest assured that He has provided all that we need. We talked before about the ‘Silence of God’,
about how when we have exhausted the Lord’s patience, with our unrepentance and incapacity to learn or become righteous He stands up and acts, not to condemn but to save. John paints for us, in our text today, a picture of two people having an encounter with Christ, and the Lord’s responses to where He finds them. The occasion for this story is a sort of ‘standing miracle’ that the Lord had set up in Jerusalem, a supernatural healing that appears in this pool from time to time. This happened at a pool called Bethesda which either means House of Mercy or House of Moving Water, as we go we will see that both derivations have meaning in this story. Water, especially ‘living’ or running water, is one the great themes of John’s Gospel. John Baptist came baptising with water, in order to reveal Christ, in chapter 1, at the wedding in Cana Jesus turned the water into wine in chapter 2, Nicodemus is told he must be born of water and the Spirit in chapter 3, Christ provides Himself as living water to the Samaritan woman by the well and her fellow villagers in chapter 4, and here in chapter 5 we have a miraculous fountain, some sick people, and a God who is with Us who sees and provides for our various needs. So to the story at hand…
Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”
The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.”
We don’t know a lot about the first person in our story who has an encounter with Jesus, but to put him in the context of our society, he is on long-term disability. He is, in all likelihood, homeless. I expect that whatever income he has comes from charity, whether begged for or not, I don’t know. He is looking for anything to take his pain and suffering away but having largely lost hope in the Lord’s miraculous intervention he has probably turned to whatever sources of numbness and mindlessness were available to him, I don’t know what that would be for a crippled man in first century Jerusalem, but in twenty first century America it would be anti-depressants, it would be porn, it would be marijuana, it would be alcohol, maybe meth or fentanyl. Whatever infirmities were in his body were in a kind of resonance with the disappointment that he had become to himself and his family and his friends, his physical problems and the ‘solutions’ to his problems that he had come up with were making each other worse, and the destruction to his life and his soul was getting bigger and bigger and more and more hopeless and he was sinking deep into a gutter.
Jesus asked this man if he wanted to be made well, and I can’t prove that Jesus wasn’t the first one to ask him this question but He certainly wasn’t the last. When I was researching this text I found several commentators, I won’t say who, who aren’t ashamed to seize on the length of time that this man had been ill and his excuses for not obtaining the miraculous healing, to blame this infirm man for his ‘passivity’ and suggest that he really wasn’t availing himself of the help that God had offered him, to suggest that he really didn’t want to be made well. That’s hella weak. That the Lord had provided a miraculous salvation that he was unable, physically or psychologically to receive only exacerbated his suffering.
What we should rather see here, is that Our Lord has deliberately sought out the man most lacking in ability to help himself. He has found the man who cannot make the trip himself, who has no friends to move him, we don’t know all of the details of his inadequacies but suffice it to say that the Lord viewed this man’s extreme neediness as his qualification not disqualification. He came to seek and to save that which is utterly lost, not the temporarily misplaced, not the one who can almost make it but can’t quite, not the one that society pities because of his condition but the one that society blames, is even still blaming 2000 years later. The Lord found a prodigal who couldn’t make the trip home to his father’s house, the Father sent the brother to bring His prodigal back to Him. Thanks be to God for brothers who care, who show compassion, and for Christ the truest brother of all. The Lord found a man who could offer Him no return on His investment, a man who we have no reason to believe was ever useful to Christ in any way, who in fact may have been the occasion for the first friction between Jesus and the Jewish leaders who would ultimately kill him, a man who in all probability never did anything to ‘build His kingdom’, that’s who Christ sought, seeks, out. And he is the first mirror that we should see ourselves in in this story, but not the last.
Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked.
And that day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said to him who was cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your bed.”
He answered them, “He who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’ ”
God had provided a miraculous healing at the Pool of Bethesda, but it wasn’t enough for this man. For him, God had to become a man, had to show up at the Pool of Moving Water and ask him directly if he wanted to be made well. God had to take all of the initiative. Of this man it can very truly be said, ‘You did not choose me. No, I have chosen you.’ as Christ later said to the Apostles.
By healing on the Sabbath and commanding the man to ‘work’, Jesus very deliberately put Himself and His Father in opposition to the rabbinical understanding of Moses’ Law. The healed man, confronted with this law, contradicts it. Note carefully, most of the time when we are accused of breaking the law we attempt to justify ourselves, to indicate that we have not really broken the law that this or that circumstance excuses our behavior in the court of the Law. Not so here. The healed man, the recipient of Grace, counters the authority of Law with the authority of God Himself. ‘He who made me well said to me, “Take up your bed and walk.”’ which is as much as to say, ‘The miraculous power which healed me can only be exercised by the will of God. The love that seeks out one so lost as me is truly divine. The one who healed me has demonstrated that He speaks for God, I obeyed Him as a Prophet. What have your rabbis ever done to prove that they speak for God?’
Then they asked him, “Who is the Man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” But the one who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, a multitude being in that place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple, and said to him, “See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.”
The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.
For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath.
How comforting for our tiny church, and how disheartening for any plans to change the world or bring the Gospel to our lost society, that Jesus withdraws as soon as the crowd gathers. How often the crowd gathers seeking Jesus only to find He left as soon as they showed up. John, who knew Him so well, takes it as a given that when the multitude arrives Jesus will sneak away. It is always to one person that Christ reveals Himself, one from a city and two from a tribe, the Law is for the community, and all human schemes for improvement are ultimately collectivist however they may look. But the Gospel always separates the individual from the crowd, always isolates one from all the rest, in a dramatic act of choice Christ picks one man from the multitude. This very ordinary invalid suddenly found himself disputing and defending the faith, a faith that he had received but as yet knew nothing whatsoever about, defending this faith against the religious elite of society, all alone. He confronted them not as a theologian, not as a philosopher, but as a Witness. The whole content of his faith was that Jesus was trustworthy and this was sufficient to confound the world. He could not explain what had happened but he testified what had been done for him. And when it was over, Christ came to him, once again solitary and secret, the Gospel touched one life with healing and called him out of the life that he had made for himself into another life that was made for him and given to him.
But having healed the broken, Christ now proceeds to His next work to confront the righteous, to confound the elders, to tear down religion and society that the crowd, the multitude, the group might become lone individuals, that the righteous many might become solitary sinners and thus be qualified for Grace. But before we get into that, I should pause to point out that Christ had already begun that work through the two encounters of the healed man with the Jewish leaders.
But Jesus answered them, “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.”Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God. Then Jesus answered and said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.
Jesus here points out for us the continuous activity of God as explanation for His actions. Essentially His answer is that Sabbath or no Sabbath, if He and His Father stop working then the Universe will simply cease. If They stop, then hearts won’t beat, thoughts won’t think, electrons won’t jump, atoms won’t vibrate, gravity won’t tug, the processes of life will stop, Christ is truly the living water, moved by itself not by any outside source, moving ceaselessly. In a few words, Christ has made the very highest claim to divinity that can be imagined. He has indicated that it is the continuous, omnipresent, divinely energetic action of a homeless Jew in the Roman province of Palestine during the reign of Tiberius that called the worlds into being and continually upholds them. He as much as looked at the Pharisees and said, ‘In me you live and move and have your being. Without me, you are nothing whatsoever.’ And they understood that claim, and didn’t so much care for it. But He ascends higher, into the knotty mysteries of the Holy Trinity.
Christ first describes Himself as duplicating whatever the Father does. In Johannean Theology we say that the Logos, God the Son the Divine Word, expresses in the Creation what the Father does in Himself. Another way to put it might be that the Father is the Source of Divine Action and the Son is the Agent who carries out the action. Why does Jesus meet them in this way? He had a simpler and very effective answer to exactly this question which he used against them not much later, about the 10th verse of John 7 or a little further on, that circumcision is performed even if the 8th day falls on the Sabbath, that is that while man’s God-given need for rest is important and legitimate it is not the only need that man has and must sometimes give way to man’s other needs, a point He would make at another time by discussing removing an ass from a ditch on the Sabbath, effectively giving the Pharisees and us permission to remove our heads from our asses on the Sabbath. Should we suppose that Jesus needed some time to think of this response? That His overly technical descent into the details of Trinitarian thought didn’t land and He had to pitch His answer a little lower for His audience? Certainly not and while I won’t say that His answer here is smooth sailing for any of us, and He certainly condescends to our capacities, let’s try and at least get the gist of what He is saying and try and think why He might choose to respond to the Jews in this way.
For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself does; and He will show Him greater works than these, that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives life to them, even so the Son gives life to whom He will. For the Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son, that all should honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.
“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.
Christ here separates Himself from all Prophets and Miracleworkers, for they merely dispense that grace which they receive from another yet Christ expressly states that the power of working miracles is in Himself, even the power of life, death, and resurrection, while at the same time touching the very subtle point that even though this power is native to Him, it comes from the Father, what we might call a union of essence and a diversity of office, the Father is the Origin(God as He is in Himself) eternally begetting the Son, who is the Agent(the action of God upon us), and from the Father(for the Eastern Christian) or the the Father and the Son(in the West) proceeds the Spirit(the action of God in us and through us). The Jews greatest need was not to have the Sabbath explained to them, but to be called from Monotheism into Trinitarian Christianity, into worshiping the Logos made Man. The purpose of the miracle, despite Christ’s reluctance to deal with crowds, was that the Son might be honored as the Coeternal, Express Image of God, and I should say that there is nothing in Athanasius or Nicaea which is not in John 5. It is in these strange, thorny points of theology that the warmth and love of the Only Begotten must be felt.
But Christ goes on, it is not simply the power of life and death and resurrection which is His, but the Right to Judgment. Christ has proven Himself, in the All-knowing vision of the Father, to be the One Competent Judge, who judges not according to rules or laws. Heaven is no ‘nation of laws and not of men’, the Lord does not measure us by some standard and judge based on it, not any standard whatsoever, except for His own good pleasure, which is the Father’s Good Pleasure. And He is given this authority because He is the ‘Son of Man’, the Second Adam, the Root and Branch of the Covenant Community and the Compassionate High Priest.
Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation. I can of Myself do nothing. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is righteous, because I do not seek My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me.
“If I bear witness of Myself, My witness is not true. There is another who bears witness of Me, and I know that the witness which He witnesses of Me is true. You have sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. Yet I do not receive testimony from man, but I say these things that you may be saved. He was the burning and shining lamp, and you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light. But I have a greater witness than John’s; for the works which the Father has given Me to finish—the very works that I do—bear witness of Me, that the Father has sent Me. And the Father Himself, who sent Me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form. But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe. You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.
Christ vindicates His ministry as being conformed to the Father and reminds them that it is a ministry of judgment, potentially of condemnation though it need not be so. He pleads with us to turn from the false and weak things in which we trust and look to Him for all good things. If we will not listen to the Father who testifies of Christ, He even sends men to speak to us, John the Baptist and the man who He healed at the beginning of the chapter. He pleads with us to judge Him by His works, by His fruit we shall know Him. He leaves out nothing that might be helpful to call us to Himself. But we will not and cannot come to Him any more than the man who lay by the pool. What infirmities then keep us from Christ?
“I do not receive honor from men. But I know you, that you do not have the love of God in you. I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive. How can you believe, who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?
We do not trust Him because He doesn’t seek His own. We cannot believe in selfless disinterested love, because we have never loved that way. We are ashamed to receive charity though that is exactly what we need. We are ashamed to be the crippled man who can’t even crawl over to receive the miracle next to him. But that isn’t our biggest problem. Not by a long shot.
Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; there is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you trust. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”
Our problem isn’t simply that we don’t trust Christ. It is the things in which we do trust. Our works, our having gotten it right are the inescapable obstacles before us. We trust in the things that we have done, but it is precisely our religion, our righteousness, that accuses us. It is always worth saying that our trust in works is utterly fruitless, in fact deadly, because the Law cannot be divided. Moses doesn’t give partial credit, he grades on a pass/fail, all or nothing. You can’t be justified piecewise, one part of you covered by your works and another by Christ. The robe of Christ’s righteousness plus the fig leaf of your righteousness equals a fig leaf. You must bring nothing like the crippled man. You can’t live this life by Law and hope to live the next by Grace. The two materials will never mix. It’s true, the Law is holy, and righteous, and good and like the Pool when the Angel stirred it, will provide miraculous healing, but not for us we are unable to receive it. It is made for righteous men and no matter how long we wait, how hard or how many times we try we will never be healed by that broken cistern but must hope for the Living Waters themselves.
The Promise, the Gospel, came 430 years before the Law, is the foundation on which the Law is built. The Law can only be kept by casting it away from yourself. There comes a point when the only way to face Mt. Zion is to turn your back on Mt. Sinai, even to show Moses your ass. This is what we have to learn about the Sabbath and the Law as a whole: It is not your friend. The Law is an Accuser, even Satan the Accuser, never a Witness for the Defense. When the Books of my works or your Works are opened there won’t be a single good point in there. And our religion will be the worst accusations against us. But after they are read, there is Another Book. Look again how the chapter closes. There is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you trust. But before that, ‘Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father’, so says the One into whose hand all judgment is committed. He has not come to condemn but to seek and to save that which is lost, that’s me and that’s you. We seek miracles that we never seem to receive, you know that you can’t, that we can’t, make ourselves well but He is standing before you asking, ‘Do you wish to be made well?’ Do you wish to receive all of your hopes and dreams? Are you ready to give up on your own goodness and receive the goodness of Another as a gift? ‘Take up your bed and walk.’