Have you ever been accused for working when you should not be? It happens, sometimes you might cut a lunch break short to help someone. You were injured and you should be resting but you decide to do some work helping another person out instead. It is not so much being wrong but seeing a need and going into action. Even Jesus got blamed for helping when other feel that no work should be happening, even though there is a need.
The third sign is the healing of a disabled man at the Pool of Bethesda while Jesus is attending a Jewish festival in Jerusalem (5:1 – 15). This is the beginning of the back-and-forth debate between Jesus and the Jewish leaders which characterizes much of the Book of Signs (chapters 5 -10). These chapters are also marked by a “replacement” motif, which shows Jesus to be the fulfillment of the various festivals of Judaism. This particular healing occurs on the Sabbath, which serves as the model for all of the other Jewish festivals. Jews were commanded not to work on the Sabbath.
5 Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. 5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, 10 and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”
11 But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”
12 So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
13 The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
14 Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” 15 The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
As chapter 5 opens, John made a geographical switch from Galilee to Jerusalem and specifically the Pool of Bethesda, a gathering place for invalids. The pool was located in the northeast corner of the old city. It functioned under considerable local superstition as a place with miraculous healing powers.
John also dropped a vague chronological note when he observed it was feast time. Many interpreters argue this was a second Passover. Many suggestions have been offered as a substitute for the Passover—Pentecost, Purim, Dedication, Trumpets. But two arguments persist: a recognition of this feast as the Passover would stretch the record of John through three and one-half years, a figure commonly preferred by most evangelical Bible scholars for the earthly ministry of Jesus. Also, it was an important enough feast to draw Jesus back to Jerusalem and we must consider that impact. The strong emphasis on Sabbath in this chapter may be the key to recognizing a Passover feast here.
The fourth verse has no significant textual support and is therefore omitted by the NIV, although some will be familiar with wording from the KJV describing the angel who would stir up the waters and the hope that the first person in the pool after such a swirling would be healed.
As in Sychar and Cana, Jesus focused on a single individual, this time a man who had been lame for thirty-eight years. He asked the crucial question, “Do you want to get well?” The man responded by raising the obvious problem. He could not get well because he could not get down to the healing pool fast enough. The man had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. Why did Jesus choose him now, and why him from among all the other disabled people gathered around the pool? The only possible answer is God’s sovereign grace. In the Father’s timing, this was the time, the place, and the way he would heal this man. The length and extent of the man’s illness presented no problem for Jesus.
We tend to think that time produces hopelessness. Surely the longer a person is sick, the less likely that he or she will get well. The longer a person has lived in sin, the less likely that person will come to Christ. We have all the statistics to show that we must win people to Christ when they are young or the chances diminish. The argument is sound on the basis of what we know, bolstered by human experience. But God is the master of difficult situations just like this one. What is humanly impossible, God loves to do. Perhaps Jesus intentionally chose the veteran Bethesda-pool invalid to prove his divine grace. Even today God may choose difficult people through whom he will prove his grace.
Verses 8 and 9 describe the miraculous cure. The original question in verse 6 focused on the man’s infatuation with magical powers and traditional superstition. If the pool had really been God’s healing agent, Jesus could have just helped the man in the water first after the angelic stirring. But the words Get up! Pick up your mat and walk emphasize that Jesus was the source of divine healing, not some kind of wave pool. When you are really sick, miracle is preferable to magic.
We dare not miss the absence of faith here. The man did not ask for help; he showed no faith that John reports; and he did not even know who Jesus was. We need to take note too that the Lord’s ministry was not primarily social, just as ours is not. He had the power to clean out the entire pool area. Not a single invalid could have survived the power of God. But he healed only one man, and that seems to have been done to form a basis for the message to follow.
Hot Springs National Park has warm and relaxing facilities, but no ultimate cure. Yet it has drawn millions to that site. But God does not need “stirring pools” to work in our lives. We do not need crosses around our necks, a saintly figurine on the car dashboard, or even oil on the head for healing. Sometimes God wants us to ask as the royal official did. And sometimes he asks for faith before he acts.
Jesus performed this miracle on the Sabbath and that became the point of argument in the next four chapters of the book John. Why the fuss over a day? Because people want rules, not grace. They want to boast about what they did to earn merit from God. This attitude opposes the gospel. Luke mentioned the Sabbath only nine times in Acts, and not once in connection with Christian worship. But the Pharisees could not get over this hurdle which troubled them during the entire time of Jesus’ life on earth.
This dramatic healing attracted the typical reaction from the Jews, a phrase uncommon to the Synpotics but used seventy times in John, usually to describe religious leaders opposing Christ. The New Testament is not anti-Semitic. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and constantly proclaimed the Gospel to any Jews who would listen. Paul went from synagogue to synagogue offering salvation to his own people first.
The Sabbath, of course, was always the seventh day (and is so today) never the first, though we sometimes incorrectly refer to Sunday in this way. This issue dominates the next four chapters of John as the hypocrisy and formalism of religious observance link the first century with our modern time.
This was no accident, Jesus did not just forget it was Saturday. He was not ignorant of the provision that the rabbis had added to God’s Sabbath law: “Whoever on the Sabbath brings anything in or takes anything out from a public place to a private one, if he has done this inadvertently, he shall sacrifice for his sins; but if willingly, he shall be cut off and shall be stoned.” The scribes had come up with thirty-nine tasks prohibited on the Sabbath. Certainly Jesus knew that healing on the Sabbath would upset the religious leaders. He knew that by commanding the man to carry his mat out of a public place he would anger them even more. So why did he do it? The dialogue rages over the next several chapters, but the central idea has to do with the authority of Jesus as the Son of God.
In verses 11 – 13 we see how little the man actually knew. This startling stranger had walked into his life, given him back normality in his legs, and then disappeared. The man’s reply to the Jews (doubtless the leaders of the Sanhedrin) reflected his willing obedience, reminiscent of the royal official in chapter 4. The exchange betrayed the Jewish leaders’ shallow understanding of theology; they focused on the carried mat, not the new legs.
The innocent response is followed by the final warning, a brief section of a verse which fits significantly into the miracle-message method John records so carefully. John 5:14 must be compared theologically with John 9:3. In the first case, one must conclude that the lameness was caused by sin; and in the second, clearly the blindness was not. The Greek text might better be translated, “Give up sinning.” The something worsecould refer to a physical illness more burdensome than the one the man had carried for so many years, or it might suggest spiritual disaster, even eternal condemnation.
In this story Jesus found the man in the temple, a place where in his hopeless state he would have found little welcome but in hishealed state was now able to enter. Jesus addressed him in his healed state: “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you”(5:14). These words are not meant to be a cause-and-effect statement related to his sickness or paralysis. Such a direct identification between personal sin and illness, which was proposed by the disciples in the story of the blind man (John 9:2), was firmly rejected by Jesus (John 9:3). The statement of cause and effect in this story, therefore, must be taken as referring to the eschatological correlation between sin and judgment that undoubtedly is the meaning of “something worse” in Jesus’ warning to the paralytic. v