Ep. 18: Healing and the Sabbath
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JOHN 5
Autumn came and Jesus travelled from Galilee to ‘an unknown feast’ in Jerusalem, possibly Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets. It appears that he was alone. So where did John get his report on what happened there? The language of the report indicates that Jesus himself recounted it later to his special friend. And what did happen there? The healing at Bethesda.
It was a pool enclosed within five porches, by the sheep market, presumably close to the sheep gate, that opened from the busy northern suburb of markets, bazaars, and workshops, eastwards upon the road which led over the Mount of Olives and Bethany to Jericho. In the five porches surrounding this pool lay ‘a great multitude of the impotent’ in anxious hope of a miraculous cure.
It was thought that an angel descended into the water, causing it to bubble up and that only he who first stepped into the pool would be cured. This, of course, was not good news to the many who weren’t cured! This bubbling up of the water was due not to supernatural but to physical causes, it being a common phenomenon with springs. It seems that Jesus preferred to be here among the suffering multitude than in the pomp of the Temple and among the priests and authorities.
The contrast was clear to all except the actual priests and authorities themselves. Their lives smacked of indifference to the masses, while around them were those who suffered, stretching ‘lame hands’ into emptiness and wailing out their mistaken hopes into the eternal silence. While the religious leaders were discussing the niceties of what constituted labour on a Sabbath, multitudes of their people were left to perish in their ignorance. On the one hand, a suffering multitude with false expectancies and, on the other hand, the neighbouring self-seeking Temple priests and teachers, who neither understood. Heard, nor would have cared for such a cry.
That was the Sabbath of the Pharisees, but not the Sabbath of Jesus, who was quite happy to heal on that day. He selected the most wretched among them all, this ‘impotent’ man, for thirty-eight years a hopeless sufferer, without helper or friend. He healed him as a direct act, no need for any stirring of the waters by an angel!
This didn’t go unnoticed. This wretched man was healed without going anywhere near the healing waters! Jesus didn’t just teach. He acted and this must have sent warning messages to the religious authorities, with their impotent wranglings. Also, it was the holy Sabbath. Unheard of! he, who had made him whole, had told the man to take up his bed and walk, something forbidden on the Sabbath! Here was simple trust, unquestioning obedience to the unseen, unknown, but real Saviour.
They met again later on at the Temple. What Jesus told him completed the inward healing. As he trusted and obeyed Jesus in the outward cure, so also did he do so inwardly and morally. From the external to the internal, through the temporal to the spiritual and eternal, which is so characteristic of the Kingdom of heaven. The healed man now knew to whom he owed faith, gratitude and trust of obedience; and the consequences of this knowledge must have been immeasurable. It would make him a disciple in the truest sense. The man healed by Christ stands in a unique position so that, if he were to go back to sin. He would be condemning himself to an uncertain future.
Why would the healed man tell the authorities that it was Jesus? It was only natural that he should do so. This is why Jesus made himself known in the clearest and most obvious way he could, in the Temple area. This was his second declaration in that place. The first time was when he purged his Father’s House of the money lenders. And now, once more in that House, it was his same understanding about God as his Father and his Life as the business of his Father, which answered any anger from others about his ‘breach of the Sabbath’.
The Father’s Sabbath was his Sabbath. The Father’s work and his work were the same. He was the Son of the Father. And in this he also taught what the Jewish leaders had never understood, the true meaning of the Sabbath, by emphasising that which was the fundamental thought of the Sabbath - ‘the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy’. He had raised another question, that of his equality with God, and for this. He was taken to task.
And so ended that day in Jerusalem. And this is all that we need to know of his stay at the Unknown Feast. With this inward separation and the gathering of hostile parties closes the first and begins the second stage of Jesus’ Ministry.
This is an extract from the book, Jesus : Life and Times, available for £10 here (Finalist for Academic Book of the year at 2023 CRT awards)