JESUS' VOICE CAN RAISE THE DEAD (5:1ff)

Jesus speaks, and a helpless, hopeless long-term paralytic gets up from his sickbed.

This 'sign' speaks of His power to call the dead to life and pronounce their judgement:

but some can't see past the fact that its a Sabbath!

Jesus seems to have been on His own at this point: there's no mention of any of the disciples. It seems they returned to their homes and jobs, while Jesus was on His first Galilean crusade. We don't know for sure which Feast it was, that Jesus had gone to: but majority opinion favours the Feast of Trumpets, in mid-September. Jesus would have observed all the ceremonial finery and prescribed liturgy of the Temple ceremonies.

In the north-east corner of the city wall, near the Temple, there was a gate through which sheep from Bethlehem were brought to supply the sacrifices. By it was a pair of large pools, surrounded by sheltering porches: one on each side, and one in between the two pools. These were crowded with people suffering chronic illnesses, because occasionally the waters would bubble, and the first person to get in would be healed. Legend had it that an angel stirred up the waters from time to time, giving them healing powers; under the Greek empire, the site had been dedicated to their god of healing, Aesclepion. A kind of 'New Age' or alternative medicine thing, as far as the Jews were concerned..

Of course, because of their disabilities, none of these people could actually get into the pool under their own steam. So there would have been relatives, friends and well-wishers there too, to help them in the scramble to be first in. The chances of success, and being healed, were probably less than winning the National Lottery! Many were brought, but eventually were taken home disillusioned. One man was known to have been there thirty-eight years. His family had long since given up hope but he insisted on being left there, even though there was no chance of him getting into the pool unaided. His only virtue was his dogged persistence in hoping against hope: some might have called it, 'being in denial'.

We don't know which feast it was, that Jesus had come up to Jerusalem for. The most likely candidate is the 'Feast of Trumpets' in mid-September. Whichever it was, the city would have been crowded with unfamiliar faces. The paralysed man didn't know Him, and didn't ask for healing. As far as we know, Jesus had no entourage to mark him out as special. but in the melee He chose this man to showcase another aspect of His glory.

He said to the man, "Do you want to be healed?" A strange question, you might think: but being disabled, and near the Temple exit, he may have received lots of 'alms' from worshippers seeking brownie points with God. Recovery after all this time, would have meant taking up his responsibilities in life all over again: and he was getting on in years.

If the man felt annoyed by this question and its undertone, he didn't show it. He just pointed out the reality that his friends and family had long since given up waiting with him, and gone on with their everyday lives. He could apparently shuffle on his bottom, but never fast enough to be first.

Without any fuss, and without raising His voice, Jesus simply said, "Rise, pick up your sleeping mat, and walk". And the man did! But while his back was turned as he rolled up his airbed, Jesus disappeared into the crowd, and the healed man had no opportunity even to thank Him or find out who He was. After looking around for a while, he set off to go home, carrying his sleeping mat. But as he passed the Temple, some of the super-religious Jews pointed out that amongst their thirty-nine proscribed forms of activity on a shabbat, was carrying anything.

He explained that he'd just been healed from a lifetime of paralysis, but they weren't interested in that. He said that he was just following his healer's instructions: but couldn't tell them who it was had healed him. But he picked up that they weren't happy at all, and made a mental note that it might be wise to tell them, if he ever did find out who the mystery man was. Otherwise he might be excommunicated, or so he had heard (9:22).

For thirty-eight years he'd been excluded from the Temple precincts, as disabled people were classed as spiritually unclean and unfit to enter God's Presence. So after dropping off his mat, he came back, presumably to give thanks to God for the miracle he'd experienced. There, to his surprise, he found Jesus - looking for him. Jesus told him that the root cause of his paralysis, had been personal sin; and warned him never to risk causing it to recur.

Now we know that Jesus didn't believe that all sickness was down to personal sin: Jews believed that it could equally be the result of something one's parents had done, or that had happened in the womb - and occasionally, God would allow sickness purely for His own glory (9:1-3). But on this particular occasion, he warned the man never to sin in that way again, lest something worse befall him. Something worse than permanent paralysis? Scary thought.

There is no mention of the man realising that Jesus was the Messiah, or coming to faith in any way. Rather, he goes off straight away to cover his own back with the authorities, by telling them who it was had told him to 'break the sabbath'. So why on earth did Jesus choose him, out of all the multitudes by the pool, to be healed? It just landed Him in deep doodoo with the authorities: in fact, they began trying to work out how to get rid of him completely: how to murder him!

The answer lies in the next section: the larger purpose of this display of God's amazing grace, was to provide a physical example of how Jesus would one day raise everyone from the dead! In His heartfelt love for His people the Jews, Jesus was willing even to provoke them to thoughts of murdering Him, if by any means He could bring them to understand that accepting Him was vital to their salvation. [Later, the Apostle Paul would emulate Jesus's example in this respect (Rom 9:1-3)]

Keeping the sabbath had been a key battleground when Antiochus Epiphanies, the Greek emperor and prototype antichrist, was trying to eradicate Jewish culture. A few diehards had held to it, even when it could cost them their lives, and their movement had morphed later into the Pharisees as we know them. Heroic resistance had ossified into spiritual myopia, and keeping shabbat had become the be-all-and-end-all of their religious observance.

There are several other occasions when Jesus is challenged on this issue, and Jesus answers in a variety of ways. The fourth commandment just forbade work of the weekday variety, without going into detail. But the Jews had created layer upon layer of further legalism - thirty-nine different ways in which one could break this commandment according to them, with each of the thirty-nine having multiple sub-categories. It was actually lawful to heal on the sabbath, according to Jesus (Matt 12:9-12; Mk 2:23-28; Lk 13:10-17). He declared Himself Lord of the sabbath. Later in John, Jesus declares that if it is OK to circumcise on the sabbath, then its certainly OK to heal (Jn 7:21-24).

When they challenged Jesus about telling the man to carry his sleeping mat, His answer inflamed them ten times more. Although the sabbath commemorated God resting from His work on the seventh day of Creation, everybody knew that God couldn't have completely ceased. Without His power sustaining it, the Universe would have ceased to be. In saying, "My Father has been working until now, and I have been working", Jesus was claiming to have been working with the Father from eternity past, up till now. And they rightly took that to mean that Jesus was making Himself equal with God. The first commandment had taught them, 'You shall have no other gods besides Me', yet here was someone seemingly claiming to be their God's peer.

John just says, 'Jesus answered them ..' (v18), without telling us what was the question!

But we can imagine the conversation went something like this: "OK, so you think I'm setting myself up as some kind of rival to Yahweh, right? You've got totally the wrong end of the stick. I can't do anything on my own: I only do what I see Him doing, and I copy Him exactly. So what you see Me do, is what He is doing. Because He loves Me, He shows Me everything - and you'll see even more extraordinary things. Because He's given Me authority to judge all mankind, which means I will be raising the dead, just as He does."