John 5 : Jesus the Son of God
AJM Holy Trinity 8th June 2003
Introduction
I was talking to
someone the other day who was telling me all about learning styles. Different
people like to learn in different ways. This was a revelation to me, and I immediately
thought of all the ways in which I don’t like to learn, and felt better about
it. I’m thinking of writing to all the people who tried to teach me in these
ways, and explaining why they might have found me difficult…
Then I sat down to
look at John chapter 5, and I realised that John understood about learning
styles too. And as I kept looking at it, I realised that the reason John
understood about learning styles was that Jesus understood about learning
styles. Not surprising, I suppose, that the person appointed to be the Word of
God should understand about learning styles, but there you go. It takes me time
to work these things out.
How then do you
like to learn? Do you like to learn through stories and examples? Through experience? Through explanations
of concepts and principles? Through dialogue?
Or do you like to learn by practical demonstration? Personal
challenge? Or do you prefer to be left to think things through for
yourself? Jesus regularly made use of all these methods of teaching, often
combining them so as to maximise his effectiveness. He wrote in the sand, he
asked searching questions, he gave illustrations from the everyday world around
him. He told stories and issued challenges. Sometimes he would just offer
concepts – the Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the best example. But often he
would demonstrate and then explain, coupling an action with an explanation. He
produced shoals of fish and talked about becoming fishers of men, demanded a
drink and talked about living water, raised the dead and talked about eternal
life. John had watched him do all these things as a young man. And here he is,
many years later, writing it all down. He’s had time to think and reflect. He’s
doubtless told these stories many times before. He isn’t writing in the jumbled
haste of Mark, trying to get down the essentials. He isn’t writing with the
careful accuracy of Luke, or the measured explanation of Matthew. He’s writing
after a lifetime of thinking about what Jesus did and what Jesus said, and
learning to fit them together. Perhaps, if you like, the gospel of John grows
out of John’s own sermons, as he looks back to things which he witnessed many
years before and has been thinking about ever since.
Often it’s said
that John’s gospel is much harder to study and to preach on than the so-called
synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. But I don’t think so. It’s as if in
John all the plums have been carefully cooked into a pudding, where in the
other gospels they remain as a pile of separate ingredients, carefully measured
out but not yet used. And so with John all we have to do is eat the pudding.
When you get to the New Testament letters the pudding is even more cooked, and
the plums tend to have disappeared into the texture of the mixture, and it can be
a bit over-conceptual. John offers a beautiful balance between narrative and
teaching, story and explanation. Often therefore he offers a careful pairing
between deeds and words. We’ve just had the woman at the well, with the human
story of Jesus demanding a drink, and his explanation of living water. Here we
get a similar pairing, and again we must look both at the human story and at
the teaching which follows it. The story is the plum, the teaching the pudding.
The story
Let’s start with
the story.
We’re in
The pool was
called
Jesus stops beside
one particular bloke. John says he’s been there for 38 years. What happens?
Jesus heals him, of course. OK, you say, that’s the kind of thing that Jesus
did all the time. We’ve know that for ages. What does it teach us that we
didn’t know already?
I think that if we
are going to fully savour this story we need to look at the man himself, and
ask ourselves what kind of a man he was. Imagine the scene. There he is, lying
crippled by the pool. He looks up to see Jesus standing beside him. What is his
reaction? None. He says nothing at all. No interest
whatsoever. That’s unusual, isn’t it. Compare it with,
for example, the woman with uterine bleeding who pushes her way through the
crowd to touch Jesus’s cloak. This guy, who after all can’t get much in the way
of interesting conversation, doesn’t even ask Jesus who he is. He’s not
interested. Bit like those beggars you pass sometimes on the street who don’t
even bother to wake up to ask you for your money. It’s all too much hassle.
He doesn’t speak
to Jesus, so Jesus speaks to him. Do you
want to be healed? Why ask him that? He didn’t ask anyone else that, it was
usually obvious that they did, and usually that’s what they were begging him to
do. But this guy’s totally passive. He just lies there. So Jesus says hi,
anyone in there, hello, I’m here, do you want to be healed? Or would you rather
just stay there with the meths and the newspaper? The guy looks at him. Healed?
Me? How can I be? I have no one to help
me get into the water, and someone else always gets there first. Now to me
that sounds a bit limp. Why is he there, then, if he’s not trying to get into
the water? Why doesn’t he ask Jesus to put him into the water? Why doesn’t he
ask for money to pay someone to wait beside him for the right moment? Why
doesn’t it occur to him that there’s something a bit different about this guy
he’s talking to? Oh, he says, if someone would take responsibility for me I
might be healed; but there’s too many other people trying to get in there
first. Is he making any attempt to get healed? No. He seems far more interested
in acting the victim than in getting a solution. It’s less hassle.
Responsibility is awfully tiring, you know.
Well, Jesus heals
him anyway. Pick up your mat and walk.
So the man picks up his mat and walks, doing what he’s told. He doesn’t say
thank you and he still doesn’t ask Jesus who he is. He doesn’t even seem
particularly pleased. He’s still got the victim approach. But there’s a problem. It’s the sabbath. Jesus seemed to make a point of healing people on
the sabbath. ‘The Jews’, by whom John perhaps means
the Pharisees, saw this man carrying his mat and told him off. The law forbids you to carry your mat on a sabbath. It didn’t, actually, but one of the
interpretations of the law was that to carry goods from one house to another on
the sabbath broke the commandment about not working.
Well, what does the man say? What would you have said? What did the blind man
say when Jesus healed him – he said never mind all that, the point is I CAN
SEE! This guy just says, oh, that man, who MADE me well, HE told me to carry my
mat. Reminds you of Adam – the woman that YOU put here with me, SHE told me to
eat it. In other words, don’t blame me, blame him. OK, who is the man, they
ask. He doesn’t know, because he hadn’t bothered to enquire. Later Jesus finds
him in the temple and warns him to change his ways before something worse
happens to him. What does he do? Take the chance to say thank you? Rise to the
challenge and change his approach to life? No, he goes straight back to the
Pharisees and gets himself out of trouble by shopping Jesus to them. You said
whose fault was it, well it was HIS.
The reaction
So that’s the
story. It raises all sorts of questions. Why did Jesus bother to heal this man?
Why didn’t the man seem pleased? What did Jesus mean when he warned him to stop
sinning or something worse would happen to him?
Well, John doesn’t
say. He’s told us the story. Now he tells us the reaction. Before we have time
to wonder what we think about what happened, he tells us what those who were
there thought. We move straight into dialogue with the Pharisees. How do they
react? Are they amazed? Do they rejoice? Do they ask how Jesus did it, who Jesus is? Do they ask him to heal the other invalids
too? Do they rush home to get their own sick friends and relations? No. Verse 17. Because
Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jews persecuted him. They
aren’t bothered with the healing, only with the rules. What would you have felt
if you were Jesus? First he heals a guy who doesn’t seem to care, then the audience turns on him and accuses him of breaking
the law. He must have wondered why he bothered. Have you ever seen that notice
which goes something like this, ‘We the unwilling are doing the impossible for
the ungrateful .. we have
been doing so much with so little for so long that we are now qualified to do
anything with nothing.’ It must have felt a bit like that.
Well, perhaps we
should try and see it from their point of view. The people of God could
preserve their identity under pagan rule only if they kept to their own ways of
doing things. They had to live according to God’s law and not according to the
creeping norms of a dangerous society. Hence the need to spell out in minute
detail what the law meant in practice. Jesus, however, sees it slightly
differently. He doesn’t have to preserve his identity by keeping the law of
God, for the simple reason that he is God. He carefully explains this to
them. Verse 19, the Son can do only what
he sees his Father doing. But this makes it a whole lot worse. He isn’t
just breaking the rules; he’s equating himself with God. See it from their point
of view: they live in a world where all sorts of charlatans, from cult leaders
to Roman emperors, claimed divinity. It is profoundly threatening to the Jewish
faith in the one and only God to have other people demanding to be worshipped.
Have no other God but me, God had said to them a long
time ago. So they now throw a complete wobbly. They try all the harder to kill
him, verse 18.
The teaching
Now we’ve had a
story with a practical outcome, and we’ve had a fast and furious dialogue
between Jesus and the spectators, with a rather threatening ending. Nobody’s
pleased, and it’s all going a bit pear-shaped. What did Jesus do? Well, he
followed it all up with some straight teaching. So John keeps the pattern. He
now gives us Jesus’s explanation of what is going on. From narrative and
dialogue, we move to sermon. And it turns out to be the same message, presented
in 3 different forms.
In his teaching
Jesus sets out to explain 2 concepts. John might have summarised them like
this:
Who is Jesus?
What does Jesus offer?
1. Who is Jesus?
Jesus had already
justified himself to the Pharisees by explaining that he is the Son of God, and
in healing this man he is doing no more than what he sees his Father doing. He
doesn’t just say this once. If you look carefully, he says that he is the son
of God in verse 17. He says it again in verse 19, and again in verse 20. He
says it in verses 21,22,23,25,26 and 27 as well, just
in case they didn’t quite catch it the first time. So they heard it all right.
But were they going to believe it? If I tell you I am the queen of
¨ the witness of God himself (vs 32, 37). But realistically, they may not be listening to God. So he offers them :
¨ the witness of John the Baptist (vs 33). But they may not believe John either. So Jesus offers a third witness :
¨ the witness of my works (vs 36). You can see it, I’ve just done it. Look at the healings. But the healings offend them. So he offers:
¨ the witness of scripture (vs 39). The Old Testament is full of prophecies of the coming of Jesus. But the Pharisees only give job interviews to messiahs who make them feel good, and Jesus definitely doesn’t make them feel good. You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life, he says. These are the scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
That’s a warning
to us too. We may not be like the beggar, because we read the scriptures and
speak nicely to those who speak to us. But what are the scriptures for, demands
Jesus? The scriptures don’t contain the life, they point to the
life. The life is in Christ. The scriptures are the treasure map, they aren’t
the treasure. John Wimber used to put it this way: the Bible is the menu, it
isn’t the meal. Think about it. Do we go to the restaurant in order to enjoy
reading the menu, or do we go in order to actually eat a meal? Ooh yes, that’s
nice, look, panfried baby squid lightly sauted in prayer and served on a bed of
asparagus, book of X chapter Y. Oh, but look here, flakes of manna tossed in
butter with a hint of cinnamon. Yum. Or fruits of the
Spirit dusted with sugar and finished with lashings of cream. Great. It’s been a fantastic evening, amazing to read such a
beautiful menu, but no thanks, I’m not hungry. Come ON, says Jesus. These are the scriptures that testify about
me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
So, he’s offered
four proofs, and they’ve taken no notice. So finally, he offers them the last:
¨ the prophecy of Moses (vs 46) – the Moses who wrote down the law they so rigorously uphold. Moses himself wrote about me, Jesus says, your very own beloved Moses. It says it in here.
2. What does Jesus offer?
So Jesus is making
it clear who he is. He’s the Son of God. But that begs another question, which
takes us back to the healing. The other question John wants us to be clear
about is this: What does Jesus offer? This is the subject of Jesus’s teaching
in verses 19-30. What Jesus offers is life. And this is the point of the story.
Here is this rather unattractive invalid. He hasn’t the faith of the centurion,
the persistence of the woman with bleeding, the pathos of the dying child, the
courage of the blind man. He isn’t interested in Jesus and he doesn’t ask to be
healed. But Jesus heals him anyway. Why? To make a point.
The point is that God gives life to whom he is pleased to give it, and he gives
it irrespective of how much the individual seems to deserve it. He gives it to
this man, who doesn’t even say thank you. The message is,
life is on offer. If it’s on offer to this uninspiring individual, it’s on
offer to me, and to you. It’s not for special people, or nice people, or deserving
people, it’s for anyone, even the beggar on the street with the meths and the
newspaper. You don’t earn it or deserve it, not even by being very religious
and knowing all the scriptures. Life isn’t found that way. Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son
gives life to whom he is pleased to give it, verse 21. You’ve seen my power
with you own eyes, says Jesus. I’m not just telling you, I’m showing
you.
That’s clear
enough. But still the story leaves us with a bit of a problem. We noticed
earlier that Jesus said to this man, stop
sinning, or something worse may happen to you. Why did he say that? What
did he mean? Well, that’s what he now explains. Jesus gives us something. He
gave this man physical healing. But a response is required. The man had
received healing. He could now walk. But when Jesus healed, it wasn’t an end in
itself, it was a sign of something else, something
bigger. That something was life. It requires no response at all to receive
physical healing. In a way the man was right, it had just been done to him. But
it does require a response to receive life. Verse 24, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and
will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. So what is
the worse thing that might happen to this man if he does not get his act
together as far as God is concerned? One day he will find himself standing
before the judgment seat of the Son, and he will be standing there as one who
has received the healing touch of the Father and failed to respond to it. Life is on offer; some will accept it,
others will fail to do so. One day, Jesus will have the job of separating the
ones from the others. So this episode is not just a promise, but also a
warning. The man carrying his mat and the Pharisees with
their noses in the Bible are all as dead as a dodo. Jesus offered the
man life, and the scriptures offer the Pharisees life. None of them seems to
want it.
The implications
So there you go.
Jesus demonstrated it, then he explained it. He gave a
practical example, he took a question and answer session, he
gave some teaching and issued some challenges. So what does it all mean for us?
Well, all sorts of
things. My own learning style is not to listen to stories or enter into
dialogues, it’s to sit in my study and think things out by myself. And as I did
that, three particular things which Jesus said stand out to me.
1. ‘Do you want
to get well?’ vs 6
Firstly, I thought
about the man in the story. He was a passive individual who saw himself as a
victim. He was so absorbed in himself, so used to lying there feeling sorry for
himself, that he never even looked Jesus in the eye.
Jesus asked him one question. The question was, do you want to get well? He preferred to
act the victim, and he carried on even after he’d been healed. The result was
that he missed out on most of what Jesus could have done for him. He gave half
and answer and he got half a healing.
What then about
you? Imagine it’s you. Imagine Jesus has walked into your living room and has
said to you, do you want to get well? What’s
your answer? Do you have a passive approach to life, one which blames other
people or looks to other people for the solutions to your problems? Are you
open to receiving everything Jesus has to offer you, or is it easier to tell
yourself that something or someone is blocking that? Are there any ways in
which you can get up from your mat and take responsibility for things which at
present defeat you? Do you really want to be well?
2. ‘Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you’ vs 14
Then I thought
about Jesus’s warning to the man once he had been healed. He said, Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to
you. It isn’t enough to be healed. Indeed, physical healing will in the
long run turn out to be irrelevant, because sooner or later everyone dies.
There’s a bigger issue. The bigger issue is this.
In chapter 20
verse 31 John summarises the purpose of his gospel. This is what he says: these things are written so that you may
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and so that by believing you
may have life in his name. Jesus says here, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.
If this man does that, he will receive healing not just of his legs but of his
soul and of his spirit. He will be rescued from death and reconnected with the
living God. So the question you must ask yourself when you read this passage is, have you done that? If you haven’t, please make sure you
talk to someone about it before you go home today.
Probably most of
us here have already done that. If so, then think about Jesus’s words of
warning. If you have been made well by Jesus, how have you responded? What has
it meant in practice? In what way do you live your life differently as a
result? What you don’t want is this: to find yourself standing at the judgment
seat as one who has received the healing touch of the Father and not changed
your life in response to it.
3. ‘The Son can
do only what he sees his Father doing’ vs 19
Then finally I
thought about Jesus’s statement in verse 19 that he can do only what he sees
his Father doing. What are the implications of this statement? Jesus obviously never
spoke to anyone he didn’t know God wanted him to speak to. He never tried to
heal anyone except those people he knew God planned to heal. In other words,
his ministry was never his ministry at all, it was always God’s, and he was
just the one through whom it happened. So what do we think about that? Often I
think we dream up all sorts of plans for ministry and then we ask God to bless
them. Surely, God, this is a good thing to do. But if Jesus didn’t do it that
way, should we? How can we learn to do what Jesus did, to look and see what the
Father is doing and join in with his plans, rather than asking him to join in
with ours? I suspect that much of what we spend our time and energy doing has
absolutely nothing to do with what the Father is wanting
to do; and that’s why it’s all such hard work.
So I encourage you
this week to think about those three things. Verse 6, do you want to be made
well? Verse 14, stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you. And verse
19, the Son can do only what he sees his Father doing. Take this opportunity to
cheer Jesus up. ‘We the unwilling are doing the impossible for the ungrateful .. we have been doing so
much with so little for so long that we are now qualified to do anything with
nothing.’ Let’s make him feel it’s all been worth while.