At an independent Bible church, lay preaching is about par for the course. We are spending the year going through the gospel of John in pretty small increments and today it was my turn. I’ve edited the text of it here slightly into four posts with maybe some supplemental material following. I enjoyed preparing this one and ended up learning quite a bit. I was excited to discover that even a topic so “law heavy” in most discourses can be shown to point so brightly to grace.
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The Text
Passage – John 5:1-18
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, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
Prayer
Lord, open our ears and enlighten our minds to understand this event in Jesus’ life. Soften our hearts and teach us to love your law and appreciate your grace even more as we study this word you have given us. Amen.
What are we going to talk about and why?
There are several things in this passage that we could talk about. The pool of Bethesda is kind of interesting since it has a back-story involving angels. Instead though, we’re going to look at the main reason John included this in his book, which was to highlight that Jesus was healing on the Sabbath.
Jesus, by simply opening his mouth and speaking the command, makes this crippled man’s body whole again. He doesn’t have to perform surgery or cast out any demons, put mud on his eyes, or even pray to the father.
Jesus often went out of his way not to draw attention to himself. In this story, he appears to have left soon after, before the man could figure out who he was. Later the Pharisees asked, “Wow, you can walk now? What happened to you?” But when he tells them what happened, they immediately become upset that the healing occurred on the Sabbath. Later, they confront Jesus about it and he brushes them off saying, “My Father is always working, and so am I.”
We are told that this is why they were seeking to kill him. Later, when Jesus is on trial, they try to portray him as some kind of anti-Roman revolutionary. They had to do this because the Romans didn’t care a bit about their religious ideas. The real reason for their hate (a seed that, when planted and watered grows into murder) was that Jesus was saying he was equal with the Father because he could ignore the Sabbath laws, with God’s blessing no less.
So today, I’m going to talk about the Sabbath, clear up what it is and what it isn’t; look through scripture and see what it’s origins are; provide a brief history or timeline about what Christians have done about it over the years, up to what we here (all you sitting in this room!) at Bridge Bible do about it today; and why. We’ll also take another look back at the Pharisees and Jesus and try to understand why it was such a big deal to them. It might provide some clues to how we should live today in an increasingly hostile public square.
Why talk about the Sabbath? Well, it happens every seven days! That’s a pretty common occurrence. What are you going to do about it? What to do about the Sabbath has regularly been a controversial topic in Christianity. After Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, observing it seems to be a pretty obvious “outward sign” of our religious devotion. Serving God isn’t something that just happens inside your head. (That’s called Gnosticism.) It includes what you do with your body in space and time.
Jesus was baptized and Jesus ate the bread and wine, but he didn’t observe the Sabbath, at least, not in a way anyone would recognize. In fact, Jesus made some incredible claims about being Lord of the Sabbath. Does this mean he just tossed it out the window? This is what I’ll be talking about today.
Definition, What is and isn’t the Sabbath?
If you haven’t studied the bible a lot (and that’s OK! Some of you here may be new to faith in Jesus Christ. Some of us have been reading it and hearing about it since we were children, but that can also backfire and make it harder to pay attention to parts of it anymore.) Anyway, if you haven’t studied the bible, especially the Old Testament much, I can’t blame you if you think that the “Sabbath” is simply the day you go to church. God wants us to worship him right? And he wants us to get together as a group to worship him on a pretty regular basis (say, once a week) and the day everyone picks to do that is the Sabbath. So “keeping the Sabbath” pretty much just means going to church every Sunday. If you decide to sleep in or just watch TV, or whatever, then you’re a Sabbath breaker! Get your rear out of bed and get to church! It’s in the 10 commandments!
The Sabbath is actually something entirely different and in fact, doesn’t really have anything to do with when we get together as a group to worship God. Now, it later took on some of those characteristics, but to nearly everyone we read about in the Bible, including to all of the disciples that followed Jesus around, it meant something pretty different. To the Pharisees it meant even more and to Jesus it meant – nothing? We’ll see.
The word “Sabbath” is from the Hebrew word “Sabbat”, which means, “to rest”. This is why, when someone takes a “sabbatical”, they are taking some time off to rest. In some languages, it has become the word for the number seven.