Once again, we come to a miracle of Jesus, what John in his gospel refers to as a ‘sign’. Jesus is back in Jerusalem for one of the feasts. There is a pool near the sheep gate, at the north of the city, where disabled people congregated. The reason they gathered there, was because it was a place of healing. You may have noticed that v4 is missing from ch5 in your bibles. That verse explains that this pool was a place of healing. People were there waiting for the ‘moving of the waters’; because an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and troubled the water: whoever stepped in first after the troubling of the water was healed of whatever disease they had.

So this was a place where people came to seek God’s healing. Jesus comes and he sees a man who has been a cripple there for 38 years. He’s seen others healed, but he has never been healed himself. Jesus asks if he wants to get well. The man doesn’t really answer Jesus question, maybe he is giving an excuse, maybe he had got so used to being the way he is. But Jesus has come to bring change. He comes to offer God’s deliverance.

He tells the man to get up, pick up his mat and walk. Now the man does have to make up his mind if he wants to get better. The man, who has been lame for so many years, rises to his feet. God’s healing had come no longer by the means of an angel, but through this unique man, Jesus.

It was a sign, and as we have said before, a sign points to something else other than the sign itself. The sign of course points to Jesus, it marks him out as special, as someone who has come from God because he displays God’s healing power. But the sign is also a lesson for us today, because it speaks of God’s healing work that continues to go on in people’s lives today.

Do you believe that God heals today? William Temple writes this in his book on John’s gospel regarding this miracle: ‘Our fellowship with Christ not only hallows and intensifies all the powers that we have when we first meet with him. It restores those powers which are atrophied by neglect or abuse. It is part of the deadly quality of sin that it hinders us from seeking its cure. It is our will to be cured; but we have lost through past sin the power to submit ourselves to the curative influence. Or else we, half converted we, are no longer ‘dead in our sins’; but still sickly and weak through sin. We need someone to cast us into the cleansing stream; and often there is none to do this for us. So we linger, discontented but acquiescent. How common this is!’

So often we can be like that paralysed man. Maybe we are no longer dead in our sins, but we are weak or disabled through them, whether physically or emotionally. ‘Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter, feelings lie buried that grace can restore. Touched by a loving hand, wakened by kindness, chords that are broken will vibrate once more.’
Maybe God wants us to feel the touch of his grace. Maybe there is some area of our life or aspect of our personality that is paralysed or neglected. Maybe Christ wants to speak into that part of us and say ‘Get up and walk’. Is God asking you or me to take a step forward? If he is asking, he will enable us to do just that.
We are also reminded as we look at the encounter between the healed man and Jesus how precious our deliverance from sin is. Jesus finds the man, he reminds him of the blessing he has been given. He warns him, sin no more or something worse may happen to you. Our salvation is too precious to throw away by falling back into old sinful ways.

So we come on to the repercussions of this miracle when the Jews see what has happened. There is no rejoicing among them at the man being healed. They are unhappy because the healed man is carrying the mat he had been lying on. Then they discover who it was that had told the man to carry his mat. The troublemaker Jesus is back in town. The man who had turned the sheep and cattle out of the temple, the one who had in fact called the temple ‘my father’s house’, the one who performed signs.

See the marked difference between the Jewish establishment and Jesus. They are so obsessed with their petty regulations with what you should or shouldn’t do on the Sabbath. Jesus on the other hand demonstrates God’s healing power, and God’s love and compassion. The Jews were of course, God’s chosen people. It was they who were heirs to the promises of God to Abraham. It was they who God had saved from slavery in Egypt.

This was the race to who God had given the Ten Commandments and entered into covenant with and given them the Promised Land. It was them to whom God had sent the prophets. It was this nation that God had brought back from captivity in Babylon, and it was to them that God had promised a messiah. But as John said of Jesus in ch 1 ‘He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him’.

It is so ironic that those who claim to be obedient to God, be they suicide bombers, students of the scriptures, religious leaders or whatever, so easily actually end up opposing God when they encounter him. Jesus heals a man and they persecute him for it. I suspect that so often the reason why religious people don’t recognise God is that they think they know all about God. And when, as was the case with Jesus, his teaching and his healing exceed the extent of their knowledge, the react against it.

How can we recognise the living God when we encounter him? How can we recognise his guidance to us as individuals? How can we recognise his will for us as a church? One thing that perhaps we can see from Jesus encounter here with the Jews, is that they thought of God as being defined by a set of rules. They had expanded the Ten Commandments by adding so many complex regulations; in a very similar way to which the European commission produces legislation for us all today. They though they could define God in this way.

But what does Jesus say? ‘My Father is always at work to this very day, and I, too, am working.’ God is not a set of rules God is living, God is active, and God is at work in his love. Sustaining, healing, forgiving, redeeming and restoring and judging too. Jesus point out their failure; they study the scriptures in the belief that the scriptures will give them eternal life.

But what the scriptures are given us for is to point us to Jesus. The Jews refused to see the evidence in front of them. They refused to come to Jesus, and acknowledge him for who he was.

Jesus once again uses the words ‘My Father’ to refer to God. This was the thing that really did it for the Jews. John tells us that this above all was the reason that they were now trying to kill him. Jesus was speaking about God as his father in a different way from the way in which he taught his disciples to call God ‘Our Father’. Jesus has a unique relation ship to God. He is the ‘Only Begotten Son’. He was in the beginning with God. To the Jews this was blasphemy.

It is the claim of Jesus to be who he is that is still the reason why people refuse to believe him. With all the other controversial characters of history, it their actions, or their teaching that cause the controversy. But with Jesus, in the last analysis, it is neither his actions, nor his teaching that are the big problem for people. The stumbling for many today, as has always been the case is Jesus claim to be the Son of God. God come in human form.

John tells us that he writes his gospel for the very purpose that we might believe just that. So we will look at the evidence that John records Jesus putting forward here in ch5. Jesus makes five claims that only the unique son of God can make.

      1. Jesus performs divine deeds. In verse 19, he claims that he does the miracles because God’s divine power is at work in him. Good reason to believe.

      2. Jesus has divine knowledge. The Father shows him everything he does - v20. Jesus knows all about Nathaniel, the woman at the well, the secrets of God. Further evidence.

      3. Jesus has the right to give life to who he pleases- v21. He can give eternal life to whom he chooses, and he will raise Lazarus to show he has this power. Jesus him himself will rise from the dead, defeating death’s power.

      4. Jesus has divine authority- v22. God has entrusted Jesus to be the judge of all mankind. One day everyone will have to answer to him.

      5. Lastly, Jesus claims divine worship- v23. Jesus is worthy of our worship in the same way that God is worthy of worship. That reminds of the words in Revelation; ‘Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise’.

It is whom Jesus is that matters. Only the divine Son of God could open the way between heaven and earth. He did that when he died on the cross, showing us above all else, that God is love And has promised us that whoever hears his words and believes him who sent him has eternal life and will not be condemned, but will have crossed over from death to life.
 

Amen.
 

Acknowledgement.

I lay no claim to originality in my sermons. They are an attempt to pass on the gospel message in a contemporary way and depend on the bible as well as others who have studied and written on the passages in question. In preaching from John’s Gospel, I acknowledge my debt to Roy Clements for his book Introducing Jesus and I have also used material from Readings in John’s Gospel by William Temple. PN Jan 04

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