Healing and Hating.  John 5.1-19                                                                There is just one more ‘official’ meeting of Sunday Night Live, before we recognize our graduating seniors, some of whom will head out almost immediately after graduation.  Over this last school year, it has been my aim to teach the students that their Christian faith is defensible.  Of course, God loves them!   Yes, Jesus died for them, but the Bible is true and reliable, and is supported through science, fulfilled prophecy, archaeology, and more, and they need to know about those things.  Archaeology?  Yes, in particular, the unearthing of numerous sites mentioned in Scripture, such as the one that John references here in John chapter 5 – the pool of Bethesda, serving to show that yes, these were real places. 

Dear God, As we read your Word today, clear our minds, help us focus … what do you want to heal in us through the reading of your Word?  Teach us about yourself, Father. Grow us, and make us desirous for more of you! Amen.

John writes, “Afterward-- [Afterward what?  After Jesus’ healing the son of Herod’s man, without even seeing the boy, resulting in the government official’s entire household coming to know Him]-- Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days. Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches. Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or paralyzed—lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?”

“I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.”

Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!”

Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking! But this miracle happened on the Sabbath, so the Jewish leaders objected. They said to the man who was cured, “You can’t work on the Sabbath! The law doesn’t allow you to carry that sleeping mat!”

But he replied, “The man who healed me told me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’”

“Who said such a thing as that?” they demanded.

The man didn’t know, for Jesus had disappeared into the crowd. But afterward Jesus found him in the Temple and told him, “Now you are well; so stop sinning, or something even worse may happen to you.” Then the man went and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had healed him.

So the Jewish leaders began harassing Jesus for breaking the Sabbath rules. But Jesus replied, “My Father is always working, and so am I.” So the Jewish leaders tried all the harder to find a way to kill him. For he not only broke the Sabbath, he called God his Father, thereby making himself equal with God.

So Jesus explained, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing.  Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.”  John 5.1-19, NLT

On this day in Jerusalem, the lame man woke up and thought it was going to be just like every other day—if the stream bubbled up water at the Bethesda Pool—he would struggle and strain to get to it, but like every other day for more days than he could count, others would rush before him.  There just was not much hope for change; but if he left the pool, there was no hope at all.

Then Jesus.  Of course, he did not know Jesus, when He addressed him and said, “Would you like to get well?”  That really is the question, isn’t it?  Huh—people take pills, run to doctors, but do they really want to get well?  Sometimes, getting well takes work.  Getting well takes realizing what has made you sick—things like stress, bitterness, guilt, unforgiveness, even unrealized dreams . . .

Once again, Jesus spoke healing into being – ‘Take up your mat and walk!’ ‘Problem was, the legalists did not like it.  The religious Jews would rather someone remain lame than violate a law.  Jesus just did not see it that way;

“My Father is always working, and so am I,” he said.  They hated him for it—for healing the man, breaking the Sabbath Law, for calling God his Father.  They would rather the man had been lame until death than have this happen!  It just did not fit with their religious agenda, which was just so terribly sad.  They put religion ahead of the man’s well-being, they put religion ahead of Jesus . . . somehow they were more comfortable with hating than healing.

Jesus changed everything.  He still does.

Christine