NOTES for Joh 5:1-24
Today's reading brings us back to the theme of the Kingdom in the context of observing religious standards and rules. It begins with the account of Jesus healing a man who had waited many years for this healing (vv. 1–15). He had been waiting for a miracle, looking for a chance to get down into the pool without finding one for decades (vv. 5–7), but he received something greater: the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness. Again, we see no spectacular miracles: the healed man simply gets up, takes the folding bed, the “bed,” on which he has lain for thirty-eight years, and walks away in good health from the pool in which he never did have to wash (vv. 8–9). On the way, he draws condemnation from those zealous for the standards and rules of the Jewish religion: this happens on the Sabbath, when a believing Jew is forbidden to carry burdens! In the eyes of the Pharisees around him, the folding bed in the healed man's hands was something utterly impermissible on the Sabbath (v. 10). When they learn that Jesus was the reason for it all, their indignation naturally turns against Him (vv. 11–16). For Jesus, however, everything that happened at the pool bore witness to the Kingdom of His heavenly Father, as He tells His accusers directly (vv. 17–24). He evidently does not separate Himself from the Father, and sees His own actions solely as the expression and embodiment of God's action (v. 17). His listeners understood Him precisely this way, and it is not surprising that His words aroused even greater anger in them: this Man, unknown to them, apparently claims nothing less than equality with God (v. 18)! Yet Jesus could not fail to bear witness to what was for Him the unquestionable reality of His own life: He truly lived in the Kingdom and bore its fullness within Himself, and the Father had entrusted Him with something He had never entrusted to anyone else—to bring the Kingdom into the world and open it to everyone wishing to enter (vv. 19–20). Therefore, whoever receives the Son is free from the final Judgment, for whoever has entered the Kingdom has already been freed from the power of evil and sin that permeate the world not yet transfigured (vv. 22–24). This was a vivid and shocking testimony; such testimony can either be welcomed with joy or rejected with indignation. Only one thing is impossible: to close one's eyes to it, remain indifferent, and pretend that nothing has happened. This concerns religious people first of all, since for them the question of God and how to live by the law He has given is central, just as it is central for those seeking the Kingdom. Yet the answers religion gave evidently did not always, or in every respect, coincide with the answers of the One who brought the Kingdom into the world. Thus everyone who heard Jesus' testimony faced a choice on which the whole of their subsequent life depended.