The Gospel of St. John: A Series of Discourses. / New Edition

by Frederick Denison Maurice

And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, because He had done these things on the sabbath-day. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He had not only broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making Himself equal with God.

The scene changes again at the opening of this chapter. 'After these things there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.' What feast it was, the harmonists may settle; as St. John has not told us, I am content to dwell upon the fact, which he evidently thought of great importance, that Jesus did go up to the feasts, and that His acts had a special reference to the state of mind which He found among the inhabitants of the capital; above all, among its religious teachers.

'Now there is at Jerusalem, by the sheep-market, a pool which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches.' Jerusalem might or might not have been compassed with Roman armies when St. John wrote. I do not know that its independence or its capture would affect the position of the pool or the sheep-market; they might be still just what they had been when the Apostle knew them. Perhaps the pool was no longer visited as in former days; perhaps the tradition of its virtues still drew to it people from the country round. At all events, the sight which had been before his eyes thirty or forty years before, was not one which he would forget. It is not one which we need much effort of imagination to bring before ourselves.

'In these' porches 'lay a multitude of sick folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the waters.' If we look at the separate figures in the picture, they belong as much to the West as to the East—to the nineteenth century as to the first. Nor can any frequenters of an English or German spa consider the motive which brought together so many of different ages and with different ailments, a strange or an obsolete one. Even the notion that at certain times the water would possess a virtue which at other times it would want, may be justified by modern experience, perhaps may be explained by modern science.

But experience and science, it will be said, are both set at nought by the announcement in the next verse: 'For an angel went down at a certain season, and troubled the water: whosoever, therefore, first after the troubling of the water stepped in, was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.' Here a reason is given for the virtues of the pool;—not, it will be said, a medical reason; not one which can connect the waters of this pool with those which intelligent people frequent for qualities which are, on fair evidence, known or believed to be in them;—but rather one which connects them with the holy wells which in the villages of England, Wales, and Ireland, are supposed to have received a blessing from some local saint. To find St. John adopting or endorsing such legends, causes no pain to those who assume him and his brother Apostles to be the propagators of superstition; ignorant Jews, who were steeped in all the prejudices of their countrymen, and who added to them some of their own invention. There are some who, with a general respect for him and them, can yet give him credit for following the traditions of his country when they were ever so vulgar and false; excusing him on the plea that he knew nothing of physics, and that his business was not with them. There are men of a better and nobler stamp, who, though they do not claim for him any acquaintance with natural science, yet are sure that he lived to scatter delusions, not to foster them; and that he would not have been permitted by the Spirit of truth to claim for lies the name of Him who came to bear witness of the truth. I do not wonder that some of these honest and earnest men should have been able to persuade themselves that the verse I have just quoted has nothing to do with the general narrative of the cure at Bethesda; but has crept into the text from the gloss of some writer who understood Jewish opinions, not the mind of St. John.

I respect the motives of these interpreters, but I think their conclusion is a rash and a wrong one. I am convinced that the words which they would omit are a vital part of the narrative, and that our Lord's act loses very much of its meaning if we overlook them. I am equally convinced that these words contradict no truth of science; that, if taken by themselves, they do not meddle with it, and are only supposed to meddle with it through a logical confusion, from which, for the sake of science and of our own intellectual clearness, it is well that we should be delivered; that, if taken in conjunction with the whole story, they help to scatter a superstition which was very injurious to the Jewish people, and is equally injurious to people in this day.

What St. John affirms is, that a certain invisible angel or minister—an intelligence, as we are wont to speak—was the instrument of making the water of the Pool of Bethesda beneficial to the persons who went down into it. He accounts, in this way, for its operation being more useful at one time than another. That assertion, you say, interferes with the doctrine that there were certain properties in the water itself which affected the condition of human beings. How does it interfere? You hold that the vaccine matter has in itself the property of counteracting the virus of the small-pox. But you hold also that the intelligence of Jenner had something to do with making this vaccine matter available for the actual cure of patients afflicted by the small-pox; you hold that the intelligence of different medical men has something to do with bringing the preventive power to bear on particular cases. You know this for a fact; but physical science tells you nothing of the way in which the intelligence cooperates with the natural agent. The notion that it does is an excusable fallacy; yet it is a fallacy. In no instance whatever can the mere study of physics help you to determine anything respecting moral or intellectual forces; though at every turn the study of physics compels you to the acknowledgment of such forces. It will save us from innumerable confusions, if we take this proposition in the length and breadth of it. Through neglect of it, the physician and the metaphysician are perpetually stumbling against each other, when they might be the greatest helpers to each other.

But, it will be said, that notion of an angel which connects it with the intelligence in a man, is a modern one, not the one which we should naturally derive from the Old Testament. I think, if we study those passages in the Old Testament which refer to angels, we shall find that it is exactly this notion which is the result of them, and that any other is a modern one, either derived directly from heathen sources, or from a mixture of heathen feelings with the lore of the New Testament. In the patriarchal times, we hear of angels appearing to Abraham to tell him of blessings which were coming upon his descendants; of angels seen by Jacob in a vision, of one who wrestled with him till the break of day. The stories leave upon us the impression that there are beings who minister to the unseen Lord of the whole earth; who are interested in the well-doing of men; who are different from men, but not so different as to be incapable of converse with them—not so different that they may not present themselves even to the human senses. The effect of those visions and revelations was to take away from the old shepherds the feeling that they were merely surrounded by natural forms or by animal existences which were beneath them; that there was a world near them, though not visible to them, which might have fellowship with them, and which elevated them above their flocks and herds. In the next age,—the age of legal and national life,—there are intimations of an angel going with the people through the wilderness; angels admonish warriors that they should be courageous in fighting the battles of the Lord; angels remind the people of their departures from the law of God; angels arouse humble men to deliver their people from idolatry and from slavery. Here the lessons respecting the nature and work of angels are not changed, but expanded. These messengers communicate more with the spirit of men, present themselves more rarely to the eye. They are witnesses of a permanent divine order, belonging not to the individuals to whom they come, but to their race; of an order from which they have departed, and into which it is the Divine will that they should be brought back. In the regal period, the war or the pestilence,—the direction of natural agencies to the punishment of human crime,—is referred to angels. The effect of this teaching upon the thoughtful Jew was, that he could never suppose himself the mere sport of outward influences of earth, or of air, or of fire. All these had a purpose; all were directed by the wisdom of Him who had entered into covenant with the nation. In the Book of Psalms, which illustrates this period, He is said to 'make His angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire.' All natural powers are felt to be angels of God, because they are under the direction of an intelligent and righteous Ruler. In the Books of the Prophets, before the captivity, the angel is not lost sight of; but the Word of God who comes to the Prophet, more and more gathers up all powers and ministries into Himself, while the human teacher to whom he speaks is himself treated as a messenger of the Most High,—as no less His angel than any creature who has not the weeds of mortality. In the Prophets, after the captivity, new functions are assigned to angels. They watch over different lands; provinces of the earth are committed to them by the Lord of all;—it is hinted that some of them may have failed in their trust, as human sovereigns fail in theirs. These lessons seem especially appropriate to the time when the Jew was to feel his connexion with other nations, and to find that each of them supposed itself to be governed by some divine king or demigod.

Is not the doctrine of this chapter entirely consistent with the lessons which St. John had learnt from his fathers? Those lessons, I have urged, can neither be confuted nor confirmed by physical science. But the analogy which we derive from our ordinary experience is all in favour of them. It is a shock to the conscience and reason of man to feel that he is indebted to moral agents,—to spiritual agents,—in a very great degree, for the health and comfort which he enjoys here; but that the whole world which lies beyond his ken is only peopled with physical forces which act upon him blindly and care nothing for him. Men never have been able to persuade themselves of this. The people have always held the opposite faith. Surely it is time to ask ourselves whether that faith must be merely set at nought,—whether its manifest falsehoods and mistakes do not conceal precious truths,—whether those truths can be at variance with any others,—whether we are not bound to bring them into light, as the only means of dislodging the errors to which they have given countenance, and also of overthrowing some of those idols of the cave which the student worships no less ignominiously than the multitude worships the idols of the market-place? I believe St. John tells us how his Master did this work at the Pool of Bethesda: 'A certain man was there which had had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, He saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man answered Him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me. Jesus saith to him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed and walked.'

This was a sign indeed,—a sign addressed to a man who had been waiting day after day, perhaps year after year, for some outward accident to make him well,—that health and disease are dependent upon no accidents; that the power of life is an inward power; that there is One in whom it dwells; that He in whom it dwells is near to the weakest, the most helpless, even the most sinful. It would seem, from the words which our Lord spoke to this man afterwards, 'Go, and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee,' as if He had selected a man in whom all these conditions met, who was the oldest and most powerless of all the sufferers there, and had brought the sufferings upon himself by his misdoings. The demonstration, therefore, was complete. Men—the very lowest men—are not the dependants upon outward things, no, nor upon the visitations of angels. Such visitations may be appointed; but there is One who has a right to call Himself a Son—One in whom the mind and purpose of the Lord of angels is expressed—One who fulfils, not occasionally but continually, His purposes of health and restoration to men—One who is the Son of Man—who has sympathy with men, and can take away their infirmities, because He knows them, enters into them, suffers them.