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

by Frederick Denison Maurice

Thus this cure is bringing us to the point to which St. John has been bringing us in all the previous passages of his Gospel. This sign at the Pool of Bethesda, like all the other signs we have been considering, reveals to us the Word who is the Source of life and health to all creatures. We are led from the messenger, visible or invisible, to Him who was with God and was God. We are led from the mere friends or helpers of man to that Word made flesh, the Son of Man. We are led finally to a Son who has come to reveal a Father.

I have chosen my text from the latter part of the chapter, because it brings this subject so directly before us, and because I believe that in doing so it gives us the real moral and explanation of the narrative of which I have just been speaking. Two cures are recorded by St. John as done by our Lord in the city of Jerusalem: one is that at the Pool of Bethesda; the other, that of the blind man at the Pool of Siloam. They are very different in their incidents and their object: the latter we shall have to consider attentively hereafter. But they have this in common,—both were wrought on the Sabbath-day. In both cases, St. John fixes our thoughts upon this point; in both, this circumstance is the cause of the bitterest indignation against Jesus; here it is said to be the motive of a conspiracy against him. 'Immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked: and on the same day was the sabbath. The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, It is the sabbath-day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed. He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up thy bed, and walk. Then asked they him, What man is that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed, and walk? And he that was healed wist not who it was: for Jesus had conveyed Himself away, a multitude being in that place. Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole. And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay Him, 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 not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.'

Two points present themselves to us here, and demand some earnest consideration. The first is, Why should the Sabbath-day have been especially chosen by our Lord for these acts of healing? The second is, What connexion was there in the Jewish mind, or in our Lord's own words, between the charge of breaking the Sabbath and the charge of calling God His Father?

The belief in angels had a good effect upon the people of the Jews, in so far as it led them to believe that the Most High cared for them individually as well as nationally,—that He Himself, and not some outward thing, was the Author of their blessings, the Restorer of their health. It was perverted to a bad use by the people, in so far as it led them to depend upon accidental interferences, not upon a continual living Helper. How Christ's sign brought out the good, counteracted the evil, of this faith, I have endeavoured to show you. But the belief of angels and spirits, which distinguished the Pharisees from the opposing sect, had most of the mischief, little of the truth, which clung to it among the crowd whom they despised. The tenet, that angels had interfered and might interfere, did not make them think that God was concerned for His creatures,—that He loved them. It only suggested the thought that there were certain persons and certain places that might receive favours which were withheld from others. It did not bring them to believe that any union between God and man existed or was possible. Rather angels were the dispensers of those laws, and the executors of those punishments, which marked the separation between God and His creatures, and the wrath of God against them. God was the Author of statutes which had been written in tables of stone, and could not be changed. God was the Judge and Condemner of those who broke these statutes. God might dispense with the punctual fulfilment of them, or accept sacrifices as a compensation for the breach of them, in the case of His favourites. But one claim to be such favourites would be the rigorous enforcement of them, as His commandments, against the nation generally, and the ignorant, miserable, sinful portion of it particularly.

Was not this zeal for the laws and ordinances of the Most High a good zeal? Did not Christ come to fulfil the law?—did He wish to set it aside? Consider, my brethren, what the law was. I do not speak of any spiritual interpretation of it; I refer merely to the letter of the Ten Commandments. They begin with these words, 'I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the house of bondage.' The zeal of the Pharisees for the law of God forgot this foundation of the law altogether. They did not tell the Israelite that the Lord was his God; they did not proclaim the Lord as a Deliverer from bondage, but as the Author of bondage. Therefore, every commandment was denied in its very essence. The first said, 'Thou shalt worship the Lord,'—that is, the Lord the Deliverer, the Lord thy God,—'and Him only shalt thou serve.' But the Pharisee worshipped any god rather than this only God; worshipped a god who was directly the reverse of this only God. Everything in heaven or earth or under the earth—money, the meanest thing of all—was more an object of worship to him than this only God. He could not help taking His name in vain. Every time he pronounced it he took it in vain; he substituted another name for that of the only God; he cherished another name in his heart.

But then came the command to keep the Sabbath-day. Here, at all events, he could be strict to the letter; that he could keep as God had wished it to be kept. What! when that commandment says, 'Man shall rest because God rests; man shall work because God works?' What! when the commandment announced the Sabbath-day as a blessing to the man-servant, and the maid-servant, and the cattle? A Pharisee construe this commandment literally? A Pharisee keep this commandment strictly? Impossible. There was none which he must distort more, in which he must suppress more vital words, which he must more habitually disobey. The denial of the sentence which introduces the commandments—the determination to regard the Lord as a forger of chains, when He declares Himself to be the breaker of them—necessarily led to a greater and grosser violation of this statute and ordinance of the Lord than of all the rest.

And yet there were obvious reasons why the Pharisee should take his stand on the fourth commandment rather than on any other. As our Lord tells him elsewhere, he made it part of his religion to set aside the honour of fathers and mothers. To bear false witness against a neighbour, if he was not a religious man, not one of their sect, was a merit rather than a crime. Covetousness is spoken of in the Gospels as the very principle of their acts towards men and towards God. And—without inquiring how far they were guilty of secret treasons against life, against marriage, against property—since the enforcing of punishments on open crimes, which disturbed the peace of society, was taken out of their hands, there was no way left them of signalizing their care for what they called God's law and God's honour, but by a pitiless rigour in enforcing the customs and traditions which had connected themselves with the Sabbath-day, the reason and the purpose of the day having been forgotten.

Here was the ground which the Jewish teachers had chosen for the exhibition of their morality and religion; it was on this ground that Jesus encountered them. To the first question, then, I answer, that He selected the Sabbath-day above other days for healing the sick, because He came to vindicate the law and make it honourable; because it had been made dishonourable, and the whole sense of it destroyed, by the notion of the Pharisees that it proceeded from an arbitrary Being, who had made it to coerce His creatures, and not from a loving Being who had formed them in His image, and desired that they should be sharers of His blessedness; because, unless the day of the rest could be reclaimed from their perversions, and restored to its right place and dignity in God's gracious economy, the law never could be a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ the Son of Man, but must always be a hard taskmaster to keep them from Him. It was not a single point of truth which was involved in this controversy—least of all the question, whether a commandment might be relaxed in one particular. The whole truth of the old covenant was involved in it; the whole life and work of the Son of Man was involved in it; the purpose for which the Son of God had taken flesh was involved in it.

The other Evangelists make these assertions sufficiently clear. They tell us how Christ claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath, because 'the sabbath was made for man;' and, because He was the 'Son of Man;' how He was more angered at the hardness of heart which displayed itself in the apparent zeal of the Pharisees for the Sabbath, than at all their other exhibitions of the same hardness; how the Jewish rulers met His divine anger with theirs, and decided that the only adequate answer to the demand, 'Is it right to do good on the sabbath-day, or to do evil?' must be a conspiracy to put Him to death. St. John could not say more on these points. But there was a subject which it was his especial office to handle. He shows us how Jesus made the defence of the fourth commandment, in its letter and its spirit, a means of asserting His own relation to God. 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' Man was bidden to work because God worked. Had God ceased to work, then, on the day of rest? Was He not nourishing the earth, and causing it to bring forth and bud on that day? Was He suspending His labours for His creatures on that day? The argument, like those about the ox and the ass falling into the pit, was broad, simple, direct; one of those which men who have lost their life, their humanity, their godliness, in their books, are tormented by hearing; one which opens the deepest abysses of thought and consolation to those who are seeking for a living God, for a Father of their spirits. But such seekers cannot be content with a command to work because God works, to rest because God rests,—they must know how the command can be obeyed. They must know on what foundation the command stands. If there is a Son of Man who can say, 'I work because He works; I do as my Father does;' He may give the sons of men power to work and power to rest. His union to them and to God is the foundation of both.

I have replied, then, to our second question as well as to the first. I have showed you how the act by which Christ, in the judgment of the Jews, broke the Sabbath-day, naturally led to what was in their judgment an act of blasphemy. It was not that He dispensed with a law of God because He was the Son of God. It was not that He put a new sense into the law of God because He was the Son of God. It was that He could interpret the law of God fully. It was that He could accomplish the law fully. It was that He could unfold the Gospel which was hidden in the law. It was that He could show in what God's rest consists, by showing in what His own rest consisted; what God's work was, by the works which He did Himself in the might of God's Spirit. And thus, by one sign, He declared that men are not the servants of angels, and that they are the children of a Father.