1. Our Lord’s reply to the charge of Sabbath-breaking is, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” He did not make any comment on the Sabbath law. He did not defend Himself by showing that works of mercy such as He had done Were admissible. On other occasions He adopted this line of defence, but now He took higher ground. The rest of God is not inactivity. God does not on the Sabbath cease to communicate life to all things. He does not refrain from blessing men till the sun of the Sabbath is set. The tides rise and fall; the plants grow; the sun completes his circuit on the Sabbath as on other days. “Why does not God keep the Sabbath?” a caviller asked of a Jew. “Is it not lawful,” was the answer, “for a man to move about in his own house on the Sabbath? The house of God is the whole realm above and the whole realm below.” For God the Sabbath has no existence; it is a boon He has given to His creatures because they need it. His untiring beneficence is needful for the upholding and for the happiness of all. And it is the same superiority to the Sabbath which Jesus claims for Himself. He claims that His unceasing work is as necessary to the world as the Father’s—or rather, that He and the Father are together carrying out one work, and that in this miracle the Jews find fault with He has merely acted as the Father’s agent.
From this statement the Jews concluded that He made Himself equal with God. And they were justified in so concluding. It is only on this understanding of His words that the defence of Jesus was relevant. If He meant only to say that He imitated God, and that because God did not rest on the Sabbath, therefore He, a holy Jew, might work on the Sabbath, His defence was absurd. Our Lord did not mean that He was imitating the Father, but that His work was as indispensable as the Father’s, was the Father’s. My Father from the beginning up till now worketh, giving life to all; and I work in the same sphere, giving life as His agent and almoner to men. The work of quickening the impotent man was the Father’s work. In charging Him with breaking the Sabbath they were charging the Father with breaking it.
But this gives Jesus an opportunity of more clearly describing His relation to God. He declares He is in such perfect harmony with God that it is impossible for Him to do either that miracle or any other work at His own instigation. “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing.” “I can of myself do nothing.” He had power to do it, but no will. He had life in Himself, and could give it to whom He pleased; but so perfect was His sympathy with God, that it was impossible for Him to act where God would not have Him act. So trained was He to perceive the Divine purpose, so habituated to submit Himself to it, that He could neither mistake His Father’s will nor oppose it. As a conscientious man when pressed to do a wrong thing says, No, really I cannot do it; as a son who might happen to be challenged for injuring His father’s business would indignantly repudiate the possibility of such a thing. “What do I live for,” he would say, “but to further my father’s views? My father’s interests and mine are identical, our views and purposes are identical. I cannot do anything antagonistic to him.” So Jesus had from the first recognised God as His Father, and had so true and deep a filial feeling that really it was the joy of His life to do His will.
This, then, was the idea the Lord sought to impress on the people on the first occasion on which He had a good opportunity of speaking in public. He cannot do anything save what is suggested to Him by consideration of God’s will. Even as a boy He had begun to have this filial feeling. “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” That in Him which is most conspicuous and which He wishes to be most conspicuous is perfect sonship; filial trust and duty carried to its perfect height. It is this perfect filial unanimity with the Father which makes His life valuable, significant, different from all other lives. It is this which makes Him the perfect representative of the Father; which enables Him to be God’s perfect messenger to men, doing always and only the will of God in men’s sight. He is in the world not for the sake of fulfilling any private schemes of His own, but having it as His sole motive and aim to do the Father’s will.
This perfect filial feeling had no doubt its root in the eternal relation of the Son to the Father. It was the continuance, upon earth and under new conditions, of the life He already had enjoyed with the Father. Having assumed human nature, He could reveal Himself only so far as that nature allowed Him. His revelation, for example, was not universal, but local, confined to one place; His human nature being necessarily confined to one place. He did not assert superiority to all human law; He paid taxes; He recognised lawful authority; He did not convince men of His Divinity by superiority to all human infirmities; He ate, slept, died as ordinary men. But through all this He maintained a perfect harmony with the Divine will. It was this which differentiated Him from ordinary men, that He maintained throughout His life an attitude of undoubting trust in the Father and devotion to Him. It was through the human will of the Lord that the Divine will of the Eternal Son uniformly worked and used the whole of His human nature.
It is in this perfect Sonship of Christ we first learn what a son should be. It is by His perfect loyalty to the Father’s will, by His uniform adoption of it as the best, the only, thing He can do, that we begin to understand our connection with God, and to recognise that in His will alone is our blessedness. Naturally we resent the rule of any will but our own; we have not by nature such love for God as would put His will first. To our reason it becomes manifest that there is nothing higher or happier for us than to sink ourselves in God; we see that there is nothing more elevating, nothing more essential to a hopeful life than that we make God’s purposes in the world our own, and do that very thing which He sees to be worth doing and which He desires to do. Yet we find that the actual adoption of this filial attitude, natural, rational, and inviting as it seems, is just the most difficult of all difficulties, is indeed the battle of life. Who among us can say that we do nothing of ourselves, nothing at our own instance, that our life is entirely at God’s disposal?
To this filial disposition on the part of the Son the Father responds: “The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth” (ver. 20). If we ask how Jesus saw the Father’s works, or how, for example, He saw that the Father wished Him to heal the impotent man, the answer must be that it is by inward sympathy the Son apprehends what the Father wills. We in our measure can see what God is doing in the world, and can forward God’s work. But not by mere observation of what God had done and was doing through others did Jesus see what the Father did, but rather by His own inward perception of the Father’s will. By His own purity, love, and goodness He knew what the Father’s goodness willed. But the Father was not passive in the matter, merely allowing the Son to discover what He could of His will. Godet illustrates this active revelation on the Father’s part by the simile of the father in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth showing the son the things he made and the method of making them. This simile, however, being external, is apt to misdirect the mind. It was by a wholly inward and spiritual process the Father made known to the Son His purposes and mind.
2. This quickening of the impotent man was meant to be an object lesson, a sign of the power of Jesus to communicate life, Divine and eternal, to whom He would. “Greater works” than this of curing the paralytic “will the Father show to the Son, that ye may marvel” (ver. 20). As through His word vigour had been imparted to the impotent man, so all who listen to His word will receive everlasting life (ver. 24). As the impotent man, after thirty-eight years of deadness, found life on the moment by believing Christ’s word, so every one who listens to that same voice as the word of God receives life eternal. Through that word he connects himself with the source of life. He becomes obedient to the life-giving will of God.
The question, How can the spiritually dead hear and believe? is the question. How could the impotent man rise in response to Christ’s word? Psychologically inexplicable it may be, but happily it is practically possible. And here, as elsewhere, theory must wait upon fact. One thing is plain: that faith is the link between the Divine life and human weakness. Had the impotent man not believed, he would not have risen. Christ quickens “whom He will;” that is to say, there is no limit to His life-giving power; but He cannot quicken those who will not have life or who do not believe He can give it. Hence necessarily “the Father hath committed all judgement unto the Son.” To the impotent man Jesus put the question, “Wilt thou be made whole?” and by that question the man was judged. By the answer he gave to it he determined whether he would remain dead or receive life. Had he not on the moment believed, he would have doomed himself to permanent and hopeless imbecility. Christ’s question judged him.