He held off on sharing this piece of information until it became an issue in the story.Īt once, the “Sabbath police” (i.e., the Jewish authorities) confronted the man who had just been healed after a thirty-eight-year-long illness. This is an indication of the deliberate manner in which the Fourth Evangelist has crafted his account. Interestingly, John has withheld one important piece of information until this very point-namely, that the healing took place on a Sabbath. But he can! The aftermath of Jesus healing the lame man In Jesus’ terms, we need mountain-moving faith (Matt 17:20), or better, we need faith in a God who can move spiritual mountains that we find not only impossible to move ourselves but that we cannot even imagine God can move. Yet what we fail to see is that what appears to be impossible to us is possible for God. In our lives, there may be times when we face seemingly insurmountable obstacles to God meeting our needs or answering our prayers. Yet Jesus pointedly cuts straight through any such nonsense, folklore, and superstition, telling the man simply, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk” (5:8). How can he be first in the water when he is unable to walk? Humanly speaking, he’ll never be able to access healing. To the invalid’s mind, his is a futile task. This verse is probably the reason why some later scribes inserted verse 4 into some later Greek texts, as it alludes to the common superstition of an angel stirring the waters.

“Sir,” he replied, “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me” (5:7). Well, of course the man wanted to be healed! Why did Jesus even bother to ask? Yet Jesus’ question did not merely stir the man’s will to recover it also exposed his superstition. The first thing Jesus does is ask the man, “Do you want to be healed?” (5:6). Now that the stage has been set, the healing ensues. It was without a doubt a genuine healing. As with the later case of Lazarus, who had been dead for four days, this healing definitely passed the smell test. The longtime and public nature of the man’s predicament renders Jesus’ healing of this man all the more credible and remarkable. Rather, the man had been indisputably and irremediably crippled and stood in desperate and verifiable need of healing. This is not an individual who had faked his illness so that Jesus could fraudulently buttress his own messianic credentials. The man had been lying there for thirty-eight years, and countless people had seen him. One of the reasons John may have chosen to include this sign is that there was virtually no way this miracle could have been staged. This must have seemed like an eternity for the man to be languishing without a realistic chance of being healed.

the narrative (in John 5:5–9a) focuses on one such invalid, a man who had been in this condition for thirty-eight years. Köstenberger unpacks the John 5 passage in which Jesus heals a paralyzed man, then faces persecution. In the excerpt below from the Signs of the Messiah, Andreas J. On occasion, the Gospel writers explain why people got angry, but often we don’t get much overt explanation-which causes some twenty-first-century Bible readers to scratch their heads. Sometimes, when we read through the Gospels, we’ll see passages where Jesus does something remarkable, then everyone gets mad. Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest Email LinkedIn

Jesus heals the lame man