'Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.'—JOHN v.8
This third of the miracles recorded in John's Gospel finds a place
there, as it would appear, for two reasons: first, because it marks the
beginning of the angry unbelief on the part of the Jewish rulers, the
development of which it is one part of the purpose of this Gospel to
trace; second, because it is the occasion for that great utterance of
our Lord about His Sonship and His divine working as the Father also
works, which occupies the whole of the rest of the chapter, and is the
foundation of much which follows in the Gospel. It is for these
reasons, and not for the mere sake of adding another story of a
miraculous cure to the many which the other Evangelists have given us,
that John narrates for us this history.
If, then, we consider the reason for the introduction of the miracle
into the Gospel, we may be saved from the necessity of dwelling, except
very lightly, upon some of the preliminary details which preceded the
actual cure. It does not matter much to us for our present purpose
which Feast it was on which Jesus went up to Jerusalem, nor whether the
pool was by the sheep-market or by the sheep-gate, nor whereabouts in
Jerusalem Bethesda might happen to be. It may be of importance for us
to notice that the mention of the angel who appears in the fourth verse
is not a part of the original narrative. The true text only tells us of
an intermittent pool which possessed, or was supposed to possess,
curative energy; and round which the kindness of some forgotten
benefactor had built five rude porches. There lay a crowd of wasted
forms, and pale, sorrowful faces, with all varieties of pain and
emaciation and impotence marked upon them, who yet were gathered in
Bethesda, which being interpreted means 'a house of mercy.' It is the
type of a world full of men suffering various sicknesses, but all sick;
the type of a world that gathers with an eagerness, not far removed
from despair, round anything that seems to promise, however vaguely, to
help and to heal; the type of a world, blessed be God, which, amidst
all its sad variety of woe and weariness, yet sits in the porches of 'a
house of mercy,' and has in the midst a 'fountain opened for sin and
for uncleanness,' whose energy is as mighty for the last comer of all
the generations as for the first that stepped into its cleansing flood.
This poor man, sick and impotent for eight and thirty years—many of
which he had spent, as it would appear, day by day, wearily dragging
his paralysed limbs to the fountain with daily diminishing hope—this
poor man attracts the regard of Christ when He enters, and He puts to
him the strange question, 'Wilt thou be made whole?' Surely there was
no need to ask that; but no doubt the many disappointments and the long
years of waiting and of suffering had stamped apathy upon the
sufferer's face, and Christ saw that the first thing that was needed,
in order that His healing power might have a point of contact in the
man's nature, was to kindle some little flicker of hope in him once
more.
And so, no doubt, with a smile on His face, which converted the
question into an offer, He says: 'Wilt thou be made whole?' meaning
thereby to say, 'I will heal thee if thou wilt.' And there comes the
weary answer, as if the man had said: 'Will I be made whole? What have
I been lying here all these years for? I have nobody to put me into the
pool.'
Yes, it is a hopeful prospect to hold out to a man whose disease is
inability to walk, that if he will walk to the water he will get cured,
and be able to walk afterwards. Why, he could not even roll himself
into the pond, and so there he had lain, a type of the hopeless efforts
at self-healing which we sick men put forth, a type of the tantalising
gospels which the world preaches to its subjects when it says to a
paralysed man: 'Walk that you may be healed; keep the commandments that
you may enter into life.'
And so we have come at last to the main point of the narrative before
us, and I fix upon these words, the actual words in which the cure was
conveyed, as communicating to us some very important lessons and
thoughts about Christ and our relation to Him.
I. First, I see in them Christ manifesting Himself as the Giver of
power to the powerless who trust Him.
His words may seem at first hearing to partake of the very same almost
cruel irony as the condition of cure which had already proved
hopelessly impracticable. He, too, says, 'Walk that you may be cured';
and He says it to a paralysed and impotent man. But the two things are
very different, for before this cripple could attempt to drag his
impotent limbs into an upright position, and take up the little light
couch and sling it over his shoulders, he must have had some kind of
trust in the person that told him to do so. A very ignorant trust, no
doubt, it was; but all that was set before him about Jesus Christ he
grasped and rested upon. He only knew Him as a Healer, and he trusted
Him as such. The contents of a man's faith have nothing to do with the
reality of his faith; and he that, having only had the healing power of
Christ revealed to him, lays hold of that Healer, cleaves to Him with
as genuine a faith as the man who has the whole fulness and sublimity
of Christ's divine and human character and redeeming work laid out
before him, and who cleaves to these. The hand that grasps is one,
whatsoever be the thing that it grasps.
So it is no spiritualising of this story, or reading into it a deeper
and more religious meaning than belongs to it, to say that what passed
in that man's heart and mind before he caught up his little bed and
walked away with it, was essentially the same action of mind and heart
by which a sinful man, who knows that Christ is his Redeemer, grasps
His Cross and trusts his soul to Him. In the one case, as in the other,
there is confidence in the person; only in the one case the person was
only known as a Healer, and in the other the person is known as a
Saviour. But the faith is the same whatever it apprehends.
Christ comes and says to him, 'Rise, take up thy bed and walk.' There
is a movement of confidence in the man's heart; he tries to obey, and
in the act of obedience the power comes to him.
Ah, brother! it is always so. All Christ's commandments are gifts. When
He says to you, 'Do this!' He pledges Himself to give you power to do
it. Whatsoever He enjoins He strengthens for. He binds Himself, by His
commandments, and every word of His lips which says to us 'Thou shalt!'
contains as its kernel a word of His which says 'I will.' So when He
commands, He bestows; and we get the power to keep His commandments
when in humble faith we make the effort to do His will. It is only when
we try to obey for the love's sake of Him that has healed us that we
are able to obey. And be sure of this, whensoever we attempt to do what
we know to be the Master's will, because He has given Himself for us,
our power will be equal to our desire, and enough for our duty. As St.
Augustine says: 'Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou
wilt.'
'Rise, take up thy bed and walk,' or as in another case, 'Stretch forth
thy hand.' 'And he stretched it forth, and his hand was restored whole
as the other.' Christ gives power to keep His commandments to the
impotent who try to obey, because they have been healed by Him.
II. In the next place, we have in this miracle our Lord set forth as
the absolute Master, because He is the Healer.
The Pharisees and their friends had no eyes for the miracle; but if
they found a man carrying his light couch on the Sabbath day, that was
a thing that excited their interest, and must be seen to immediately.
And so, paying no attention to the fact that it was a paralysed man who
was doing this, with the true narrow instinct of the formalist, they
lay hold only of the fact of the broken Rabbinical restrictions, and
try to stop him with these. 'It is the Sabbath day! It is not lawful
for thee to carry thy bed.'
And they get an answer which goes a great deal deeper than the speaker
knew, and puts the whole subject of Christian obedience on its right
footing. 'He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto
me, Take up thy bed and walk.' As if he had said: 'He gave me the
power, had He not a right to tell me what to do with it? It was His
gift that I could lift my bed; was I not bound to walk when and where
He that had made me able to walk at all chose to bid me?'
And if you generalise that it just comes to this: the only person that
has a right to command you is the Christ who saves you. He has the
absolute authority to do as He will with your restored spiritual
powers, because He has bestowed them all upon you. His dominion is
built upon His benefits. He is the King because He is the Saviour. He
rules because He has redeemed. He begins with giving, and it is only
afterwards that He commands; and He turns to each of us with that smile
upon His lips, and with tenderness in His voice which will bind any
man, who is not an ingrate, to Him for ever. 'If ye love Me, keep My
commandments.'
There is always something hard and distasteful to the individual will
in the tone of authority assumed by any man whatsoever. We always more
or less rebel and shrink from that; and there is only one thing that
makes commandment sweet, and that is when it drops like honey from the
honeycomb, from lips that we love. So does it in the case of Christ's
commands to us. It is joy to know and to do the will of One to whom the
whole heart turns with gratitude and affection. And Christ blesses and
privileges us by the communication to us of His pleasure concerning us,
that we may have the gladness of yielding to His desires, and so
meeting the love which commands with the happy love which obeys. 'He
that made me whole, the same said unto me…' and what He says it must be
joy to do.
So, 'My yoke is easy and My burden is light,' not because Christ
diminishes the requirements of law; not because the standard of
Christian obedience is lowered beneath any other standard of conduct
and character. It is far higher. The things which make Christian duty
are often very painful in themselves. There is always self-sacrifice in
Christian virtue, and self-sacrifice has always a sting in it; but the
'yoke is easy and the burden is light,' because, if I may so say, the
yoke is padded with the softest velvet of love, and lies upon our necks
lightly because He has laid it there. All the rigid harshness of
precept is done away when the precept comes from Christ's lips, and His
commandment 'makes the crooked things straight and the rough places
plain'; and turns duty, distasteful duty, into joyful service. The
blessed basis of Christian obedience, and of Christ's authority, is
Christ's redemption.
III. And then, still further, we have here our Lord setting Himself
forth as the divine Son, whose working needs and knows no rest.
We find, in the subsequent part of the chapter, that 'the Jews,' as
they are called, by which is meant the antagonistic portion of the
nation, sought to slay Christ 'because He had done these things on the
Sabbath day.' But Jesus answered them, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and
I work.' Unquestionably the form which the healing took was intended by
our Lord to bring into prominence the very point which these pedantic
casuists laid hold of. He meant to draw attention to His sweeping aside
of the Rabbinical casuistries of the law of the Sabbath. And He meant
to do it in order that He might have the occasion of making this mighty
claim, which is lodged in these solemn and profound words, to possess a
Sonship, which, like the divine working, wrought, needing and knowing
no repose.
'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' The rest, which the old story
in Genesis attributed to the Creator after the Creation, was not to be
construed as if it meant the rest of inactivity; but it was the rest of
continuous action. God's rest and God's work are one. Throughout all
the ages preservation is a continuous creation. The divine energy is
streaming out for evermore, as the bush that burns unconsumed, as the
sun that flames undiminished for ever, pouring out from the depth of
that divine nature, and for ever sustaining a universe. So that there
is no Sabbath, in the sense of a cessation from action, proper to the
divine nature; because all His action is repose, and 'e'en in His very
motion there is rest.' And this divine coincidence of activity and of
repose belongs to the divine Son in His divine-human nature. With that
arrogance which is the very audacity of blasphemy, if it be not the
simplicity of a divine consciousness, He puts His own work side by side
with the Father's work, as the same in principle, the same in method,
the same in purpose, the same in its majestic coincidence of repose and
of energy.
'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore for Me, as for Him,
there is no need of a Sabbath of repose.' Human activity is dissipated
by toil, human energy is exhausted by expenditure. Man works and is
weary; man works and is distracted. For the recovery of the serenity of
his spirit, and for the renewal of his physical strength, repose of
body and gathering in of mind, such as the Sabbath brought, were
needed; but neither is needed for Him who toils unwearied in the
heavens; and neither is needed for the divine nature of Him who labours
in labours parallel with the Father's here upon the earth.
Now remember that this is no abolition of the Sabbatic rest for
Christ's followers. Rather the ground on which He here asserts His
superiority over, and His non-dependence upon, such a repose shows, or
at all events implies, that all mere human workers need such rest, and
should thankfully accept it. But it is a claim on His part to a divine
equality. It is a claim on His part to do works which are other than
human works. It is a claim on His part to be the Lord of a divine
institution, living above the need of it, and able to mould it at His
will.
And so it opens up depths, into which we cannot go now, of the
relations of that divine Father and that divine Son; and makes us feel
that the little incident in which He turned to a paralysed man and
said: 'Rise, take up thy bed and walk,' on the Sabbath day, like some
small floating leaf of sea-weed upon the surface, has great deep
tendrils that go down and down into the very abyss of things, and lays
hold upon that central truth of Christianity, the divinity of the Son
of God, who is One with the ever-working Father.
IV. Lastly, we have in this incident yet another lesson. We have the
Healer who is also the Judge, warning the healed of the possibilities
of a relapse.
'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's
eight-and-thirty years of illness had apparently been brought on by
dissipation. It was a sin of flesh, avenged in the flesh, that had
given him that miserable life. One would have thought he had got
warning enough, but we all know the old proverb about what happened
when the devil was ill, and what befell his resolutions when he got
better. And so Christ comes to him again with this solemn warning:
'There is a worse thing than eight-and-thirty years of paralysis. You
fell once, and sore was your punishment. If you fall twice, your
punishment will be sorer.' Why? Because the first one had done him no
good. So here are lessons for us. There is always danger that we shall
fall back into old sins, even if we think we have overcome them. The
mystic influence of habit, enfeebled will, the familiar temptation, the
imagination rebelling, the memory tempting, sometimes even, as in the
case of a man that has been a drunkard, the physical effect of the
odour of his temptation upon his nostrils—all these things make it
extremely unlikely that a man who has once been under the condemnation
of any evil shall never be tempted to fall under its sway again.
And such a fall is not only more criminal than the former, it is more
deadly than the former. 'It were better for them not to have known the
way of righteousness, than after they have known it to turn aside.'
'The last state of that man is worse than the first.'
My brother, there is no blacker condemnation; and if I may use a strong
word, there is no hotter hell, than that which belongs to an apostate
Christian. 'It has happened unto them according to the true proverb.
The dog is turned to his vomit again.' Very unpolite, a very coarse
metaphor? Yes; to express a far worse reality.
Christian men and women! you have been made whole. 'Sin no more, lest a
worse thing come unto you.' And turn to that Lord and say, 'Hold Thou
me up and I shall be saved.' Then the enemies will not be able to
recapture you, and the chains which have dropped from your wrists will
never enclose them any more.