Day 281 (John 5) - Year 8

Tara-Leigh Cobble (0:01)

Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara-Leigh Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap.

There's a quiet corner in the old city of Jerusalem with manicured gardens outside a beautiful church, and off to the side, you can walk down the stairs to the pools of Bethesda. You can even see the remains of the five porticos where one of my favorite stories happened. In Jesus' day, this pool is where the invalids of Jerusalem gather. One of the reasons they like this spot is because the word on the street is that these waters have healing powers. From time to time, the waters start to swirl, and people say that if you jump in when that happens, you'll get healed.

Your Bible may have a footnote that says some ancient versions of this text include a local rumor that it was angels stirring the waters. Maybe, but there's a bit more evidence that the bubbling and swirling is from a natural spring or a hot spring that would occasionally rear its head. Those can and do sometimes have the effect of helping aches and pains. Regardless, this is a place of hope for invalids.

Jesus rolls up to the pools of Bethesda one day and starts a conversation with a man who has been there for 38 years. Jesus asks if he wants to be healed, and the man doesn't give a yes or no answer. Maybe because he doesn't want to get his hopes up. So instead, he tells Jesus why healing seems impossible for him. After all, he's been there for 13,870 days. And in that time, he's probably had to watch other people get the healing he's longed for. But Jesus meets him in the midst of his hopelessness and gives him the thing he can't even imagine is possible. And he picks up his mat and walks off. And do you know the very first place he goes after he's been healed? To the temple. He hasn't been allowed to go there in almost four decades, because even if he could have gotten there, he wouldn't be allowed to enter because he's considered unclean. But the minute he's healed, he goes to worship God.

Unfortunately, he gets in an argument with the Pharisees because he brought his mat with him. Here's the problem. It's the Sabbath. There are laws about the Sabbath. God set up these laws way back in the beginning of his relationship with Israel because they had just come out of 400 years of Egyptian slavery, and he wants to show them that he's not a slave driver like the Egyptian Pharaoh. Pharaoh commanded them to work, but God commanded them to rest.

Sabbath also serves as a marker of their trust in God, believing he'll provide for them even if they take a day off from work each week to engage in their relationship with him, to focus on worship and peace and nearness. Historically, the Jews were terrible at keeping the Sabbath. So along come the Pharisees who are very strict, and they decide that apparently God's law is too lenient. What they need are more rules to force them to obey the law. So they beef up God's law by writing their own amendments. For instance, God says you can't work on the Sabbath, so they said, well, brick masonry is a big job around here, and that involves combining water and dirt. So just to be on the safe side will make it illegal to combine water and dirt on the Sabbath. Therefore, we hereby declare it illegal to spit on the dirt on the Sabbath. You can spit on a rock, but you can't spit on the dirt. They call this building a fence around the law, a fence to protect it. But over time, what happens is that they start treating the fence itself like it's God's law, instead of something they built. These Pharisees tell the healed man that not only is he not allowed to carry his mat on the Sabbath, but that he's not allowed to be healed on the Sabbath either, and that the man who healed him has broken the law. Wow, talk about a bummer. Jesus tracks the man down in the temple and encourages him. He says, you're better. Isn't this amazing? Look, you had a hard life already and sin has consequences I want you to avoid so that no more harm will come to you. Let today mark a turning point for you. When the Pharisees find out that Jesus was the one who healed the man, they want him dead. Can you imagine? So Jesus pushes back. Often when we see Jesus interact with the scribes and Pharisees, what he's doing is throwing a leg over the fence intentionally and basically looking them in the eye and saying, I'm not breaking the law.