Two Healings, Two Responses (3)

 

 

Continuing our comparison between the healings of John 5 and John 9:

 

In John 9, when Jesus and His disciples see the man born blind, the disciples ask Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?”

 

Jesus replies, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents, but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him."

 

In John 5, when Jesus finds the man whom He had healed, He says to him, “Behold, you have become well; do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse happens to you.”

 

I point out that the subject of sin is raised in both narratives, not to attempt to answer the questions that can be raised in both instances, but because we are comparing the two men, the two healings of Jesus. The Scriptures were not written to satisfy our curiosity; they were written to reveal Jesus Christ. One of my favorite quotes from Fenelon is along the line of, “I know many people who are perfect…in speculation.”

 

For sure questions can lead us to Jesus, they can cause us to seek, to ask, to knock; and when Jesus is the object of our search and desire that is one thing, however, when our questions do not have Jesus as their object and center of gravity then we often engage in “foolish questions and ignorant speculations” which “produce quarrels” (2 Timothy 2:23).

 

Furthermore, there are many things deep in the counsels of our Father beyond our understanding; it is not necessary that we know everything, it is necessary that we know Jesus and live in intimate relationship with Him.

 

Regarding John 9 and the man born blind, one thing we can be assured of, absolutely assured of, is that Jesus always desires to reveal Himself to us, He always desires to display the works of God in us. After all, God so loves us that He gave His only begotten Son for us – of course He wants to reveal Himself to us and draw us ever-closer to Himself.

 

I often tell folks who in are difficult situations, “I don’t pretend to know why this is happening, why you are going through this, but I do know this, our dear Lord Jesus wants to reveal Himself to you through this and draw you closer to Him.”

 

I believe this with all of my soul, with all that I am. I believe it because this is the character and Nature of Jesus Christ. There is deep and widespread suffering in this world, few of us escape it, it has many forms, some easily seen, some we never know about. Jesus walks with us through suffering, He carries us, He invites us to share His sufferings, He invites us to bless others through our sufferings – there are many dimensions to suffering and comfort and our transformation into His image.

 

And so we learn to look for Jesus in life’s pain and suffering, we look for how Jesus is coming to us and those around us, we seek to see the works of God within suffering, tribulation, uncertainty, within our struggles. O dear friends, this life will soon be over and the reality of eternity will be upon us and we will be within it. Each one of us will have a “last day”, each one of us will have a coming of the Lord, each one of us will leave this temporal life and move (actually we’ll “be moved”) into a life glorious beyond measure. Are we preparing for this? Are we allowing Christ to prepare us? Can we smell it? Taste it? Sense it? Touch it? See it, in some measure?

 

Let us always look for Jesus to reveal Himself.

 

Then we have what Jesus said to the man in Chapter 5, “Behold, you have become well; do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse happens to you.”

 

This may remind us of what Jesus says to the woman of John 8:11, “Go and sin no more.” I point this similarity out without further comment.

 

Regarding the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years in Chapter 5, physical incapacity does not mean that our capacity for sin is lessened (Matthew 5:21 – 30; 12:33 – 37; 15:10 – 20). We do not know how the man lived prior to his prolonged illness, nor do we know how he lived during his illness; we do know that Jesus warned him to stop sinning so that “nothing worse happens to you.”

 

It appears that this man did not take Jesus’ counsel to heart, for unless he was completely naïve, he must have known the result of telling the religious leaders that it was Jesus who healed him on the Sabbath. The man of John 9 aligned himself with Jesus, the man of John 5 gave his allegiance to those who sought to destroy Jesus.

 

Later in John Chapter 5 Jesus asks, “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?” This is the way of the religious world as much as it is the way of the world. It is often the way of those “searching Scriptures (John 5:39). Thankfully, we also have Bereans in our midst (Acts 17:11)!

 

Have I ever betrayed Jesus to the world or to the Pharisees? Have I received the blessings of Jesus, only to align myself with systems bent on His destruction? When others have asked me the equivalent of, “Why are you carrying your pallet on the Sabbath?” have I blamed Jesus and betrayed Him, rather than, like the man of John Chapter 9, steadfastly testified of Him and worshipped Him, have I been willing to be “put out” (9:34)? (See also Hebrews 13:13).

 

There is no peer pressure quite like religious peer pressure.

 

I will keep my answers to myself, for they are not pretty answers; my answers shock me, they shame me, they make me tremble.

 

What about you?

Two Healings, Two Responses (2)

 

Continuing our reflections on the healings of John chapters 5 and 9:

 

In both instances, the Pharisees challenged the men healed. In Chapter 5 they wanted to know why the man was carrying his pallet on the Sabbath. In Chapter 9 the Pharisees challenged the man by saying that the man who healed him, Jesus, was not of God and was a sinner (9:19, 24, 31). This is along the line of what we see earlier in Jesus’s ministry, when the scribes from Jerusalem were saying of Him, “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons” (Mark 3:22). That is, the religious leaders were attributing the works of God to Satan and saying that Jesus had an “unclean spirit,” a perilous practice indeed (Mark 3:28 – 30)

 

Put more bluntly, in John Chapter 9 the Pharisees were telling the man whom Jesus healed, “An ungodly man healed you. God did not heal you. You have been touched by a demon.”

 

Now then, if you were the blind man, how would you have liked to hear that?

 

In Chapter 5, when asked by the Pharisees, the man did not know who healed him (5:13). In Chapter 9 the man knew who Jesus was, “The man who is called Jesus made clay, and anointed my eyes…”

 

There seems to have never been any doubt about Jesus by the man healed of blindness; his understanding of Jesus blossoms in the narrative. He goes from considering Jesus a prophet (9:17) to believing in Jesus as the promised “Son of Man” and worshipping Him (9:35 – 38; Daniel 7:13 – 14; Luke 22:66 – 71).

 

On the other hand, the man healed in John Chapter 5 shows no thankfulness toward Jesus. Unlike the man born blind, instead of giving Jesus glory he reports Jesus to the religious leaders. After later encountering Jesus later in the temple, “The man went away, and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. For this reason the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath” (5:14 – 16).

 

[Note: When John uses the term “Jews” in his Gospel, he is typically referring to the religious and civic leaders of the Jews. John himself was a Jew, as were all the apostles, as were most of the people of Jerusalem.]

 

Perhaps, in comparing the two men whom Jesus healed in John, there is an element of the ten lepers of Luke 17:11 – 19. “One of them, when he saw that he had been healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at His feet, giving thanks to Him.”

 

In response, Jesus asks, “Were there not ten cleansed? But the nine – where are they?”

 

Perhaps there is an element of the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3 – 9, 18 – 23)? The man of John 5 is an example of the “seed bedside the road” which “the evil one snatches away.” The man born blind is a picture of the good seed bearing much fruit.

 

Are we thankful for the work of Jesus in our lives? When He answers payer do we fall on our faces, worshipping Him?

 

Do we, as the man born blind, testify to Jesus no matter the opposition? Or do we align ourselves – actively or passively – with those determined to destroy Jesus?

 

What else do you see when you compare these two men?

 

We’ll pick this back up, the Lord willing.

Two Healings, Two Responses (1)

 

 

Have you ever compared the two healings recorded in John’s Gospel? I’m speaking of the man lying by the pool of Bethesda in John 5, and the blind man in John 9.

 

Both occurred on the Sabbath (5:9; 9:14) in Jerusalem. The fact that Jesus healed on the Sabbath set the religious leaders off, it made them crazy (5:10, 16; 9:16).

 

Lately, I’ve been wondering about the emphasis the Gospel’s place on Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath. In Mark 3:1- 8, early in His ministry, Jesus heals on the Sabbath in a synagogue and the religious leaders and Herodians conspire “as to how they might destroy Him.” Later in His ministry, in Luke 13:10 – 17, Jesus heals a woman who had been afflicted for 18 years, and once again stirs up religious opposition.

 

In Luke 13:15, in response to being attacked verbally by the synagogue official, Jesus says, “You hypocrites…” He doesn’t say, “You don’t understand, hang in here with Me and I’ll explain it to you.” He gets right to the point and calls the religious group “hypocrites.” This is a pattern we see in all four Gospels, and it is especially highlighted in the Gospel of John.

 

This reminds me of Jesus’ approach in His hometown synagogue in Luke Chapter 4 (I recently did a series on this). Rather than take things nice and easy and work into His Message, He gets to the point about who He is (Luke 4:18 – 19) and then throws gasoline on the fire by pointing to God’s working in the lives of two non-Israelites (Luke 4:25 – 27) which so infuriates His hometown neighbors that they try to kill Him.

 

Why didn’t Jesus spend the first few weeks or months of His ministry playing by the religious and cultural rules, while healing six days a week and not on the Sabbath? Why, early in His first extended sermon does Jesus say, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20)? Why not wait a few weeks or months before confronting the scribes and Pharisees and try to win them over?

 

From the very beginning of His ministry right up until its conclusion during Holy Week, Jesus is confrontational with the religious establishment; nor is He seeking to persuade people to follow Him, quite the contrary (John 6:60 – 71; 8:31 – 59; Mark 8:31 – 38; Luke 9:57 – 62). He says, in effect, to the people, “Don’t follow Me unless you know what you are getting into. Don’t believe in Me unless you give Me all that you have and all that you are.”

 

I don’t know the answer to my questions.

 

There is an adage in pastoral preaching that we are to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and while there may be an element of this in Jesus’ approach to ministry, I don’t think it captures the entire picture. One thing for sure, Jesus doesn’t leave any middle ground, He didn’t do it then and He really doesn’t do it now.

 

Yet, we do seem to be a people of the middle ground, of compromise with the world, the flesh, and the devil; of compromise with money and possessions and marketing and political and economic and social agendas.

 

I wonder what our own untouchable “Sabbaths” are. That is, what are those things that Jesus dare not touch in our lives and congregations, that are off limits to Him? I can look back and see many in my own life. There must be some in my heart today, dare I ask Him to reveal them to me?

 

What are the religious (and other) practices and doctrines and traditions that we defend from Jesus?

 

Yes, the Sabbath is Biblical in that it is in the Beginning (Genesis 2:1 – 3). However, the true Sabbath is Jesus Christ, with all the Sabbaths and Holy Days of the Old Testament pointing to Him, to relationship with Him, to His glorious Person and work (Hebrews Chapter 4; Colossians 2:16 – 17; Matthew 11:28 – 30).

 

What do you see when you compare the healings of John 5 and John 9?

 

We’ll pick this back up, the Lord willing.