On Line Bible Study - For the Week March 5-11, 2012

Lesson 526

John 5: ¹⁶ So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. ¹⁷ In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” ¹⁸ For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

The text under consideration for this lesson is John 5:16-30. (Click on the link for the entire text.)

Recalling the healing that took place at the beginning of chapter 5, we head into a Father Raymond Brown calls "one of the most exalted discourses" in the Gospel of John. We are going to consider two things.

First, Jesus claims to be acting on the authority of God. In Verse 19 Jesus may be referring back to something Moses said in Numbers 16:28. In the text from Numbers Moses has to defend his commands and actions by indicating that he was acting under the direction of God. In that story, a divine manifestation of power undergirds Moses word. It may be that Jesus is calling up that story when he says to the religious leaders:

“Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.

This gets to the question: Who said you were boss? Or ... What gives you the right? Jesus is operating, according to John, out of the same line of authority as Israel's great prophet, Moses.

There is a second way - perhaps less obvious - in which the evangelist is making a case for both the authority and the divinity of Christ. Consider Verse 17 above. Does God truly rest on the Sabbath? The Rabbis had discussed and debated this question and had come to the conclusion that, given the fact that people were born and died (and thus, judgment was needed as they passed from this life to the next), and the natural world continued to function (suggesting that God's love and power were still in operation, for had God truly 'rested', everything would have stopped), God must be at work on the Sabbath.

By making this statement, Jesus is aligning himself with God. In other words, by virtue of the fact that Jesus was working, this indicates his divinity - only God works on the Sabbath.

It may be subtle to our ears. It was like the roar of a freight train to the ears of First Century Jewish leaders. It is left for us to decide what we are going to believe.