Jesus at Bethesda
Jesus now answers the charges from the Jews. By “Jews” we can probably understand the religious leaders of Israel, but there may have been some laymen who were in agreement with them and who were at least as vocal. From this point to the end of the chapter, we have only the words of Jesus. John doesn’t give us any reply from the Jews at this point, if there ever was one.
19 Jesus gave them this answer: “I tell you the truth, 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.
Without saying directly, “I am the Son of God,” Jesus addresses himself as God’s Son, and says that he can’t do anything at all that isn’t in complete accord with God the Father. Jesus isn’t talking about human fathers and sons, since a human son can be very different from his father.
For example, in marriage, Abraham committed adultery by taking Hagar as his lover to produce an heir, and even though it was done at Sarah’s urging, Abraham was still guilty of a sin; God showed him how he had misapplied his promise by giving him Isaac as his true son, the son of his marriage with Sarah. But Isaac was not like Abraham; Isaac and his wife Rebekah were faithful to one another, and Isaac never took a concubine.
But with God the Father and his Son, the Father is perfect, and the Son is perfect, too. Jesus excludes even the possibility that God the Son might ever ignore or omit or fail to do anything that God the Father does or bids him to do. The Father and the Son do everything in accord with one another. Period.
20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, to your amazement he will show him even greater things than these.
“Greater things than these” is a reference to the miracles Jesus has performed, such as healing the man who was now carrying his mat back home on a Sabbath day. But the Jews could each think of miracles in the Old Testament that would seem to be greater than this. Moses, Elijah and Elisha all performed miracles. They healed, they performed signs in nature like bringing water from a rock at God’s command, or causing a drought to occur for three years. They defeated armies by trusting God. There are even cases in the Old Testament of (Jesus is causing them to think of it) a prophet raising someone from the dead. Jesus wants their thoughts to travel that far, and is focusing their minds on that possibility. And he continues…
21 For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.
Yes, Jesus is talking about miracles that will go as far as raising the dead (in this Gospel, we will see Jesus do this in chapter 11). But just at the moment when Jesus mentions raising the dead, he also shows us that he has been talking about two things at once. Yes, he means physically causing the dead to awaken to life once again, but he is also talking about the spiritually dead, those who do not have faith, being brought to faith and therefore to spiritual life. But don’t think that the two aren’t connected. Those who are spiritually dead, who have rejected Christ, will rise to life on the Last Day, but not to eternal life in heaven. They will rise with a reunited body and soul, but because of their unbelief they will rise to eternal punishment in hell. From their sleep of death they will awaken into an everlasting nightmare of pain and horror, where “their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind” (Isaiah 66:24).
But those who have been raised to spiritual life on earth, who have been given faith in Christ and who have not turned away from that faith, will rise to eternal glory—which Jesus will describe in beautiful detail at the beginning of chapter 14.
22 Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, 23 that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him. (NIV)
Speaking of being raised from the dead; this will happen to us all on the Last Day. All of us who will no longer be living on the Last Day will be raised from the dead and will stand together with those people who still live, and we will stand judged by God. And Jesus Christ himself will be the judge of the living and the dead. And whether a person is to be eternally blessed or damned, every knee will bow (Isaiah 45:23) and every tongue will confess that God is the true God (Romans 14:11)—and that Jesus Christ is truly God, just as the Father is. This is why we confess in the creed, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”
What we say about the Father as God we can also say about the Son, Jesus Christ. Both Father and Son are truly God Almighty (the divinity of the Holy Spirit will also be defended in the Gospel of John, but for that we will wait until chapters 14 and 15. But for now we take comfort and assurance that “Jesus is the Son of God” (Acts 9:20), just as he himself confessed and as the Apostles preached.
Through Jesus, we have the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of our bodies, which will be reunited with our souls in eternal life in heaven.
Something Extra:
Ecclesiastes 1:14-15
14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun;
all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
15 What is twisted cannot be straightened;
what is lacking cannot be counted. (NIV)
Solomon still hasn’t said it, but he is gradually leading us to comprehend: Without God in our lives, any pursuit we follow will be meaningless. Without God, we can’t make the crooked straight; without faith, we can’t make the rough places smooth. The second half of verse 15 means this: A person who truly pursues wisdom will eventually discover that even those things that are missing from human knowledge are so vast that they are uncountable.
These things are not meant to frustrate us with the pursuit of knowledge nor with education or universities. These things are meant to point us to the place where everything that is lacking—as uncountable and impossible as it may seem—is filled in and supplied by Christ. What is missing from our human nature is the holiness demanded by God. What is impossible to us is obedience to God’s commandments, but that’s exactly the what Jesus has given to us with his perfect obedience.
What it so beautiful about Solomon’s Ecclesiastes is precisely this persistent message: We are incomplete without God; we are condemned without Christ. And so we turn to Jesus again and again; every day we turn to him like it was the first time, answering his loving call in the gospel. Only in Christ can we say with Job, “I am pure and without sin, I am clean and free from guilt” (Job 33:9). But in Christ, we can say it with confidence, with faith, and with the assurance that all of our sins have been atoned for; we are truly clean, because we have been forgiven.
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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