Commentary

41 At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”

The crowd doubted the evidence first, insisting that Jesus owed them a better miracle since their ancestors ate bread from Moses. Now, they move from attacking the evidence to attacking his identity.
“Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?

1. They grumble at Jesus’s claim to be the bread from heaven, questioning his origins: “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph… How can he now say, I came down from heaven?”
2. “These Jews were far off from the bread of heaven, and knew not how to hunger after it. They had the jaws of their heart languid; with open ears they were deaf, they saw and stood blind.” -Augustine, Tractate 26, 1.

43 “Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

Christ’s Response
1. Jesus answers their attack on his identity by explaining their doubt. Why can’t they come to him? Because the Father has not drawn them. All of this is in the Father’s plan.
2. Jesus is the only one able to see God. He has knowledge in a way nobody else has. Even Moses could only see God by hiding in a rock and seeing his back (Exodus 33:21-22). Jesus is God and can see God in His fullness.
3. He reiterates his promise: those who believe have eternal life. Previous bread only delayed death. Christ’s flesh will end it.
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them,”
1. “[H]ave I not myself heard you say in your heart, ‘Jesus, Jesus, my whole trust Is in thee: I know that no righteousness of my own can save me, but only thou, O Christ, sink or swim, I cast myself on thee?’ Oh, my brother, thou art drawn by the Father, for thou couldst not have come unless he had drawn thee. Sweet thought! And if he has drawn thee, dost thou know what is the delightful inference? Let me repeat one text, and may that comfort thee: ‘The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.’ Yes, my poor weeping brother, inasmuch as thou art now coming to Christ, God has drawn thee; and inasmuch as he has drawn thee, it is a proof that he has loved thee from before the foundation of the world. Let thy heart leap within thee, thou art one of his.” -Charles Spurgeon, “Human Inability,” Mar. 7, 1858.

52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

53 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

First, they doubted the evidence, telling Jesus that their ancestors got bread from Moses and they deserved a better miracle. Second, they doubted his identity, insisting that he was just the son of Joseph, not anyone from heaven. Now, they doubt his message, claiming that he’s not even coherent.
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
1. The crowd fixates on a highly literal objection: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” even though Jesus speaks in a metaphor that points towards a profound spiritual reality.
  1. This rejection is very similar to when Nicodemos objected to Jesus’s language about being “born again” in John 3:4.
Jesus doesn’t back down; he doubles down: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you… my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.” He has no interest in slowly chipping away at his message to accommodate people who have no real interest in it.
1. “Unless ye eat the flesh of the Son of man – Spiritually: unless ye draw continual virtue from him by faith. Eating his flesh is only another expression for believing.” -John Wesley, John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes of the NT, Jn 6.
2. “It should be noted that this can refer either to spiritual eating or to sacramental eating. If it refers to spiritual eating, there is no doubt about the application… However, if it is applied to sacramental eating, a problem arises… since in the one receiving the Eucharist actual reverence and devotion are required, which those who do not have the full use of reason, such as children and the mentally ill, do not have, and therefore it is in no way to be given to them.” -Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John, Lecture 7, 969.

60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

61 Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63 The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. 64 Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. 65 He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.”

“This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
1. Often, so called “hard teachings” are less about comprehension and more about acceptance.
  1. One of the top defenses against countercultural commands is “I don’t understand this part.” Verses like Mark 10:2-12 (Jesus on Divorce) and 1 Timothy 1:10 (Paul on sexuality) are more than clear as they’re worded, but many still claim that they can’t understand what the Bible says on these topics.
  2. Often “I’m confused” masks unwillingness to accept teachings that challenge personal preferences. The Christian life asks, “Do we trust that God knows more than we do and that his ways are good?”
2. Jesus asks, “Does this offend you?” and warns that if they stumble here, they will be further confounded by future events like his ascension.
3. Jesus does not water down his teaching or chase those leaving; he invites trust beyond comfortable words, preparing disciples for wild things to come.
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them… no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.”
1. Jesus knew from the beginning who did not believe and who would betray him.
“Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life.”
1. Jesus’s words are “full of Spirit and life;” understanding and embracing them relies on divine action, not just human effort.
Augustine famously wrote about this struggle to know God and approach him by drawing on Romans 10:14 in Confessions.
1. “Lord, what comes first: asking for your help or praising you? Do we start a life with you by asking for your help? Or do we need to know who you are before we can do that? How could we ask for your help if we don’t know who you are? We might start talking to you like you were some totally different being! Or do we start out by asking for your help so that we can know you? But how could we ask for help from a god that we don’t believe in? And how could we believe in that god if nobody brought the Gospel to us? In the end, people who seek the Lord always end up praising him, because anyone who seeks will find, and anyone who finds will praise. I’m seeking you, Lord, by asking for your help. I’m calling on your name while believing completely in you because the Gospel was brought to me. You gave me faith, and now that faith is crying out to you.” -Augustine, Confessions, Ch. 1.
2. If you can’t see God, pray to Him. “Knock and the door will be opened.” (Matt. 7:7)

66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

67 “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.

68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”

70 Then Jesus replied, “Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!” 71 (He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve, was later to betray him.)

“You do not want to leave too, do you?
1. As people leave due to his “hard teaching, Jesus asks the Twelve if they also wish to leave. It had to have been an emotionally-charged moment as thousands left and he turned to his closest friends.
2. Peter’s confession: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…” isn’t just a buddy cheering up a sad friend. Peter sincerely believes in everything that Jesus is said. He’s seen the evidence, he acknowledges Jesus’s identity, and he believes in the message.
“Yet one of you is a devil!”
1. Jesus repeatedly forewarns about Judas’s betrayal, which does not change Judas’s course. What God has destined will not be changed by human will, even if Judas has every opportunity to do otherwise.
2. The disciples were tested through all of this. The crowd left, but they stayed despite how unpopular it was. This wasn’t the end of the testing. Their faith would continue to be tested throughout their lives, and not everyone would pass in the end.
3. “Mark the wisdom of Christ: He neither, by exposing him, makes him shameless and contentious; nor again emboldens him, by allowing him to think himself concealed.” -Chrysostom, Hom. xlvii. 4.

Full Transcript

For weeks we have talked about this question: If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t he give us everything we want? We have looked at wrong answer after wrong answer, haven’t we? We’ve looked at the prosperity gospel—this claim that God wants to give you everything you could possibly imagine, and the only thing holding him back is you! You don’t have the faith. If you did, you’d have that new car. That doesn’t align with scripture. The apostles were not promised health or wealth, and they did not get it.

We looked at the claims that God deals with spiritual stuff, that he doesn’t deal with earthly stuff because that’s beneath him. Don’t go to him for stuff like food or money; it’s beneath him. He deals with spiritual things. Also, not true. Throughout this chapter, we saw God dealing with very physical things. He multiplied bread and fish; He helped His apostles get across a sea. These are all very physical, worldly things going on, and he deals with each of them without being disgusted. God made the world; he certainly doesn’t hate it. It’s not beneath him.

Then last week, we even looked at the classic atheist response: if God’s all-powerful, why doesn’t he give us everything we want? They would say, because he can’t, because he’s not real. We see bad things happen every day. If there was an all-powerful, good God, wouldn’t he stop those bad things from happening? Of course he would, but he doesn’t—because he can’t, because he’s not real. The atheists would have us dead to rights if that’s the God the Bible described. If the Bible said there is an all-powerful God, and he’s good, and no bad things will ever happen to you, what would we say in response?

That’s not what the Bible says. The Bible never says that you’re not going to suffer. As a matter of fact, many people in the Bible do suffer despite following God. The true biblical answer to this that we finally get to dwell on now is this: God won’t always give us what we want, but He’ll give us what we need. God’s miracles are not at our beck and call. There it is, and he has told us what his will is. He’s told us in no uncertain terms what he wants to do. He said, “I want you to live eternally. I want to destroy sin and death.” Part of the problem is we are still addicted in many ways to sin and death.

Giving us what we want would actually go against what he wants in many cases. God has to find a way to rehabilitate us, to help us seek what is good in an eternal sense, not just in a temporary sense. Sometimes that won’t be easy. The question is, can we trust him? Knowing what he said he’s going to do, knowing what his goals are, and knowing that they don’t always align with ours, do we trust him?

We’re going to look at that even more today as we continue on from where we left off. Let’s briefly refresh our memories. We began chapter six four weeks ago. All the way back then, where did we start? Jesus was teaching and he was healing by the Sea of Galilee, and there were all these people—five thousand or more. They didn’t have anything to eat. Jesus turns to Philip, “Hey, we need to feed these people.” Philip says, “Impossible! Can’t be done!” Meanwhile, a boy offers Jesus some bread and some fish, and Jesus starts handing it out. He just keeps going and going. There is not only enough; there is more than enough. At this point, the crowd gets to thinking and they say, “Hey, if he can do that with bread, what else can he do? I want this guy working for me. Let’s make him our king whether he wants to be king or not. He’s going to solve our problems.” Jesus goes up a mountain to pray, and he tells his disciples to go across the sea.

That night there is a horrible storm, and they are paddling and paddling, trying to get across the sea. All night they only get halfway. Muscles aching, blisters on their hands, not getting where they want to go, but Jesus comes to them over the water. The second they trust him and let him onto their boat, they’re right where they want to be. They have learned a lesson, but the crowd has not. The next day they wake up and say, “Hey, where’d Jesus go? I can’t find him anywhere.” So after searching, they get on some boats. They go across the Sea of Galilee, and they start searching on the other side. Finally, they go into Capernaum. They find Jesus teaching there in a synagogue, and they start asking him questions. They say, “Jesus, where have you been?” He says, “You’re here because you want bread and fish. You want something that’s going to be good for a day. I want to give you something that’s good for eternity. Believe in me. Believe in me and you will have eternal life.”

They immediately start to doubt him. The first doubt they throw out there is they doubt whether he’s given them sufficient evidence to believe in him. They say, “Okay, so you gave us some bread once. Not a big deal. Moses did that. He did the bread thing. You’re going to have to do better than bread if you want us to believe in you.” Which is pretty ironic. They came all this way because of the bread. Obviously, they were impressed, but the second Jesus says, “Trust in me, not in yourselves,” then they start to bristle. Then they start to take a step back. Hold on! I don’t know if I am ready to trust you. I liked the bread trick, but that’s not enough. They’re going to continue to take steps back. They’re going to doubt Jesus three times throughout the course of this, moving from doubting whether he’s given them enough evidence, to doubting who he is next, and then finally they are going to doubt whether his message even makes sense at all.

That is where we pick up after the first doubt, and Jesus has reaffirmed that he does indeed offer eternal life. He gets a little wordier this time, a little fuller. Pay attention to that. We pick up at verse forty-one. At this, the Jews began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?” This guy’s not so special. I know his dad. That’s Joe’s kid. This is not a big deal. Now he’s acting like he’s all special. “I’m from heaven. You’re not.” I know where you’re from. I know your parents. Again, strange, isn’t it?

Just yesterday, they called him the prophet in the line of Moses and wanted to force him to be their king. They obviously knew there was something special about this guy, but the second Jesus tries to acknowledge that and explain it to them, they take another step back. Jesus responds to their second doubt saying, “Stop grumbling among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and has learned comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

Notice again—he’s gotten even more complicated. Jesus doesn’t water it down when people object. If anything, He seems to get a little more intense. He’ll explain why. But notice also here he’s gotten more complex, but he hasn’t gotten insanely, unfollowably complex. The core of his message that he said all the way back in verse twenty-nine is still there, and we know how he got there. He said, “You are here for bread. You were impressed by loaves and fishes. You wanted bread for a day. I want to give you bread that will last for eternity. Believe in me.” He’s gotten a little more complex, but that’s still there, and they’ve seen the argument kind of develop. I don’t think it’s unfollowable. I don’t think at this point there is any rational reason to believe that Jesus is saying, “Hey, come up here and take a bite out of my arm. It’s going to do something for you.” No, obviously he’s not.

The crowd goes in that direction anyway. They argue sharply among themselves and say, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Suddenly, Jesus doesn’t make sense to them anymore. We saw this all the way back in John chapter 3 with Nicodemus. Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again.” And what did Nicodemus say? “Jesus, come on. That’s ridiculous. What, you want me to crawl back inside my mother’s womb? You don’t make any sense.” Jesus did not invent metaphor. It was around; it was well-established since the beginning of time. Nicodemus knew that Jesus was not proposing what he said, in the same way that this crowd understands that Jesus does not literally want them to go up and tear him to pieces with their teeth. They know what he’s asking for. They just don’t want to do it. The confusion with the crowd is not up here. It’s not that they don’t understand; it’s that they’re not willing to accept it, and that’s a different thing.

I’ve seen this many times in the church. I remember, for example, there was one church where they would read two scriptures every Sunday, and it was from the lectionary, so they were all pre-chosen for the entire year. The first scripture would always be read by a member of the congregation. The second scripture would always be read by the pastor, and the pastor would preach from the second passage. One day, the congregation member gets up to read their first one. She stands up there and she reads the Mark passage—Mark chapter ten, verses two through twelve:

Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” “What did Moses command you?” he replied. They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So that they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.” And when they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”

Sure enough, they read this. Then they followed it up with this in front of the whole church. They said, “And as a divorced person, I’m confused. I’m so confused by this. I hope the pastor’s about to tell us what this means because I don’t understand it. I sure hope they have some answers.” It was uncomfortable. The pastor got up there and disarmed the situation. They said, “I’m actually going to preach on the second passage. But if anyone’s confused and would like to talk about the first passage you heard, come to my office hours. Delighted to talk about that or anything else you’re confused about.” I think the uncomfortable thing wasn’t necessarily the combativeness; it wasn’t that as much as the fact that the passage isn’t really that unclear. She knew what it said; she just didn’t like it. She wasn’t willing to accept it, and again, that can happen in so many places.

I remember with the split of the United Methodist Church, I can remember a colleague coming to me and saying, “I am wrestling with this because one of the things people seem to disagree on is same-sex marriage. And I just don’t understand. I read this morning in First Timothy, chapter one, verse ten. It says, ‘Those who practice homosexuality will not enter the kingdom of God.’ That’s what it says, but I don’t know what that means. That doesn’t make any sense because we don’t know what Paul was dealing with. That could mean any number of things. I mean, maybe he’s talking about prostitution. Maybe he’s talking about pedophilia. We just can’t know what Paul meant. We can’t know. I’m too confused. I don’t understand what he was trying to say. If only he would have left a second letter explaining his first letter, maybe we could have known what he meant, but we just can’t. It’s so confusing.”

I responded and said, “Well, what if he meant what he said? What if the two thousand years of Christians who all believed that he meant what he said were right, and it’s exactly what it looks like? I think your concerns are because the ethics that are often practiced today suggest that if you have any restrictions on sexuality, you must hate someone. Jesus never tells us to hate anyone—by no means. We’re supposed to love people, but there are certain ways that God tells us to shepherd our sexuality. That’s what the church has traditionally held. That’s what makes sense in the passage. What if Paul meant what he said?” He just responded, “That’s ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous. You can’t know what he meant. You can’t know. It’s impossible to know.” He knew what it said. He just wasn’t willing to accept it.

I don’t say this as someone who always is willing to accept what the Bible says immediately. We’ve all had those instances, haven’t we, where we read something—something that touches a nerve, something that calls us out, something that makes us say, “Jesus is going too far here. That’s not… I’m confused. I don’t understand what this means.” Often the confusion is not up here; it’s here. God has shared something that isn’t the way we would have done it. Do we trust him? Do we trust that he knows more than we do, and that his ways are good?

The crowd doesn’t. The crowd thinks he’s too baffling. They’re not ready to trust him. In verse fifty-three, Jesus responds again and again. Notice he will not make it even a little bit easier; he will get more intense again. He says, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.”

“This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. Really intense. He’s just gone right out there. They’ve said, “I object on this premise,” and he says, “Let’s talk about that premise. I’m going to go with it. I’m going to run with it.” Why is he doing this? He’s about to explain. Verse 60: On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” Notice what they say there. They don’t say, “This is a hard teaching. Who can understand it?” They understand. This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it? Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where He was before?”

Here he’s explaining why he is getting more intense. If he was chasing people down saying, “No, don’t walk away. Hear me out. Let’s work through this together”—Jesus doesn’t do that, though, and that’s consistent throughout the scripture. Think about the story of the rich young ruler who came to Jesus and said, “Jesus, I need you. I want to follow you. What do I need to do?” Jesus said, “Sell everything, give the money to the poor, and come follow me.” The man leaves sad because he’s not willing to do that. Jesus doesn’t chase him down; he lets him go. That seems to be the same spirit Jesus has here. He gets more intense. He doesn’t water it down. He says, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before?”

If you can’t believe this, this is just a starting place. This is nothing. Just wait, things get crazier from here. If you can’t accept this, there are going to be things to come that will utterly confound you. You are going to see the miraculous and balk. You are going to see things like me ascending—I’m going to leave. What are you going to do? You’re going to panic! Why? Because right now you’re counting on me making it easy, coming to you, and constantly making things easier. I don’t want you to trust my pretty words. I want you to trust me. Do you trust me? Because if you do, you will be able to weather anything that comes—all the wild stuff. That’s good for us today, too. God isn’t done doing wild things. If we can’t trust him in the little stuff, how can we trust him with things that haven’t even happened yet?

“The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.”

When we see Jesus getting more intense and not chasing people down, it can feel like he must hate them or that he doesn’t care about them. We think if he really cared, he would make it easier. Jesus says, no. Everything I have spoken is spirit and life. Those who are enabled by the Father will get it. What does that mean? Here, we’ve got a group of thousands of people that we know are genuinely interested in Jesus. They have followed him to both sides of a sea and hunted for him on either side. They care, but they’re looking by their own power, not by God’s power. When humanity sinned and fell away from God, we became incapable of doing good.

We were meant to function hand in hand with God. The Holy Spirit is supposed to be our fuel, keeping us going and drawing us closer to God. When we cut ourselves off from God, how are we supposed to do good without the Holy Spirit? We’re capable of no good without God, and that includes things like knowing God. Even just knowing God is a good thing, and without God, we’re not even capable of that.

So what’s the solution? We have to ask God for help in knowing God. That seems a little crazy, I know. It’s a bit of a mind-bender. Even in his seminal work, Confessions, Augustine of Hippo admits that this is incredibly confusing. How do I do that? How do I call on a God that I don’t know yet? I have to know Him to call on Him, don’t I? And yet, when a preacher brings that word, it provides enough information to help us call on Him. You are loyal, God. You listen, and you allow us to draw on you to know you better. The only real way to know God is through God. We need His help to even know Him.

That is applicable to us today as well. If you are in a place where you can’t see God—you are looking and you just can’t see Him in the world around you—ask him for help. Just pray a simple prayer: God, reveal yourself to me. Help me to see you in this world. Help me to know you better. Knock and the door will be opened.

Verse 66: From this time, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the twelve. We know Jesus knows the answer to this. That’s been one of the focuses throughout John chapter six. Every time there has been a question, the text tells us that Jesus already knew. It said just a few verses ago that Jesus already knew who was going to follow him and who wasn’t. He knows. But you have to imagine this is an emotionally charged question, because watching thousands of people turn away—thousands of people he loved, thousands of people he came here to save and to die for—watching them walk away must have broken his heart. He turns to the twelve: “You don’t want to leave me too, do you?” Simon Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” What a beautiful response. Peter gets a lot of things wrong, but this is beautiful. Lord, to whom shall we go? Where else could we go? Jesus, this is home. We belong with you. We wouldn’t know where else to go. Of course, we’re going to be here.

Is Jesus your hope? Could you say that? Who else would we go to? There is nowhere else. I’ll be here no matter what; it’s where I belong. “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” He doesn’t say, “We have come to believe that we believe in you,” or, “We’ve come to believe that it’s possible that you are the way.” He doesn’t say, “We have come to believe that we have faith that you are the one.” He says, “We believe and we know.” The witness of God opened his eyes. He doesn’t just theorize; he knows. The evidence is sufficient. He knows.

The Holy Spirit can do that. You can know who God is. Wouldn’t this be a perfect place to end? Honestly, for a while, I thought it ended there. Isn’t it a nice triumphal ending? Everyone leaves, but the disciples stay and they’re not going anywhere. It doesn’t end there, though; it goes on just a little more. Jesus replies, “Have I not chosen you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.” He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the twelve, was later to betray him.

This is not the only time Jesus says something like this. There are multiple instances in Scripture where Jesus, in front of Judas, foretells that Judas will betray him. It doesn’t seem to change Judas’s mind. Judas does not seem to be someone who is particularly open to meditating on the words of Jesus. We’ve all known that person who, whenever they hear criticism, looks at everyone else. I imagine Judas is like that. If Judas were around today and working in an office, and the boss came out and said, “All right guys, this quarter we’re going to have to work extra hard. I know some people have been slacking. I need you to buckle down,” Judas would be there saying, “Yeah! I know you guys have been slacking. Time to get serious.” Meanwhile, Judas is the one sleeping at his desk. He doesn’t even recognize it. He just looks at everyone else and says they’re the problem.

I imagine Judas is in just the same place here. Judas unapologetically is the one who is going to betray Jesus, and yet when Jesus says, “One of you is going to betray me,” I imagine Judas looking really severely at everyone else, maybe even looking at Peter. But it’s Judas. He’s a hypocrite. He doesn’t think these things through.

The passage ends on a note of telling them that it’s not done. They have faith here and they’ve learned, but it’s not over. There is more to come. There are new challenges that they will have to learn to trust God through. They’ve learned to trust Jesus even when the crowd turns away, but now there is a new circumstance: one of the twelve will turn away. There’s something new that they will go through, and they will need a new depth of trust in Jesus because even one of the ones that he chose will turn away.

The Christian life is always one of new challenges. There’s never a moment where you just say, “I have faith in Jesus,” and you’re done, you’re finished, and you never have to worry about it again because you trust Him and that’s good forever. You will still be concerned, you will still be afraid, and you will still be confused. The Christian life continually involves gaining a new, deeper faith. There are always new things that you will wrestle with and new challenges that life throws at you. Can you trust Jesus there? Can you trust him in what’s next? That development of faith doesn’t end after you just do it once. Continually, we are invited to know him better and to trust him even more.

Here at the end, let’s ask our question one last time: If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t he give me what I want? Why doesn’t he guarantee health and wealth? God’s miracles are not at our beck and call; they’re at His. We can ask him for help, and sometimes we’ll get it, and sometimes we won’t. Ultimately, a big part of this is trusting his will. He’s made his will known to us; he’s told us what he’s seeking. He is seeking the end of sin and death itself. He is seeking something wonderful, and he’s trying to help us. He’s told us that.

Can we trust him? Can we trust him when things are easy and when things are hard, when we get the miracle and when we don’t? God has not promised us anything in this life; he’s promised us everything in the next. Do we believe that? Can we trust him? The disciples learned to trust him. The crowd did not; they found every excuse in the book. Can we trust him? We have to learn to trust if we really want to be followers of God—to trust that in all circumstances he is seeking our good, our wellness, and that he loves us immensely.

Amen.

John 6:1-15: The Feeding of the Five Thousand

May 6, 2026May 12, 2026 ~ Vincent

Video Teaching
Verse-by-Verse Commentary
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Back: John 5:15-47

Overview: John 6

Next: John 6:16-24

From the Pulpit

Commentary

6 Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), 2 and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick.

3 Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. 4 The Jewish Passover Festival was near.

“a great crowd of people followed him”
1. Notice that the crowd followed Jesus out into the wilderness without any food to begin with. One can’t help but be impressed by their devotion.
2. “Here we see, in the first place, how eager was the desire of the people to hear Christ, since all of them, forgetting themselves, take no concern about spending the night in a desert place. So much the less excusable is our indifference, or rather our sloth, when we are so far from preferring the heavenly doctrine to the gnawings of hunger, that the slightest interruptions immediately lead us away from meditation on the heavenly life.” -John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentary on John
“The Jewish Passover Festival was near.”
1. This detail adds another interesting dimension to the miracle. Passover commemorates the freedom of the Hebrew people from Egypt, after which people journeyed into the wilderness to reach the promised land. In the wilderness, the people were sustained by miraculous bread from God. At the upcoming feeding of the five thousand, here we are again, with people going into the wilderness and getting sustained by miraculous bread from God. What God did once long ago, he does again here.

5 When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle, besides the resurrection, found in all four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John).
1. “Therefore as to this miracle, since we have heard how great it is, let us also search how profound it is; let us not only be delighted with its surface, but let us also seek to know its depth. This miracle, which we admire on the outside, has something within.” -Augustine, Tractate 24 on John, 2.
The Book of Luke tells us that Jesus also taught and healed while he was in the wilderness with the crowd.
“…to test him…”
1. Notice that Scripture explicitly says that Jesus was testing Philip. There’s intentionality behind his choice to go into the wilderness without food. This is no accident.
2. “Or to shew others it. He was not ignorant of His disciple’s heart Himself.” -Theophylact’s Commentary on John

7 Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages[a] to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”

Philip failed the test by relying on earthly calculations, estimating more than a year’s wages would barely suffice. He focused on his capacity instead of Jesus’s.

8 Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, 9 “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”

Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, isn’t mentioned in Scripture a lot, but when he is, he’s consistently bringing people to Jesus.
1. John 1:40–42 Andrew meets Jesus and then runs to Simon to introduce him to Jesus as well.
2. John 12:20-22 A group of Greeks are in Jerusalem for the passover and want to meet Jesus. Philip turns to Andrew to make that introduction.
“…five small barley loaves and two small fish…”
1. Notice that the word “small” is used twice to emphasize just how insufficient this particular meal is.
2. Barley, the cheapest grain (about a third the value of wheat), was “peasant food.” The meal was meager. If this happened today, it may well have been five slices of Wonder Bread and a tin of tuna.

10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). 11 Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.

“(about five thousand men were there)”
1. The crowd numbered at least 5,000 men, not including women and children—possibly totaling 7,000 to 15,000.
Notice the three steps that Jesus takes:
1. 1. Took: Jesus took the loaves and fish, signaling that God’s work often involves offering what we have to him. God desires human participation in his work.
  2. Gave Thanks: Jesus gives thanks for the tiny insufficient meal. In his hands, it is more than enough. Sometimes, we may feel insufficient, but the way God sees us is different. In his hands, we are more than enough.
  3. Distributed: He distributed the food, and everyone ate “as much as they wanted.” In God, there isn’t just enough. There’s MORE than enough.

12 When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” 13 So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.

“…twelve baskets…”
1. The miracle of Jesus doesn’t just give people enough; it gives them more than enough.
2. “[W]hy did He give the fragments to His disciples to carry away, and not to the multitude? Because the disciples were to be the teachers of the world, and therefore it was most important that the truth should be impressed upon them.” – Chrysostom, Hom. xlii. 3

14 After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.”

15 Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

“Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.”
1. “He was the Lord of the prophets, the fulfiller of the prophets, the sanctifier of the prophets, but yet a prophet also: for it was said to Moses, I will raise up for them a prophet like you. Like, according to the flesh, but not according to the majesty…. And the Lord says of Himself, A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country. (Jn 4:44)” -Augustine, Tractate 24 on John, 7.
“…they intended to come and make him king by force…”
1. They wanted to make Jesus an earthly king by force, likely expecting him to overthrow Romans and fix their economy. They saw Jesus as a tool to achieve their goals.
2. There are also many people today who want to harness God for their own personal gain. Preachers of the “prosperity gospel” make all kinds of claims about how God will give people exactly what they want if they only respond in the way that the preacher is insisting they should.
3. Rather than trying to make God follow our agenda, we need to serve His.
4. Be hungry for the bread of life, not just a life of bread.

Full Transcript

If God has infinite power, why doesn’t he use it to solve my problems? If God has infinite power, why don’t I have a new car? Why don’t I have a million dollars? He has miracles, right? Why doesn’t he whip up a miracle and give me a million bucks? That would be a good miracle in my book. Why doesn’t he give me health and wealth? Why doesn’t God do that? Some people will tell you that he does.

Some people will say that’s exactly how God works. God wants to give you a million dollars; God has that new car waiting for you. The problem is you just don’t believe enough. If you have enough faith, he’s going to give you all that and more. We call those people prosperity gospel preachers. The prosperity gospel is the belief that God will solve all of your problems exactly the way you want them solved if you do something. Maybe you need to have more faith, or maybe you need to give him money. Maybe something needs to be done, and then you will get everything you’ve ever dreamed of. You’ll get the money, the car, the health, and the wealth. You’ll get all of it. This is surprisingly popular.

It is wildly popular. The last time I went to Barnes & Noble, the majority of books prominently featured in the Christian section were by prosperity gospel writers. I’m sure anyone who’s ever seen a preacher on TV knows that televangelists are famously associated with the prosperity gospel. That doesn’t mean all authors and all TV preachers are like that, but a lot of them are. It’s a popular thing because it’s attractive. Who doesn’t want a silver bullet out there that’s going to solve all their problems? That would be great! Now I don’t have to worry about it; I just need that “thing.”

The problem, of course, is that it’s not true. That should be pretty obvious, at least because if you think about the Bible, you have to ask: was Jesus rich? This is not a theoretical question; this is for you. Was Jesus rich? Jesus was not rich. Was Peter rich? Was John rich? Was Andrew rich? None of them were rich. This is a faith about a crucified God. The apostles mostly were martyrs, with the sole exception of John, who died in exile. None of them got rich quick. The fact that people somehow hijack Christianity to claim that you can get rich quick today just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t fit, but that has not stopped people from making the claim anyway.

This past week, I looked through some prosperity gospel preachers just to see the kind of things they say. Here were some of my favorite quotes: “Don’t wait for the pie in the sky by and by when you die. Get yours now with ice cream and a cherry on top.” “Sow a seed on your Mastercard, your Visa, or your American Express, and when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing.” “You must believe and then you’ll receive.”

My personal favorite apparently made headlines. There was one televangelist who explained to everyone that he had heard from God, and God told him that he was going to “call him home” unless his congregation could fundraise eight million dollars in three months. It’s just shameless. A lot of stuff like this is out there, and it’s just shameless. God doesn’t work like that.

The core idea here—that God wants to solve all of your problems on your terms—is half true. God wants to solve our problems. The biggest thing that gets in the way is that we don’t even know what our biggest problems are. We think we know. We think if God would just give us a million dollars, that would solve the problem. But God says, “That’s not your biggest problem. There’s some other stuff that’s way bigger in your life, and I’m working on that.”

Let’s dive into chapter six. Sometime after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick. As you can probably surmise from the theme of this chapter, the crowd is going to get a lot of stuff wrong in the coming verses. But I like how we start. We start in a good place. These people are excited to know Jesus. Jesus is going to the other side of a sea, and their response is to go to the other side of the sea, too. They didn’t even have anything to eat. Thousands of people went to the other side of a sea just for the opportunity to spend more time with Jesus. That is a level of enthusiasm that is admirable regardless of what follows.

Are you that excited this morning? I hope you are. I hope you have that level of excitement in you because you should be excited. I think it’s easy for some folks to get ho-hum about church because we can’t see the spiritual reality of it; we only see the physical reality. We see the same walls and the same people. But we are in the house of God and Jesus is with us, and we get the chance to know him better. You should be excited. If you’re not excited, get excited.

Here are some people who are excited. They know how great Jesus is, and they want the chance to know him better. Verse three says: “Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. The Jewish Passover festival was near.” Why are they telling us that detail? On one hand, they are telling us this because it helps you locate it in the time of the year.

I think another reason they’re invoking Passover here is that Passover is about remembering the plagues. That’s the final plague that came on Egypt. The angel of death came to Egypt because they would not free the Hebrew slaves and killed the firstborn of all the Egyptians. After that day, Pharaoh said to let the Israelites go free. That is really what we’re celebrating here: the freedom and what happened right after they were free. They went into the wilderness for a long time and were sustained by bread from heaven. Isn’t it interesting? Here are some people going into the wilderness to be sustained by some miraculous bread. God does something once, and then he does it again later. It’s almost like echoes of something that already happened—in this case, an even bigger instance of something from the past.

Verse five says when Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming towards him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” By the way, this particular miracle is the only miracle in the entire four gospels that appears in each one of them, barring the resurrection. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there are a lot of stories that make it to two or three gospels, but this is a miraculous story that appears in all of them. This is really helpful because it tells us some of the details if you read across the breadth of scripture.

People are just coming up to Jesus, and he says, “We have to get food ready.” What are they doing out there? Are they just going to get a meal? Luckily, Luke fills in some of the details. It tells us that Jesus, during their time out here, also taught them and healed them. That is just a little that can be filled in by looking at the other scriptures.

Picking up again, when Jesus saw a great crowd coming towards him, he turned to Philip and asked, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do. It’s important that it tells us he was testing him. Can you imagine if that little detail wasn’t there? It would change the feel of the whole thing. Jesus turns to Philip and asks if they have any way to feed these people, Philip says they don’t because it’s too expensive, and then Jesus says he guesses he has to pull a miracle out. It would make the whole thing feel unintentional, like an accident where Jesus doesn’t understand money and has to do something to make up for it. It changes the whole vibe if you don’t know it’s a test.

God knows everything. He already knows what’s going to happen. He gives people the opportunity to do what’s right and show that they get it, or he gives people the opportunity to show that they need a little more time being educated. That’s what’s happening to Philip here. It’s important to note that because it happens throughout the Bible. Sometimes God asks someone a question when he already knows the answer. Sometimes God says one thing and then later does it a little differently because someone has spoken with him. It seems almost like he’s changed his mind, but God didn’t change his mind; he gave someone the opportunity to speak truth in a way that was good.

God tests people, and it’s true with us, too. Sometimes we go through some stuff and it’s not what we expect. God tests us. He gives us the opportunity to do what’s right or to show we need some more education. Philip, unfortunately, fails this particular test. He responds by saying it would take more than a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite. Faced with this crazy task, Philip immediately relies on himself. He’s from the area and knows things pretty well. He seems to be able to look at the crowd and think about where he could get food. He probably at some point has spoken with Judas, the treasurer of the group.

How crazy is that to think about, by the way? Jesus chose Judas to be the treasurer. Thank goodness we have Charity and Todd; I’d hate to have a Judas in that position. So, Philip knows about how much money they have. He knows the tools he has and what he brings to the table, and he knows this is not possible. He relies on his skills rather than on Jesus. He needs a little more education.

Then Andrew comes up in verse eight. Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up: “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” Every time you see Andrew, he is introducing someone to Jesus. We saw him earlier in the book of John, and Andrew was introducing other people who would become disciples. Here, he’s introducing a young boy with loaves and fishes, and later on, he’s going to be introducing Gentiles to Jesus. Andrew is always introducing people to Jesus; it’s just one of those things he’s good at.

He introduces this boy who has five small barley loaves and two small fish. Notice that “small” is used twice here. This is not a big meal; it’s a boy’s meal. Some translations even say it’s a young boy’s meal. You have to imagine it’s not particularly big. Sometimes when you see Christian art, the boy comes forward with five nice, thick Italian loaves or big baguettes. Sometimes he’s got King’s Hawaiian—which, why wouldn’t you? It’s one of the best bread choices you can make. Those are all visually appealing, and there is nothing wrong with that, but in scripture, it’s not anything big. It’s five small barley loaves.

Barley loaves are not nice. Barley would have been the cheapest grain you could get; you can read about it in Ezekiel and Revelation. Barley comes up in both of those books as something that is not particularly valuable. If you give your kingdom away for a few handfuls of barley, you’ve given it away for nothing. Barley is worth about a third of what wheat is worth, so barley loaves are peasant food—commoner food. They’re not nice, and no one is necessarily excited to get them. It will fill your stomach, but it’s not particularly fancy.

A modern equivalent might be to imagine one of the kids that came up for the children’s moment. Imagine there was a church meal afterward and nothing had been prepared. One of those kids comes forward and they’ve got five slices of Wonder Bread and a tin of tuna. That’s what we’re looking at. This is not grand. People were probably thinking this wasn’t going to work. Even Andrew says as much: he notes the boy has some stuff to offer, but doesn’t know how far it’s going to get them.

But Jesus says, “Have the people sit down.” There is plenty of grass, so they sat down—about five thousand men were there. Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He begins by taking it. Obviously, the kid offered it; Jesus isn’t stealing the loaves, but he is taking them. The kid can’t hold on to the meal and still see this miracle happen. Jesus takes it so the miracle can follow, and that’s important to remember.

Whenever we see a miracle—like when Jesus turned water into wine—notice that he asked them to gather water. Here, we see him feeding five thousand people, but he asks this boy for a meal. Whenever Jesus does great things, he wants humans to participate. He wants us to do something. He’s not just a genie who poofs things out of nowhere. He could if he wanted to, but he wants us to participate in what he’s doing. He wants us to do something so he can magnify it and make it even greater. It’s really humbling the way he allows us to participate in the greatness of what he does. He takes the loaves, and more will come of them because of that. You have to imagine that even for the kid, this is a good deal: he gives up one lunch and he gets as much as he wants down the road.

Everyone benefits because this kid was willing to hand over his meal. After Jesus takes the loaves, he gives thanks. There’s a great quote I came across from Charles Spurgeon referencing Augustine. You’ve got the “Prince of Preachers” invoking the “Father of Orthodoxy.” He says, “For five little cates and two sprats, God gave thanks to the Father. Apparently a meager cause for praise. But Jesus knew what he could make of them, and therefore gave thanks for what they would presently accomplish. God loves us,” says Augustine, “for what we are becoming. Christ gave thanks for these trifles because he saw whereunto they would grow.”

Jesus gave thanks for these breads and fishes knowing that, in their current form, they weren’t enough to feed five thousand people. But in the hands of Jesus, they could. That’s good news for us because, in our current form, we can’t do a whole lot. We are limited and we make mistakes. We are certainly not capable of a lot of things, but in the hands of God, we are capable of incredible things. We’re capable of miracles, just like those loaves and fishes.

Then he hands out as much as people want. It says there were five thousand men, a number that does not necessarily involve the women or the children. So how big was the crowd when all was said and done? Was it seven thousand? Ten thousand? Fifteen thousand? It’s a massive crowd. Of those seven thousand people, how many might not have had many resources? How many might have been hungry or didn’t know where their next meal was coming from? Food insecurity is real today, but it was infinitely more so in this era.

Some of these people may never have had the opportunity to genuinely eat as much as they wanted with no concern about how it would impact them tomorrow. But Jesus does that. He makes this feast where people can eat as much as they want. This was something they likely had never seen; they didn’t have all-you-can-eat buffets. This was not necessarily fancy eating—it was still barley loaves and small fish—but they got enough. That’s the thing about the Christian life: sometimes we may not always get the fanciest stuff, but God will provide. He will give us what we need.

When they had all had enough to eat, Jesus said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over. Jesus doesn’t just provide enough; he provides more than enough.

After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the prophet who came into the world.” Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

The crowd gets to thinking: “Man, that guy can make loaves and fishes out of nothing. I bet he can use those powers to solve a lot of our other problems. The Romans are in charge and they’re pretty brutal. We’ve got economic problems; we’ve got tons of problems in Israel. Let’s get this guy to solve them all. Let’s make him our king.” Notice it doesn’t say they asked him if he wanted to be king; it says they wanted to make him king by force. They want to take God and get him to serve them. They don’t want to serve God.

They have just seen a man they are convinced is, at minimum, a prophet. They saw him multiply bread and fish with their own eyes. Instead of saying, “You must know something—how can I serve you and be a part of what you’re doing?” they say, “I’ve got some jobs for you.”

Jesus knows they do not get it, so he leaves. We will see more of this because that mentality doesn’t depart from them easily—the idea that God wants to give me “stuff,” that God can solve all my problems, and that he’s going to be the best employee I’ve ever seen by giving me money, a new house, and the perfect life. But Jesus is looking for people who want to look on a grander scale. He wants people who are hungry for the bread of life, not people who are just hungry for a life of bread.

We’ll see more of that next week as we see Jesus walk across the water. Amen.

John 5:15-47: The Authority of the Son

May 3, 2026May 7, 2026 ~ Vincent

Video Teaching
Verse-by-Verse Commentary
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Back: John 5:1-14

Overview: John 5

Next: John 6:1-15

From the Pulpit

Commentary

16 So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him.

Historic Context of Sabbath Observance
1. The Jewish leaders are acting the way they are because of the history of the Jewish people. The Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments, and the Old Testament penalty for breaking it was death (Exo. 31:14-15 and 35:2)
2. Israel’s failure to keep the Sabbath contributed to their 70 years in exile (2 Chron. 36:20-21, Lev. 26:33-35, Jer. 25:11-12)
3. The exile ended about 500 years before the time of Christ, but it was a massive event in Israelite history. A significant part of their communal self-understanding was wrapped up in that period of exile.
4. This led to taking the law so seriously that they created a series of laws concerning what activities were allowable and which ones weren’t that were so complex that they even dictated what could and couldn’t carry on the Sabbath.
  1. In the Babylonian Talmud (b. Shabbat 94b), there is a series of laws concerning Muktzeh (laws concerning whether items should be handled at all) and Hotza’ah (laws concerning the carrying of items) on the Sabbath. Some items, like a hoe, are Muktzeh (translated: set aside) because they are tools of labor and have no Sabbath-appropriate purpose. Other items, like a sleeping mat, are permitted for use but are subject to Hotza’ah laws, which prevent you from moving the items from a private dwelling into a public area. The mat had a Sabbath-appropriate purpose (sitting or lying down), but the man was carrying it in the streets, so it was a violation of law.

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.

“My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”
1. Jesus equates himself to God with this statement, which the leaders recognize and are infuriated by.
…not only was he breaking the Sabbath,
1. Jesus consistently taught the Sabbath’s purpose was misunderstood.
  1. His disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:3-8).
  2. Teaching that one would rescue a child or a donkey from a well on the Sabbath (Luke 14:5).
  3. Jesus teaches, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” and that He is the “Lord of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28)
2. The Sabbath is a means to draw closer to God, not an end. It was established at creation to teach humans to rest in God.
Christian Sabbath (Sunday)
1. The Christian Sabbath moved from Saturday to Sunday, as seen in Acts 20:7.
2. The logic: the old Sabbath represented rest in the old creation, while Sunday—the day of Jesus’s resurrection—signifies the start of the new creation.
3. Modern Christians are more at risk of neglecting the Sabbath than of taking it too seriously. Many have redefined Sabbath away from a particular day or to include any sort of rest, rather than rest specifically intended to grow closer to God.
4. There’s an opportunity to value the Sabbath not just as a brief moment of rest in a busy day or a random vacation, but as a day that God intended for us as a tool and means for our benefit—a day of worshipful rest in God.

19 Jesus gave them this answer: “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. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. 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. 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. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.

After the Sabbath conflict, Jesus explains His relationship with God the Father.
1. This section uses a large amount of classic Trinitarian language, affirming that Jesus and the Father are distinct persons yet one being—both are God. To honor one is to honor both.
2. “To believe and love the Trinity is to possess the key of theology.” -Charles Spurgeon, “Bread Enough and to Spare,” July 16, 1871.

24 “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. 25 Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. 26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. 27 And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.

And he has given him authority…
1. Jesus asserts His authority in response to earthly authorities challenging Him. He speaks with perfect judgment and discernment as God.
2. When we encounter teachings or actions of Jesus we don’t understand or prefer, we must remember His divine authority. Our disagreement is our problem, not His.

28 “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice 29 and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. 30 By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.

31 “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. 32 There is another who testifies in my favor, and I know that his testimony about me is true.

33 “You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. 34 Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. 35 John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.

36 “I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, 38 nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. 39 You study[c] the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

“If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true…”
1. Jesus admits that His own testimony would not be sufficient to prove anything, so he points to external witnesses.
  1. Deut. 19:15 and Num. 35:30 require two or three witnesses to establish any charge or execute judgment.
“I have testimony weightier than that of John…”
1. John the Baptist testified to the truth, which was helpful, but Jesus relies on a weightier testimony: God Himself. God’s testimony is expressed in two ways:
  1. Miracles: Jesus’s works, given by the Father, testify that the Father sent Him.
  2. Scripture: The Old Testament points to Jesus constantly.
Jesus tells scripture experts that they study diligently thinking they have eternal life, but miss the point.
“These are the very scriptures that testify about me…”
1. “Again, we are taught by this passage, that if we wish to obtain the knowledge of Christ, we must seek it from the Scriptures; for they who imagine whatever they choose concerning Christ will ultimately have nothing instead of him but a shadowy phantom.” -John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentary on John
2. Scripture is a means to an end (knowing God), not an end in itself. The words matter, like in a love letter, but their value lies in pointing to the author, God.
There are many people that claim to know a lot about Scripture, but they haven’t found God in spite of all of their so-called knowledge.
1. Bart Ehrman is a famous professor and atheist that uses his knowledge of early Christian documents to try to debunk Christianity.
2. Amy Jill-Levine is a professor of the New Testament that is Jewish and does not believe in Jesus. In spite of that, she produces resources about Jesus to be used in churches.
3. People inside the church today can also miss the point by treating scripture reading as a checklist item.
4. When opening scripture, expect to encounter God, regardless of feelings. The goal is to seek God through it.

41 “I do not accept glory from human beings, 42 but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. 44 How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God[d]?

45 “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. 46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. 47 But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”

God is the intended endpoint of everything we see.
1. “I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts…”
  1. Everything in our lives is intended to point us to God, whether it be prayer, a walk in the park, or time with a friend. God is the ultimate end of everything that’s created. It’s should draw our attention to Him.
2. “How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?”
  1. We are called to be means through which others see God’s goodness. Just as everything should draw our attention to God, we should draw other people’s attention to God, not to ourselves.
  2. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you” -Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Bk. 1.
“…for he wrote about me.”
1. “Indeed had they attended to His words, they ought and would have tried to learn from Him, what the things were which Moses had written of Him. But they are silent. For it is the nature of wickedness to defy persuasion. Do what you will, it retains its venom to the last.” -John Chrysostom, Hom. xli. 2.

Full Transcript

It is critically important to recognize the difference between ends in and of themselves and means to ends. An end is something that is good on its own terms; it doesn’t lead to anything else. It is the baseline of what you are seeking—a good thing that you can rest in. On the other hand, a means to an end is something that gets you closer to the end that you’re looking for. That’s a bit of an abstract definition, so it’s much easier to speak using examples.

My favorite example is a love letter. A love letter is a means to an end, and I don’t mean that in a sinister way. If you think about it, when someone receives a love letter—and people have since the beginning of time—they treasure it. They read it again and again, soaking in every word and every letter. Why do they do that? It’s not because they’re really big fans of the genre of love letters. They love the letter not for its own sake, but because of the person who wrote it. It’s just a means to an end, which is a relationship between two people. When they look at the letter, they remember the person that loves them, how good they are, how gracious they are, and how beautiful they are. That’s the point of a love letter.

Can you imagine if someone read a love letter and thought of it as an end in and of itself? How absurd and weird it would be. Imagine seeing one of your friends reading a handwritten love letter and you say, “Ooh, looks like someone’s got something special going on.” They respond, “What? Oh, no, I found this in the Walmart parking lot blowing around. I have no idea who wrote it, but man, it’s beautiful! I’ve read it every day for the past two weeks.” Yikes! That’s not a good thing. You would probably think your friend needs to get out more because they seem lonely. That’s the thing: when we treat means to an end as ends in and of themselves, it makes us weird. Our affections are disordered.

That’s what Jesus is going to talk about today. He’s going to talk about how we humans have this habit of looking at these means to seek a greater thing and turning them into ends in and of themselves.

We begin in verse fifteen, which is a bit of a bridge verse. It takes us from where we were last week to where we are this week. You’ll remember last week Jesus healed someone who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. The man was paralyzed, Jesus healed him, and then he got up and started walking around. The authorities saw him and they were upset: “What are you doing moving around on the Sabbath like that? You shouldn’t pick up your mat and walk. You should stop that. And who healed you, by the way? That’s not okay.” The man said, “I don’t know, I have no idea what the guy’s name was.” Later on, he runs into Jesus and learns His name. Then, in verse fifteen, the man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Why did he do this? We could speculate endlessly. Maybe he was afraid of them, or maybe he wasn’t too bright and didn’t really think it through. Who knows what his logic was? But I think it’s just a good reminder that sometimes even when you do a good thing, you don’t get anything out of it; it might even actively cause you trouble. You don’t do a good thing because you expect to be rewarded or because you think someone will help you out in return. You do a good thing because it’s the right thing to do. That’s what Jesus does. He helps this man, and this man turns around and makes life difficult for Him. That’s just how it is, and if it was that way for Jesus, sometimes it’s going to be like that for us. We can’t expect people to turn around and do us favors when things get difficult. Good things must be done because they are good in and of themselves.

Verse sixteen: “So because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense, Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.’ For this reason, they tried all the more to kill him, not only because he was breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” We could look at some of this Trinitarian language—we haven’t seen that in a hot minute, though there was a lot of that in John 1. We’ll come back around to that in a second.

I want us to think about the logic of the Sabbath here because that’s what they’re angry about. They’re angry that Jesus healed on a Sabbath. It would be reasonable to assume some of them are insincere and just see Jesus as a troublemaker, but it would be crazy to assume they are all insincere. Some of them genuinely believe this and are upset. The Sabbath was serious. It wasn’t a recommendation from God; it’s one of the Ten Commandments. “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” If you look throughout the Old Testament, the recommended penalty for someone who did not keep the Sabbath was death. It was carried out in certain instances where people were going about business as usual on a Saturday trying to get ahead.

Especially during the time of the two kingdoms, as you see the Israelite kings rising and falling, you can see the consistent fall away of the Israelites from God’s ways. You start with King David, who was a great king, then King Solomon, who was pretty good, and then you just got a bunch of stinkers. Over time, they broke God’s law more and more. One of the listed things they were doing wrong was not keeping the Sabbath. This is one of the reasons God got angry and they were sent into exile. Their land was taken from them and they were sent across the continent because they broke God’s law and refused His ways. It was only about five hundred years before this that they were allowed to come back to their lands. Part of their history is that they fell away from God’s law so severely that they lost their home. You can imagine why they might take the law pretty seriously—so seriously that they’re making up “bonus” laws. There is nothing actually in the rules about the Sabbath that says miracles cannot happen on Saturdays, or that homeless people can’t pick up mats. They just added that stuff because they thought bonus laws were better than not enough laws.

Jesus has a different perspective. In Matthew 12, His disciples pluck grain from a field because they’re hungry. The authorities get angry, and Jesus says, “That’s not the point. You are missing it.” In Luke 14, they get angry at Jesus for doing good things on a Saturday again, and Jesus says, “If you had a kid that fell into a well or a donkey that fell into a hole on a Sabbath, wouldn’t you get him out?” Probably His clearest statement of what the Sabbath is supposed to be is in Mark 2:27-28. He says, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” and He says that He is the Lord of the Sabbath.

The Sabbath is a means, not an end. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good or important means, but the Sabbath exists to help us grow closer to God. It doesn’t exist in and of itself for itself. All the way back to creation, God made everything in six days and rested on the seventh. He didn’t rest because He was tired; God doesn’t get “tuckered out.” He did it for us, to teach us how to exist well. On that Sabbath day, we rest in Him.

Some people get confused about why Christians have Sunday as their Sabbath instead of Saturday. You can see in Acts 20:7 that the early Christians moved their Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. The logic was that the Sabbath was the day God rested in the old creation—it was the end of the old way—but now Jesus has come and was resurrected on a Sunday. This is the beginning of something new. We don’t belong to the old world anymore; we belong to this new creation that Jesus made. We’ve been doing it that way since the beginning.

The real point here is that Jesus sees the Sabbath not as an end in and of itself. He says they’re going about it all wrong. The goal is to grow closer to God through the Sabbath. To be fair, I doubt very many Americans today are at risk of taking the Sabbath too seriously. Culturally, we’re more likely to not recognize that it has any value at all. It’s mostly the “bad” weekend day. Saturday is the good one because you have the fun stuff, and Sunday is the one where you have to go to church and have work the next day. I think we have a lot to learn about the Sabbath and a real opportunity to take it more seriously as a valuable tool intended for our benefit. I don’t say that as someone who has it all figured out; my wife and I have had conversations this past year about how we can make this a more worshipful day where we really rest in God.

We pick up now where we get into more of that Trinitarian language.

“Jesus gave them this answer: ‘Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. He will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. 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. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that they all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man. Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.'”

Massive section here. You can think about the creed we said earlier and how much of it finds its roots right here. Jesus is repeatedly saying, “Me and the Father do the same stuff.” We are in the same boat, we have the same strength. We are different persons, but we are one being on the same tier. We’re both God. But we could spend a lot of time on that. Instead, I would rather take this time to think about why He’s saying this. What’s the point? Why is He telling us that He has this authority and has been given this life unto itself? Why is He saying all of this?

He’s showing that His authority is real. When the authorities on this earth challenge Him and say, “Hey man, you are doing the Sabbath wrong,” He responds, “No, I have the authority to speak on this. I would know.” I’m not just guessing about this stuff. I have been given perfect judgment. I have been given perfect discernment. I am God. I am at one with the Father.

When we see Jesus in the scripture, I think this is a serious challenge. Sometimes we see Him do stuff that you wonder about. It’s not what you would have done, or maybe it’s not what you would have preferred Him to do. You think to yourself, “What’s He doing?” Sometimes people even theorize, “Well, here Jesus made a little bit of a mistake.” That’s not His deal. If we don’t like what He does, that’s our problem. Jesus is God. That’s the whole point when He does things or teaches us things; He acts with authority—not as someone who’s a random guesser or someone who’s got an intriguing theory for us to mull over, but as someone who has all due discernment, judgment, and authority.

He continues on looking at another “means” that people are failing to see as a means to a good end. Verse thirty-one: “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who testifies in my favor, and I know that his testimony about me is true. You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. Not that I accept human testimony, but I mention it that you may be saved. John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light. I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish, the very works I am doing testify that the Father has sent me. And the Father who has sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form.”

In other words, what He’s saying here is, “I am not the one telling you that I am great.” I could do that, but it wouldn’t be particularly legitimate. You can’t be a reference for yourself; that’s not how it works. He says John told you—taking us all the way back to chapter one—and John was right, and that was helpful for you. But I am not relying on John’s testimony because he’s just another person, and people get it wrong sometimes. I have a better witness than that: God. Check the scriptures. That’s about me. If you are curious if I am legit, look at the scriptures and look at what I am doing. I am fulfilling the scriptures. I am the answer to the scriptures. I am what you’ve been waiting for. That book is about me.

Verse thirty-eight: “Nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life. I do not accept glory from human beings, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Father’s name, but you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe, since you accept glory from one another, but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”

This is a whole section about scripture because He’s talking to people who are supposed to be experts on scripture. These are people who spent their whole lives studying it, and He says, “You are supposed to know Him, but you don’t know me. You are missing the point.” This is not an end in and of itself; it is a means to an end.

By no means do I suggest that the words of scripture are not important. I think that’s a way people could mishear that. But think about the love letter again. A love letter is a means, and aren’t the words in a love letter important? They make a big difference. The words are important, but you don’t read the words for their own sake; you read them because of the person who wrote them. The scriptures are not an end in and of themselves. They are something intended to bring us closer to God. That’s their whole purpose. We read the scriptures to encounter God.

Yet, you can see all kinds of instances where people know the scriptures incredibly well but don’t know God. I think especially of Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman is a professor who specializes in early Christian documents, and he is an atheist. His whole deal is that he has studied all of these scriptures, and he uses what he knows to try to debunk Christianity. He has written book after book talking about why he thinks it’s illegitimate. He’s someone we’re going to talk about a little bit in the Advent study because a lot of his challenges, once you understand his methodology, are not so hard to take on. Nonetheless, he has been determined his whole life to debunk Christianity. He has studied the scriptures, but he doesn’t believe in God.

While looking him up, I ended up on his blog and saw one of his more recent Christmas posts. He was frustrated. He was frustrated at the way non-religious people act. He wrote, “Why do religious people give so much more of their possessions and of themselves than secular people? Why do religious people so much more frequently commit themselves to the good of others than secular people do? Why are so many secular people so obsessed with the fleeting pleasures of the flesh and the superficial enjoyments that the media crams down our throats? It is one of my perennial puzzles and concerns.”

How absurd! He spent his whole life convincing people not to believe in Jesus, and then he’s angry that some people don’t believe in Jesus and act like it. What did you think was going to happen, Bart? You goober. But taking him seriously, this is someone who recognizes that what he’s doing is unfulfilling. He is creating a world that he doesn’t want. Why? Because he’s an expert on the scriptures but doesn’t know God, so he’s missed the entire point.

There are other examples. I remember before I left the UMC, I saw a lot of stuff from Cokesbury. They were pushing one particular author for studies; they wanted everyone to buy her work. Her big selling point was that she’s Jewish, but an expert on the New Testament. Because she’s Jewish, she knows the cultural stuff, so you should do her studies to learn new things. You want me to learn about Jesus from someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus? You are missing the point. The point of Jesus is not that He’s this interesting cultural figure you might get some cool historical ideas about. The point is that He’s Lord. If you’ve spent your time studying the scriptures and you don’t believe, there is no reason to study them; it’s a total waste of your time.

It’s easy to see people outside the church that study the scriptures and yet have missed the point. But it happens in the church too. How often do we open the scriptures just because we’re “supposed to” that day, just checking a box? When we open the scriptures, we should expect to encounter God. That’s the point. They don’t exist as an item to check off on a checklist.

I’m not saying when we expect to encounter God, we should necessarily feel like we encountered God. Sometimes people expect a certain feeling or a level of enthusiasm to prove that God is there, but that’s wrong thinking. Feelings are fleeting. Sometimes you wake up on the wrong side of the bed. It’s not anything you did or anything wrong with the day; you’re just in a bad mood. Sometimes you feel close to God, and maybe sometimes you don’t. Feelings come and go. We should expect to encounter God regardless of what we feel. The goal of the scriptures is to seek God; it is a means to an end.

It’s true with so many things in the Christian life. Prayer is not an end in and of itself; it’s a means to an end, and that end is God. Coming to church is not an end in and of itself; it is a means to build our relationship with God. The goal of the whole Christian journey is to grow our relationship with God. When we start to see these individual things as their own ends, we get twisted up.

It’s not just the religious stuff that is intended to be a means to the end of growing our relationship with God. Think about all the other ways we could do that. Going outside and enjoying creation—creation exists to reflect the glory of God. By seeing that, we can grow closer to Him. When we spend time with a friend who is especially kind, we have the opportunity to see the kindness and mercy of God through them. We ourselves are means to the end of finding God. We are expected to behave in such a way that people see God’s goodness and mercy in us.

Really, the only true end is God. Everything is intended to draw us to Him, to help us to see Him better, to see His glory and His goodness. As we go about this holiday season, I’m sure you’re going to be stressed. You’ll be running around dealing with family and a million events. Whatever you’re wrestling with, remember to ask yourself that question: Is this an end in and of itself, or is it a means to an end? When you recognize that it is a means, ask yourself, “How can I see God in this?”

We will all constantly feel restless, frustrated, and confused until we find that one true end. We will be restless until we rest in God. Amen.

John 5:1-14: The Healing at the Pool of Bethesda

May 1, 2026May 28, 2026 ~ Vincent

Video Teaching
Verse-by-Verse Commentary
Full Transcript

Back: John 4:43-55

Overview: John 5

Next: John 5:15-47

Video Teaching

Commentary

5 Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals.

Christians disagree on which unnamed festival Jesus was going to Jerusalem for in this instance. Passover or Shavuot tend to be the ones most gravitate towards.
1. If it was Passover (which Jesus also goes up for in John 2:13, 6:4, and 11:55) it would reasonably fit into Jesus’s 3.5 year period of public ministry. Symbolically, healing during Passover would show that Jesus is liberating people today, just as Moses liberated in the past, painting him as the greater Moses.
2. Passover happened at harvest, but John 4:35 says harvest was still four months away. Shavuot was a festival that happened around that time. It was a celebration of Moses receiving the law at Sinai. Symbolically, healing on the Sabbath (a violation of the law, strictly interpreted) and then lecturing the Jewish leaders about the law afterwards would be fitting for a festival about God’s law.

2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.

The pool was located in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate, a gate used primarily for moving sheep and other livestock in and out of the city.
The covered colonnades were a beautiful work of Roman architecture, but here it had been essentially turned into a homelessness camp by the poor and desperate who were hoping to find healing in the waters. This was a place of immense suffering.
The pool of Bethesda was a local legend, not widely known throughout the empire. It was almost forgotten by history until archaeologists found it. Its modern remembrance is primarily because Jesus visited it.

—and they waited for the moving of the waters. 4 From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had.

This addition to verse three and the entirety of verse four is subject to scholarly debate. It does not appear in some of the earliest version of the text. It may have been a scribe’s explanatory note that was later incorporated into the text.
Regardless of its scriptural authenticity, the verse is helpful because it explains that people were waiting and watching for the water to bubble, at which point there would be a “mad dash” to be the first one in.
This intense focus on the pool caused the people to miss Jesus, a great healer, when He came.
“Their eyes were fixed on the water, expecting it to be troubled; they were so taken up with their own chosen way that the true way was neglected.” -Charles Spurgeon, “Jesus at Bethesda; or, Waiting Changed for Believing”, April 7 1867.

5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”

The man Jesus approached had been an invalid for 38 years. His whole life defined by his condition.
When Jesus asks him, “Do you want to get well,” it is not a silly question. Being healed would be hard! It would completely change the man’s life. He would lose his means of getting charity, have to find a trade, and possibly lose the community he knew by the pool.

7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”

8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

The man responded with an excuse, explaining that he has no one to help him into the pool. Jesus doesn’t ask for or need an explanation or justification.
Jesus commands him, “Get up. Pick up your mat and walk.” This healing requires the man to take initiative and trust Jesus, even though it may have seemed irrational or been physically difficult.
If you want to be healed from the unhealthy things in your life,pick up your mat and walk, trusting that Jesus’s power, mercy, and grace are available if you take the initiative.

The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, 10 and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”

11 But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”

12 So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”

13 The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

After being healed, the man is confronted by authorities who are upset that he is carrying his mat on the Sabbath. They want him to preserve the status quo and effectively “go back where he came from.”
When we experience healing in Christ, some people may be frustrated and want to drag us back to our old, unhealthy ways.

14 Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

Healing is not a “one and done” event. One must continually choose to live as a new creation and not slip back into sin or brokenness.

Full Transcript

A buddy of mine told me about a little church that he once served. It was a tiny country church, about twenty-five people in attendance on the average Sunday, and they were older—significantly older. They recognized that if they didn’t do something to start reaching out to younger people, they didn’t have that much time left, so they decided to have a meeting to come up with ways that they could reach out to younger generations. The pastor was quite pleased with this. He himself was younger and he recognized that, truth be told, this was something they probably should have talked about well before now, but late is better than never. They all came together and had this meeting.

There wasn’t a lot of energy in the room. People didn’t really seem to know what to do. They didn’t really know any young people or what they might like, so it was awkward stumbling for that first while. The pastor spoke up and tried to give them some direction. He said, “Most of you have children, and a lot of your children live in this community. They come sometimes on Christmas. Have you ever asked them what stops them from coming more regularly? That’d be a good starting place to give us a place to start working from.”

People started to say things. One woman said, “My son doesn’t like the music.” Another person said, “My daughter says there’s too much drama, that this community has too much politics, and so she just doesn’t want to be involved.” Another person spoke up, “Well, my grandkids have ball games on Sunday, and they don’t want to miss the ball games.” Then a woman stood up and she said, “This is ridiculous. I’m tired of this. What are we doing? Why are we sitting around trying to come up with ideas on how we need to change? They’re the ones that need to change. It’s not us, it’s the young people! They need to change!”

Then the room got cooking. People loved what she said. They spent the next thirty minutes talking about what was wrong with young people today. I wonder why there weren’t any young people in their church. Go figure.

After a full thirty minutes, they were coming near the close of the meeting and realized they had not come up with any ideas about how they might reach out to young people. They decided, “Let’s just wait on that. Let’s give it some time. You never know. We’ll look again next year.”

Change is hard. Change is really, really hard. Even when we recognize that we are not healthy—that there are things actively wrong with us—it is really hard to look a problem in the face and change our behaviors. A lot of times, it’s easier to just deal with the problem, to learn to live around it, and just be content with being unhealthy rather than face the terror of a new world in which we actually address the problems in our lives. Sometimes we cloak that by saying, “Oh, we’re just going to wait. Let’s just wait a little longer. Let’s see what happens. Maybe it’ll just solve itself.”

It is easy to see that with this little dysfunctional church, but I think most of us can relate to that. Most of us have something in our lives that we know isn’t healthy—whether it be pride or negativity or lust or rage—something that we know means we’re not living our best life. Every so often we trot it out and think about it. We say, “Man, maybe we should do something.” But sometimes we decide not to because change is hard and change is scary. We tell ourselves, “It’s a really busy time of the year. The holidays are coming up. We’ll look at it again in January. Really, who knows? Maybe it’ll be gone by then. Maybe a miracle will just drop out of the sky and solve all of our problems.”

The passage we’re looking at this morning is about someone who had lived with a problem for thirty-eight years. His whole life had been defined by a problem until one day Jesus came to him and asked him, “Do you want to be healed?”

We’re at John chapter five, verse one. By the way, we are almost to the end of the five chapters of John that we set out to look at, so I’d like you all to do something. I’m giving you homework this week. I want you to go home and look back on the five chapters that we looked at and just see what you learned. Start with the pre-incarnate Word. Read through the story of John the Baptist, the story of Nicodemus, and all of these stories to see what stuck with you. What is one thing you want to remember that you think was important?

It doesn’t have to be something that I said. Maybe it’s just a certain verse that stood out to you differently because of your life circumstances this time around. Maybe there was a particular song in worship that brought out a dimension of this scripture that you hadn’t seen before. Maybe it was another pastor you were reading that struck you. I don’t care where you learned something, but I want to know what you learned. I think it is so important as we come to the end of a project to take a minute and look back, because if we don’t intentionally think about what we want to remember, there is a good chance we’re not going to remember anything. Next week, I am going to include a little slip of paper in your bulletins and ask you to write down one thing that you learned.

The week after that, I want to share what you guys learned. I think there are so many things that people learn that can build each other up just by seeing what God has taught us across a period of time. You don’t have to sign them, so you don’t have to be worried about doing “good enough” that people are impressed with you. That’s not what this is about. Just think about something that would benefit this community—something you learned in the book of John that you’d be willing to share. You’ve been warned: next week, papers.

John chapter five, verse one: “Sometime later Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here, a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.”

When we’re at a miraculous site, sometimes it can be easy to assume that this place was somehow more dignified than others, that somehow God’s grace just shone through a little clearer in this place. This is not the case with Bethesda. Bethesda was an ugly place. This was not the kind of place you would be delighted to spend a lot of time in, and you can see it in the details. First off, the pool of Bethesda is near the Sheep Gate. You can guess how the Sheep Gate got its name; it is a gate that was used predominantly for sheep. If you had sheep that you needed to get in and out of Jerusalem, that’s the gate you took them through. Occasionally some other livestock might come through, but this is primarily an area for animals.

There is a pool by the gate for animals. It would be incredibly reasonable to think that sheep might have stopped to drink from it if they were thirsty on the way in. It’s a place for animals, and yet people are here—some of the people who are most vulnerable, who are hurting, paralyzed, can’t walk, blind. All of these people are scattered around.

I think the NIV does a bit of a disservice here by saying there are “covered colonnades.” It’s a fine translation, but I don’t use that phrase in my regular speech. The King James Version perhaps does it better by just calling them “porches.” There are five porches. Another way to think about these structures might be shelter houses. These are not nice places to spend time. “Colonnade” suggests they’re somehow a beautiful ancient ruin just because the word is fancy, but these were not fancy. These are just buildings with no walls. They are makeshift structures to protect people from the sun and the rain. Essentially, what we’re coming across here is a pool surrounded by a homelessness camp. It is not beautiful. There is a lot of suffering by this pool.

The pool itself doesn’t have great storied legends. Don’t think that we remember this place because it was just so uniquely special. As a matter of fact, the Bible is pretty much the only source that references Bethesda. There was a period of time where archaeologists started to think that Bethesda didn’t exist, and maybe the person who wrote the Bible was wrong or mixing stories because they just couldn’t find a pool in the place where it was described. Sure enough, they found it given time, but that’s the thing—this place was almost forgotten about. It did not have this vast legend that people all over the empire knew about; it was a local legend.

The reason we remember this place today is because it is a place that Jesus graced with His presence. That’s what made it memorable. As ugly as it might have been, when you think about how Jesus graced it with His presence, it can be tempting to think, “Man, I wish I were there so I could see Jesus heal someone.” Heartbreaking though it may have been, I wish I could see that. But Jesus repeatedly assures us throughout the scriptures that He is with us. He says, “Where two or more are gathered, there I am.” He says, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Jesus is with us in Walnut Grove. If you want to see Jesus heal someone, go to Him.

Now we have the mystery of verse four. Depending on what translation you are using, you may or may not have verse four in the text proper. If you are using the NIV like me, you will notice it is not in the text; it is a footnote. It reads: “From time to time, an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had.” It’s an explanation of how the pool worked.

Some of the older versions of John that have been found do not contain this verse. There is a debate: was this actually intended to be scripture, or did some well-meaning scribe add this note as just a little piece of commentary explaining how this particular area worked? As people copied the gospel again and again by hand, did they start to accidentally think that this piece of commentary was actually a part of the scripture itself? I read up a little bit on it and it is complicated. There are really good arguments to be made in either direction, and I cannot say that I feel comfortable weighing in definitively. Either way, whether it is a piece of commentary that has snuck in or is intended to be a part of the scripture proper, I think it’s helpful. It tells us what’s going on at this place—how it functions and what the people are doing.

All these people who have gathered there and are staying by the pool are waiting and watching for a miracle. They are waiting and watching for those bubbles to come out, and the second the water starts to bubble, there’s a mad dash because the first one in the water is healed. You can imagine that’s where all of the attention is wrapped. If you are waiting there for years, you don’t want to miss it because you weren’t paying attention for a minute. This is the focal point of these people’s lives: waiting and hoping for a miracle from this pool.

Even when Jesus comes—a great healer—no one seems to recognize Him. We see already in the book of John that Jesus has become something of a local legend. People know Him and seek His healing, and yet a whole camp of people waiting on healing don’t recognize Him. I think Charles Spurgeon put it really well. He says, “The blindness had come over the people at this pool. There they were, and there was Christ who could heal them, but not a single one of them sought Him. Their eyes were so fixed on the water, expecting it to be troubled; they were so taken up with their own chosen way, that the true way was neglected.”

All of us, to some extent, have that same potential. Instead of seeing problems and addressing them and taking them to Jesus, trusting that He can help, sometimes we wait. We just wait on it, kind of like that church. “Let’s give it another year. Let’s wait a little longer. Who knows what’ll happen? Maybe there’ll be some grand miracle and the problem will just go away.” It is easy to want to wait and not have to face the problem properly—not to take it to the infinitely better source that we know is there. We know we can take our problems to Jesus. We know He is a much better solution than waiting for a random miracle. Because, let’s be honest, what are the odds of a random miracle, right? Occasionally you hear stories about people who have random, totally out-of-the-blue miracles that change their lives. Occasionally you’ll hear a story about someone who led a really rough life—a lot of drugs, a lot of crime. They end up in prison and, lo and behold, they have a vision from God out of nowhere. God says, “Hey, I have plans for you. Get it together.” Their life is changed, and everything is different from that moment onward.

It does happen; you can find these stories. There is a chance that a random miracle just plops out of the sky, but that doesn’t happen for most people, does it? You can see that even at this pool. There are tons of people in need waiting by the pool, and how many are healed when those bubbles come around? One.

There are a lot of people who are stuck waiting forever. Random miracles are not common. They are not a normative, expected way that we should expect our problems to go away. We need to take them to Jesus.

Continuing on, we see the story of one particular man who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” That might seem like a silly question. Surely no one wants to be paralyzed; of course he wants to be healed. But imagine what it would be like to be him. Imagine if you were this guy for thirty-eight years. You’ve been living by that pool and your whole life is defined by that. You’ve learned how to get food by staying there. Your friends are all people you met while you were there. You don’t even know what’s down the street.

Can you imagine how his life would change if he were healed? It would change, and it would be terrifying. No one would give him charity anymore; no one is going to give a healthy man charity. He is going to have to find a trade. He is going to have to go into town and figure out how to live, and he has no experience with that. A lot of his friends are probably going to say, “What are you doing here, man? You can’t hang out by the pool anymore. It’s weird. Move on.” There are all kinds of reasons not to want to be healed. Being healed is infinitely harder in the short term than just sitting and languishing. So Jesus asks, because if you don’t want to be healed, it’s not going to work out.

He asked the man, “Do you want to be healed?” The man responds, “Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” He gives an explanation as to why he’s there—an excuse. To be fair, I don’t think this is a bad excuse; I think it is a great excuse. He is prevented from being better. He has been stuck there for a fair reason. I am not going to fault the guy; I can’t imagine what else he would have done. But Jesus does not want an explanation. He did not ask for one, and he’s not seeking one. This man doesn’t have to justify why he is where he is to be worthy of healing. Jesus doesn’t care how we got there. Do you want to be healed now?

Yes, life is unfair. Yes, wrong things happen. There is a very good chance that you are here and you had nothing to do with it. But even if you are the cause of your own problems, Jesus asks, “Do you want to be healed?” No explanation is necessary. Jesus responds to the man, “Get up. Pick up your mat and walk.” The way He heals in this particular situation, He gives the man His power and His grace. All of it is right there at his fingertips. If you want to change your life, take it. But you have to take it. You have to stand up. You have to take initiative.

Think about how hard that would have been for that guy to think this was rational. He has been there for thirty-eight years; he doesn’t even know who Jesus is. This stranger comes up and says, “Stand up. Pick up your mat. Go.” That would have seemed laughable. We don’t know how hard it would have been to stand, either. We don’t know the details of this particular miracle. Had his legs atrophied? Could he remember what it was like to walk? Was it easy? Was it painful? Was he afraid it would be painful? There are all kinds of reasons not to do it, just as there are all kinds of reasons not to change. There are always ways you can convince yourself not to take initiative, but Jesus’s power is there. His grace is there. His mercy is there. All the man has to do is trust Him—trust that He can heal in the way that He’s claimed.

The man does it. As the story goes on, people come around and they’re frustrated with this guy. Authorities come around and they come up with this goofy reason to be upset: “You picked up your mat on a Sabbath. Can’t do that.” This man who has been paralyzed for years can stand, and rather than celebrating that with him, they want him to go back where he came from. They want to stop this because he is upsetting the status quo. The status quo was good. They don’t care if he is healed or better; they just want to live in the status quo. They need him to put back that mat where it came from and get right back next to that pool.

It’s absurd, and it’s true in real life. When we experience the healing and health that Jesus makes available to us, sometimes there are people who are frustrated because they liked things the way they were. They want to drag us right back to where we were, to our unhealthy ways.

But what does Jesus say? Jesus sees this man in the temple and He says, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.” You are well again. Stop sinning. Don’t go back to being defined by brokenness or by hurt. Don’t go back to a bad way, even if it’s a different bad way. The man can’t literally go back to being paralyzed without a bizarre instance, but there are all kinds of ways he could slip back into a different sin, into a different way of being that was not what God created him to be. Jesus has given this man healing. He has made him closer to what he was made to be.

If we want to be changed by Jesus, it’s not a “one and done.” You have to continually make the choice to live into that healed self, to be the new creation He made us to be, rather than slipping right back down just because we solved one problem. If we want to be a new creation, we have to choose to stop living in unhealthy ways and live into the life that He’s made available to us.

I would bet a lot of us have problems or unhealthy things in our lives that we know are wrong—ways of living that are not good that we have trotted out before and said to ourselves, “This isn’t the time. Maybe later we’ll address it.” We tell ourselves this is not the time to take this to Jesus. Maybe we’re comfortable being unhealthy. Maybe that just seems like the way we are, and there is nothing we can do to change that. Or maybe we’re just hoping a random miracle plops down out of the sky and makes things easier for us.

Jesus asks us, “Do you want to be healed?” We don’t have to live that way. Do you want to be healed? If the answer is yes, pick up your mat and walk. Trust that His power, His mercy, and His grace are available. All we have to do is take initiative. He will help us every step of the way. Pick up your mat and walk. We are invited to trust that Jesus is the healer He says He is. Amen.

Six Major Theories About Why Jesus Healed with Mud made of Spit (John 9)

October 21, 2024 ~ Vincent

Why did Jesus heal the man in John 9 by making mud out of spit?!? I preached on John 9 recently and to make sure I had a good take, I looked up explanations from as many wise Christians as I could. People are all over the map on this one! There are so many explanations! I’ve sorted the theories into six major camps and added a quote from someone that I think is a great source for that explanation. Are there more theories out there? Absolutely, Feel free to do even more searching. I do, however, hope that this captures most of the breadth of the conversation. These ideas definitely aren’t mutually exclusive, so there are a lot of people that pick out several different reasons and agree with all of them.

(A lot of these quotes come from Christians throughout history, which means the primary sources can be tough to read. These are my paraphrases for ease of reading. Feel free to look up the original if something particularly. interests you.)

A Series of Symbols

The Lord came and what did He do? He unveiled a great mystery. He spat on the ground and He made clay out of His spit. Why? Because the Word was made flesh. Then, He anointed the eyes of the blind man. The man was anointed, but he still couldn’t see! Jesus sent him to the pool of Siloam. But notice that the evangelist pointed out the name of the pool: “sent.” And you know who was sent for us! If he hadn’t been sent, none of us would be free from sin! So he washed his eyes in that pool called sent — he was baptized in Christ!

-Augustine of Hippo, Tractate 44 on the Gospel of John

A Test of Faith

“The intention of Christ was, to restore sight to the blind man, but the way he went about it seemed absurd at first. By covering his eyes with mud, Jesus doubled his blindness! Who wouldn’t have thought that he was mocking that poor man or just doing some pointless nonsense? But Jesus intended to test the faith and obedience of the blind man so that he could be an example to everyone else. It wasn’t any ordinary test of faith! But the blind man relied on Jesus’s words alone. He was fully convinced that his sight would be restored to him. With that conviction, he hurried to follow Christ’s command. It speaks to his wonderful obedience that he simply obeyed Christ, even though there were so many excuses to do otherwise. When a devout mind, satisfied with the simple word of God, believes entirely in what seems incredible, that’s the true test of faith. Faith is followed by a readiness to obey, so that anyone who is convinced that God will be their faithful guide will naturally give their life over to God. Who could doubt that fear and suspicion crept into the man’s mind? He knew he might get mocked for what he was doing! But with hardly any effort, he broke through every barrier to faith and realized that it was safe to follow Christ.”

-John Calvin, Commentary on John

The Evangelistic Theory

“Maybe our Lord intended to draw even more attention to the miracle. A crowd of people would naturally gather to see something so odd, and the guide that helped the man get around the city would end up sharing the story as they went to the pool of Siloam.”

-John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament

The Gospel Comparison

“The man’s eyes were opened after a little clay was put in them and he washed them out in the pool of Siloam. God really does bless humble things during our process of conversion. It is incredibly humbling for a preacher who thinks, ‘I preached an amazing sermon on Sunday,’ to find God didn’t use that sermon to convert anyone! It was the random remark he made in town the other day that God worked with. He didn’t think it was worth anything! He didn’t plan it out or perfect it! But God did. What he thought was his best didn’t mean all that much to God, but when he wasn’t even trying, God blessed him. A lot of people had their eyes opened by little moments that had an incredible impact. The whole process of salvation is accomplished in simple, humble, everyday things. It’s so easy to compare it to the clay and spit that Jesus used. I don’t know many people that had their souls saved by formal, lofty processes. A lot of people join the church, but I haven’t met any that were converted because of a profound theological debate. It’s not common to hear that someone was saved because the pastor was so eloquent. Don’t get me wrong! We all appreciate eloquence. There’s nothing wrong with it! But eloquence has no spiritual power. It can’t transform our minds, and God prefers to use humbler things in His conversion. When Paul set aside human wisdom and decided not to use eloquent speech, he let go of things that weren’t going to be useful for him anyway. When David took of Saul’s elaborate armor and took up a sling and stone, he killed a giant! And the giants of today aren’t going to be conquered any better by people trying to put on the armor of Saul. We need to stick to simple things. We need to stick to the plain gospel and preach it plainly. The clay and the spit weren’t an artistic combination. It didn’t’ suit anyone’s taste! Nobody felt culturally gratified by that mud! But by that and a wash in Siloam, eyes were opened. It pleases God to use the foolish things to save those who believe in Him.”

-Charles Spurgeon, The Healing of One Born Blind

The Healing Spit Theory

The spittle of a human being is the best antidote for the poison of serpents, though, our daily lives attest to its efficacy and utility, in many other areas. We spit to keep ourselves safe from epilepsy and to avoid bad luck after meeting someone with a bad right leg. We apologize to the gods for having ridiculous expectations by spitting into our laps. In the same way, whenever medicine is employed, it’s good to spit three times on the ground to help it to take hold.

-Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book XXVIII, vii

A Meditation on Means

The Lord revealed his power more effectively by choosing this method of healing than if he had opened the blind man’s eyes with just a word. He used things that seem more likely to blind a man than to let him see! Who would believe that someone was about to heal the ears of a deaf man if they started filling his ears with mud? Clearing his ears might make sense, but putting mud in them? No. If Jesus wanted to use rational means to open this mans’ eyes, a surgical knife would have made more sense than mud. But Jesus chose to use this means for his power… it is supremely easy for him to heal by any means he wants. He can use laying on of hands or touching or a word or even spit and clay. If the word of Christ is added, any means he chooses will be effective, even if it seems more harmful than helpful to us.

-Wolfgang Musculus, Commentarii in Ioannem as found in Reformation Commentary on Scripture.

Tag: Charles Spurgeon

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Six Major Theories About Why Jesus Healed with Mud made of Spit (John 9)