John 5:8-10 - Take up your mat and walk

5:8,9a

Jesus commanded him to get up, pick up his mat and walk. Now at one level this seems cruel. Suppose you saw a disabled person in a wheelchair and told them to get up and walk. What would others think? At best they would think you were heartless, mocking the person. At worst you might be arrested under some sort of discrimination or hate law. Jesus sometimes says the most unreasonable things to us. But what made it reasonable was that the man was immediately healed.

When Jesus spoke the words the man was immediately healed. Now it seems that the man did not demonstrate any faith at all. You  might say that he demonstrated faith in getting up and walking, but when Jesus uttered the command and he was healed I think it likely that the man would sense something happening to his body, something changing. Too often we portray having faith as an act of will in a “mind over matter” sense. This man was responding to what Jesus had done. When God speaks things change. When God speaks into our life we need to act on that change.

5:9b,10

A common theme to Jesus’ life was His conflict with the Pharisees and other religious leaders, and many of these focused on the Sabbath. In our day we have a tendency to just think the Pharisees were just a bunch of religious nuts. Now they were clearly wrong, for Jesus says they were, but let’s first try and understand their position a little. The Sabbath is clearly important. It is one of the ten commandments, the Sabbath principle is an important part of the Law, desecration of the Sabbath is frequently mentioned by the prophets. The nation had gone into exile in Babylon as a result of their complete disobedience to God. After the return from exile, and throughout the intertestamental period the Jews had slowly got the idea that they needed to be devoted to the One God. So the Pharisees were not just being daft in their consideration of the Sabbath as being important. However, in their zeal to protect and observe the Sabbath faithfully they had added all sorts of regulations, with very detailed rules on what one was and was not allowed to do on the Sabbath. In so doing they had ended up going against God! We need to be careful here, for we can go through the same process. We realise something is important to God, we then seek to protect it by our own methods, we end up adding all sorts of man-made rules with the result that we become enemies of God.

We should also look at our own attitude to the Sabbath. I think the majority of people fall into one of three camps, one have a vague sense that Sunday is important, but nothing more; some take a very legalistic approach, similar in some ways to the Pharisees; and some consider it to be no different from any other day at all. Probably the majority fall into the first of these categories. I do not believe we should take a legalistic approach to the Sabbath, but the Sabbath principle is still important.

Finally, we should note that Jesus saw the Sabbath as a day for healing people, for setting people free. If we get a right view of the Sabbath it can become a time for restoration.