The Sabbath controversies in the Gospel of John easily top my short list of the most important Sabbath texts in the Bible (John 5:1-20; 9:1-41).1 Among no more than seven recorded miracles in John, two are performed on the Sabbath, and they are recounted in exquisite detail. This gives the Sabbath broader exposure in John than anywhere else in the New Testament, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Bible. After the first Sabbath healing, we hear for the first time that “the Jews were seeking . . . to kill him” (John 5:18).2 The heated discussions between Jesus and His opponents put the Sabbath at the center of the storm in John. The Sabbath focuses the question of Jesus’ identity and relation to the Father. This makes the Sabbath the great clarifier in this Gospel; it also takes us to the heart of the mission and message of Jesus.
In the prologue (John 1:1-18) three verses pinpoint the task facing Jesus in John. First, we are told that “no one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (verse 18, NASB).3 This must mean that Jesus can do and has done what no one else could do or has done to the same extent: reveal what God is really like. Second, earlier in the prologue, the narrator says that “in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (verse 4, ). This statement places the emphasis not on precept but on practice, not on law but on living embodiment.
Third, we read that “the light shines in the darkness” (verse 5). “Darkness” must here be understood as an ominous active category and not merely as a passive state of affairs. Someone is pushing back against Jesus, working hard to keep the darkness in place and to smother the light. At one of the most charged moments in John, Jesus makes it clear that the darkness in the world is the result of a personal, nonhuman power. The world is dark because of misapprehension of God. Satan is the instigator of this darkness. “He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
This text is more sharply focused than current translations would have us believe. Jesus says literally, “When he speaks the lie.” The entity that Jesus refers to as the lie recalls the story of the serpent’s misrepresentation of God in Genesis (Gen. 3:1). It is the darkness of that lie that Jesus has come to dispel, making the Sabbath the arena of revelation.
The first five verses of John 5 set the scene for this Sabbath story: a man, who had suffered disease for 38 years, lies next to a pool, located near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem.
Jesus has a remedy for this man. The new possibility is introduced when Jesus asks him, “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6). Perhaps the man initially is curled up in his blanket, his face turned away and not looking at Jesus when Jesus speaks to him. Perhaps he turns slowly and agonizingly to Jesus with his answer: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me” (verse 7). Eventually there will be direct and sustained eye contact between Jesus and the ailing man, a scrutinizing gaze on the part of the man and an electrifying gaze on the part of Jesus. The eye contact creates hope before Jesus’ words suggest the possibility. Suspense and expectation are now in the air. And Jesus says to him: “Stand up, take your mat and walk” (verse 8).
The command, primed by the empowering gaze, imparts the ability to do what is commanded. Suddenly, strangely, the paralytic gets up, takes his mat, and walks (verse 9)! Even now, years later, the man’s recovery leaps from the pages of the New Testament. We are caught completely off guard by the implications of the next sentence, charged as an unexpected negative: “Now that day was a sabbath” (verse 9).
Controversy
“It is astonishing that the Jews are unmoved by the miracle, either at this point or in what follows,” says Ernst Haenchen.4 It is indeed! The awe that might be expected is drowned out by the narrator’s explanatory remark that the healing happened on the Sabbath (verse 9; cf. John 9:14). All of a sudden the air is chilled by a logic that takes no joy in what has taken place. “Now that day was a sabbath” (John 5:9) is a sentence that transforms the passage. It “is no longer soaring aloft on the wings of hope” but has “plummeted to the ground with a decided thud,” writes Karen Pidcock-Lester.5
“It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat,” the Jews say to the man who has been restored (verse 10). The timing is wrong because “it is the sabbath,” and the mat is wrong for the same reason. The mat, inauspicious at first, turns out to be at the center of the provocation. Jesus does not say to the man, “Stand up and walk.” He says: “Stand up, take your mat and walk” (verse 8). Likewise, John does not say that the man stood up and walked. Instead, the man “took up his mat and began to walk” (verse 9). When the Jews subsequently see the man walking about, it is the mat that catches their eyes. If not for the pointed and purposeful inclusion of the mat, the man would have been home scot-free, and Jesus might have escaped the ensuing outrage (verse 18; cf. John 9:16).
The prospect of Jesus being caught by surprise at people’s negative reaction is ruled out by the fact that there are two Sabbath healings in this Gospel, each featuring a person with a chronic illness (John 5:5; 9:1), each describing an unsolicited healing initiated by Jesus (John 5:6; 9:6), and each generating almost identical and highly negative reactions (John 5:10, 18; 9:16, 24). If Jesus failed to think through the consequences of healing on the Sabbath the first time, He would certainly not repeat the mistake ( John 9:6, 7).
The weight of evidence, therefore, leads to the conclusion that (1) Jesus did not meet the paralytic at Beth-zatha because of a chance encounter (cf. John 5:6); (2) the healing was not a mistake; and (3) Jesus did not fail to anticipate the negative reaction. It seems as if Jesus threw down the gauntlet by publicly ignoring Jewish Sabbath regulations. Two of the 39 prohibitions in existence specifically dealt with carrying a pallet and kneading dough.6 Thus, we can appreciate John’s account of the negative reaction to the sight of the man carrying his mat. “Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath” (verse 16).
But we miss the depth of the struggle if we assume that Jesus was merely picking a fight with Jewish leaders over proper Sabbath observance. It is not what they see that creates controversy; it is rather what they don’t see. They see a man carrying his mat, and they cannot take their eyes off the mat (verse 10). Later they hear of a man restored to sight on the Sabbath when Jesus put mud on his eyes (John 9:8), and they cannot stop talking about the mud (verses 11, 14, 15). Clearly they see the mat and the mud, but they do not see the man. Much worse, they do not see God.
Of the two, failure to see the man and failure to see God, Jesus seizes upon the latter. His answer begins with a vision of God, claiming awareness of God as though known only to Him: “My Father is working until now, and I also am working” (John 5:17, translation mine).
God Revealed
The force of this statement must not be lost on us. “My Father is working,” Jesus says. By saying this, Jesus is exposing His “role model,” and He is also laying bare the rationale for their criticism down to its theological and scriptural bedrock. “What,” we ask them across the years, “is the core meaning of the Sabbath as you see it? What kind of God is the Sabbath meant to convey?” If working is the word that best fits Jesus’ vision of God, which word would best describe the outlook of His critics, now staring at Jesus with murder in their eyes?
The answer is not stated directly, but we hear it indirectly from the mouth of Jesus. On one level, His active imitation of the Father stands in contrast to their tight-lipped obedience to a commandment, frozen in time. On a deeper level, His emphasis on the Father working stands in contrast to their view of God resting. In the minds of His critics, the memory of Creation is the basis for Sabbath holiness (Gen. 2:1-3). Jesus, however, has the audacity to connect the Sabbath and working, making this connection again and again (see John 5:17; 7:21; 9:4).
These passages connect the Sabbath to a certain kind of “work.” The ideology of the Sabbath in John takes as its raw material “working” and not “resting,” as one might have expected.
Jesus’ answer so alarms His critics that they wish to see Him dead (verse 18). As they see it, Jesus has made claims that must not be allowed to stand. He has claimed intimacy with God far beyond what they will accept, “calling God his own Father.” He has laid claim to the divine identity, “making himself equal to God.” Last, He has grounded His own actions in the rationale of imitation, saying, “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (verse 9). This seamless threesome?—intimacy, identity, and imitation—are the foundation of His action, focused like a laser beam in His healing ministry on the Sabbath. All three serve the task of revealing to the world what God is like. Divine identity and intent go hand in hand in the ministry of Jesus.
Which is it, then? Which is it, whether resting or working, that best describes the meaning of the Sabbath in John? Is God resting in the context of present human need? Is God pulling back on occasion, taking a time-out from present reality? Does the Sabbath signify divine detachment and human need put on hold, as though God is saying, “Take two aspirins and call Me in the morning”? Must the paralytic, who has been ill for 38 years, wait until Tuesday to be healed because God has better things to do on the Sabbath?
The answer, I believe, is to bring together resting and working under the heading of revelation. In John, Jesus is above all the revealer (see John 1:18; 14:8, 9). It is no coincidence that John’s Gospel begins like Genesis (Gen. 1:1; John 1:1), bringing together the Creator and the Revealer in the person of Jesus. At Creation God’s commitment to humanity is described by God’s rest (Gen. 2:2, 3). But God’s rest at Creation does not mean absence and remoteness. On the contrary, it speaks of God’s commitment to humanity and God’s participation in human reality. God’s rest at Creation is precisely meant to reveal a God who is coming to what God has created and not one who is walking away. In John, Jesus is proclaiming the same message in a very different context. “My Father is working,” shocking though the thought must have been, configures the original intent of the Sabbath for the present reality of pain, disease, and death. If resting in the face of crying needs, taken literally, implies remoteness and indifference, God is not like that.
No matter how offensive the thought, Jesus defended His actions by the ultimate criterion: “My Father is working until now, and I also am working.” The Sabbath miracles in John show that God is hard at work making right what is wrong. The Sabbath controversies in John, even more important than the miracles by themselves, show Jesus going head-to-head with misconceptions of God that are inspired by “the father of lies” (John 8:44). And physical restoration, we see, is more easily accomplished than spiritual liberation. In one of the most important Sabbath texts in the Bible, Jesus harnesses the Sabbath for the task of revealing the truth about God, asking His followers and fellow Sabbathkeepers to join Him as a matter of acute urgency. “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work” (John 9:4).
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1 A more extensive discussion is found in my book The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 2009), pp. 181-203.
2 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations ?in this article have been taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission.
3 Scripture quotations marked NASB are from the New American Standard Bible. Copyright © 1960,1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
4 Ernst Haenchen, John 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. Robert W. Funk, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 246.
5 Karen Pidcock-Lester, “John 5:1-9,” Interpretation 59 (2005): 62.
6 Shabbath 7:2, Mishnah.
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Sigve Tonstad, a native of Norway, is an associate professor of religion and an assistant professor of medicine at Loma Linda University. This article was published July 21, 2011.