“My Father Is
Still Working,
And I Am Also
Working”
After this there was a festival of the
Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate
there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bath-zatha, which
has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids – blind, lame, and paralyzed.
One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him
lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do
you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “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.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take
your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and
began to walk.
Now that day was a Sabbath. So the
Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful
for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The man who made me well
said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who
said to you, ‘Take up your mat and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did
not know who it was for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made
well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” The man went
away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the
Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the
Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I am also
working.” For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him,
because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was also calling God his own
Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
John 5-18