John 5
Jesus heals a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years — on a Sabbath — and the resulting controversy becomes John's first long discourse on the Father and the Son.
Summary
At the pool of Bethesda, among a crowd of blind, lame, and paralysed people, Jesus finds a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years. Do you want to be healed? The man explains that he has no one to help him into the water when it is stirred; someone else always gets there before him. Jesus tells him to take up his mat and walk, and he does. The healing happens on a sabbath, and the religious authorities challenge the man for carrying his mat. He says the man who healed him told him to. Later Jesus finds him in the temple and tells him to sin no more, lest something worse happen. The man goes and tells the authorities that it was Jesus who healed him.
The discourse that follows the conflict over the Sabbath is the first extended statement of Johannine Christology. The Son does only what he sees the Father doing, because the Father loves the Son and shows him everything. The Father raises the dead and gives life; so the Son gives life to whom he will. The Father judges no one but has committed all judgment to the Son, so that all may honour the Son as they honour the Father. Whoever hears Jesus's word and believes has passed from death to life. The hour is coming when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and live. The chapter closes with a cumulative witness argument: four witnesses confirm who Jesus is — the Baptist, the works, the Father, and the scriptures. Moses himself wrote about Jesus; if they do not believe what Moses wrote, how will they believe what Jesus says?
- John 1Chapter 1 falls into two distinct movements.
- John 2Chapter 2 contains the first two incidents of the public ministry, set in very different registers.
- John 3Chapter 3 divides into a dialogue and a testimony.
- John 4Chapter 4 is built around the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the four gospels.
- John 5Chapter 5 turns on a Sabbath healing that provokes the first sustained conflict with the religious authorities and generates a major theological discourse.
- John 6Chapter 6 is the longest in the gospel and the most demanding.
- John 7Chapter 7 is one of the most dramatic scenes of the public ministry, set during the week-long Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem.
- John 8Chapter 8 opens with the pericope of the woman taken in adultery (verses 1–11), absent from the earliest manuscripts and widely understood as a later addition, but narratively powerful: whoever is without sin may cast the first stone.
- John 9Chapter 9 is the most novelistic chapter in John and a sustained piece of dramatic irony.
- John 10Chapter 10 follows directly from the expulsion of the man born blind in chapter 9 and develops two sustained metaphors.
- John 11Chapter 11 is the dramatic climax of the Book of Signs and the most fully narrated miracle in John.
- John 12Chapter 12 is the bridge between the two halves of the gospel.
- John 13Chapter 13 opens the Book of Glory and sets the scene for the Farewell Discourse that occupies chapters 14–17.
- John 14Chapter 14 is the opening movement of the Farewell Discourse and contains several of the most quoted passages in the gospel.
- John 15Chapter 15 moves through two large movements: the vine and branches discourse (verses 1–17) and the warning about the world's hostility (verses 18–27).
- John 16Chapter 16 continues the Farewell Discourse and moves through three phases.
- John 17Chapter 17 is the high-priestly prayer, unique in the New Testament: Jesus prays at length in the hearing of his disciples on the night of his arrest.
- John 18Chapter 18 covers the arrest, the hearings before Annas and Caiaphas, Peter's three denials, and the first half of the Roman trial before Pilate.
- John 19Chapter 19 covers the final stages of the trial and the crucifixion.
- John 20Chapter 20 narrates the resurrection in two stages across two distinct scenes.
- John 21Chapter 21 is often discussed as a possible appendix, since chapter 20 closes with a purpose statement that reads like an ending.