Fr. Stephen De Young: We’ll be starting in John, chapter 5, verse 16, where we left off last time. But just to get us caught up real quickly to where we are, we just read the story about Christ healing the paralyzed man who was by the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. This particular pool was associated with miraculous healings because at certain intervals, an angel would come and disturb the waters and the first person who got in would be healed. And so Jesus encountered this paralyzed man who had been there for some 38 years, which would be most, if not all of his life, at least his adult life, and who was laying there and who had not been healed yet. And Christ healed him and told him to pick up his bed and walk home.

And some of the Pharisees saw him carrying his bed and noted that it was the Sabbath. And technically, if you’re walking and carrying something, that constitutes work, so he was working on the Sabbath. And so they came in and criticized him. He told them that he was carrying his bed because the person who healed him from his paralysis had told him to carry his bed. And having just been healed from 38 years of paralysis, he wasn’t going to ask a whole lot more questions. He was just, “Yes, sir”. And at that time, the Pharisees asked him who it was who healed him. And he didn’t even know. He had been so excited, he had just kind of taken off. So later we read that Jesus went and found him and talked to him. And so then, right where we left off last time, the man had gone back to the Judeans of the Pharisees, who had troubled him about carrying his bed and informed them that it was Jesus who had healed him, because now he knew.

And as we’re about to see, rather than that satisfying them, they’re now going to decide to blame Jesus for having led this man to commit this horrible sin of carrying his bed home on the Sabbath.

Interlocutor: How could they not be in awe about this man who was paralyzed, and then they’re going to criticize?

Fr. Stephen: Well, from their point of view, we as modern people, especially as modern American people, we have a very scientific mindset, where we tend to think that the world kind of operates by natural law. Everything sort of runs according to science and math, and then every once in a while, there’s a miracle. And when we see one of those miracles, we’re astonished and amazed that this miraculous thing happened, because it’s sort of an exception to the way we’re used to thinking about the way the world is working.

But the people who lived in the 1st century AD, I don’t just mean the Jews, I mean, everybody who was alive everywhere in the world of the 1st century AD, that’s not how they viewed the world. They didn’t view the world as operating according to sort of natural laws and mathematics. They believed that the world was full of spirits and different spiritual powers. In the case of if we’re not talking about the Jews, in the case of the Romans, the Greeks, the Chinese, India, everyone at that time in general, were talking about, you know, different gods and spirits and demons and these spiritual creatures who are all at work in the world all the time. Remember the Romans, I mean, for them, the sun is Apollo and his chariot riding through the sky. It’s not a big ball of incandescent gas, the way we think of it.

And so, while the Jews were monotheistic, they just believed there was the one God, they did believe that there were angels and demons and other spiritual powers in the world. And so when they saw something that we would call miraculous happen, someone’s healed or go back to Elijah, an axe-head floats or something happens that they see as being the product of some spiritual force, their thought is not, “Oh, this is amazing. This kind of stuff never happens!” Their thought is, “Who did this? What spiritual power is responsible for this?” And in the case of Jews especially, because they only believe in one God for them, is this coming from God, or is this coming from the demonic? Is this coming from good or evil? And the way they make that decision is primarily at this point, especially the Pharisees is based on the law. It’s based on the Torah.

So, when they look at this, they say, “Okay, this person is cured of their paralysis. Who’s responsible for it? Did God do it?” So they said, “Well, the person who did it told him to carry his bed on the Sabbath. So he was telling him to do work on the Sabbath, and that’s a sin. So that means this miracle isn’t from God.” That’s their way of thinking, that’s how they understood it. So it wasn’t that, “Oh, hey, this person was miraculously healed. This must be from God. Therefore, it’s okay for him to carry his bed.” They would have had the exact opposite direction. He told him to break the law. So he’s a bad guy.

So, chapter 5, verse 16:

For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill Him, because He had done these things on the Sabbath.

So that right there, that’s why. So for there they say, “Okay, he told someone to break the law, therefore he’s a false prophet. He’s doing false miracles.” And if you look at the Book of Deuteronomy, according to the law, what you’re supposed to do to a false prophet is you’re supposed to stone them to death. So that’s their thinking. They’ve decided Jesus is a false prophet because of this. And so now they’re ready to kill him.

But Jesus answered them,

So Jesus didn’t go off and hide because these people want to kill Him and are upset at Him, right? Jesus approaches them and responds to them. He says:

“My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.”

What does that have to do with anything? Well, we talked about this a little bit last time. This is one of those themes that goes through John’s Gospel. Remember how the Sabbath begins? Sabbath starts actually at the beginning of Genesis, chapter 2. God in six days creates the heavens and the earth. And then when his work is done, he rests, and that’s the Sabbath day. So therefore, we rest on the Sabbath. So, what Jesus says here is that His Father has been working even up to the present time. Meaning God didn’t just create the world and then sit back, sort of just let things go wherever they were going to go, right? Because especially after the fall, they went to some very bad places. The world became full of sin and wickedness. But God doesn’t just leave it that way. God is continuing to work in his creation to bring about salvation. And so Jesus is saying, “Look, you don’t even understand what the Sabbath is about.” The Sabbath, the reason it comes at the end of the week is that the idea was to show to the Jewish people that at the end, what they’re looking forward to, what they’re hoping for when God is done saving his people, was rest. Then we’ll truly be able to rest. We’ll truly be at peace, once God has saved and delivered his people. And so they’ve turned it into just this arbitrary rule, right? “No, you have to… Every seven days you have to do and you have to follow all these rules or you’re working and you’re breaking…” and they’ve missed the point.

And so what Jesus is trying to do is refocus them on the original point. God is still working. That rest hasn’t been achieved yet. It hasn’t happened yet. He’s still working in the world. And notice he adds, “And I have been working”, right? Not, “I’m now working too”, but “I have been working”, because remember St. John is very clear that Jesus has been around since the very beginning with God the Father working for salvation. We’re going to see where this culminates later. But for St. John, what he’s presenting is that Jesus, what Jesus is now doing now, that he’s becoming incarnate and he’s on earth, is finishing this work of creation and salvation.

And so, that’s what the Jewish people should be focused on. They should be focused on the fact that this man was just healed of his paralysis. They should be focused on the salvation that this man just received, to the things that are now happening because Jesus is here to complete the work of salvation, not on an arbitrary list of rules trying to make people follow them.

Interlocutor: How in the Orthodox Church are we still working on the Sunday?

Fr. Stephen: Well, Sunday is not the Sabbath. Saturday is still the Sabbath. Sunday is the Lord’s Day. Now we get confused in English, because in English, we have pagan names for our days of the week. Most other languages, they do not. It’s like in Spanish, Saturday is “Sabado”, it’s the Sabbath day. And Sunday is “Domingo”, the Lord’s Day. In most other languages, that’s how it’s set up. We get confused because we have Sun Day, Moon Day. Woden’s Day, named after Odin and Thursday named after Thor. They’re all named after pagan goddesses. In English.

Interlocutor: I told you that my dad was a farmer, so whenever the crops are ready to be harvested, he needed to do it. So he would always go over to the priest and ask if you have permission to work.

Fr. Stephen: Well, what happens is when Christ rises from the dead, he rises from the dead on the first day of the week, on Sunday. And in the apostles’ understanding of that, they saw Sunday as fulfilling Saturday, because when Jesus dies, he dies on Friday. And then what does he do on Saturday on the Sabbath? He rests in the tomb. And so this is spoiling a little about where we’re going to go at the end to St. John’s Gospel, but that’s okay, because we all know the story, but Jesus on the cross completes this work that we’re talking about. And so, then the rest happens on that Saturday. And so the purpose of the Sabbath was to point forward to that. And so once Jesus has fulfilled it, now we go to celebrating on the first day of the week, his resurrection, which is a new beginning, the beginning of a new creation in a new world and a new beginning for us. And so the way it’s put in the Synaxarion is that the apostles transferred the dignity of the Sabbath to the Lord’s Day. That all of that moved.

And so it’s important that in another Gospel, Jesus says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, that the Sabbath and rest is a gift to us. And so if we turn that from a gift into an obligation, we’ve lost something. Just like the Pharisees have lost something here. They’ve taken everything that the Sabbath was supposed to be about, this promise of rest at the end, and turned it into just an arbitrary set of rules that you have to follow or you’re a bad person.

So, it is a very good thing, other than coming to church on Sunday, to rest on Sunday, to spend time in prayer, to spend time in meditation, it is a very good thing. But if you’re required, I mean, if you’re a physician, there are all kinds of jobs where you end up having to work on Sundays. That is not a sin you’re going to be judged for, you’re going to be liable to judgement and condemnation for.

Interlocutor: Well, my dad would never miss Mass, so he would always go to Mass because Mass is always at 7:30 in the morning. We only have one in Branch. So after Mass, though, if he had to get in the harvest, he would always go and ask for permission.

Fr. Stephen: And this is another one of those areas where it’s very different for us now, especially as modern Americans, where we’re used to having, I mean, I don’t get one, obviously, but where people used to having a two day weekend off, you work five days and then you have two days off. We don’t understand the Sabbath and a day of rest the same way. At this time in history, the Romans, when you read pagan Roman writers writing about the Jews, one of their biggest criticisms of the Jews is that they’re lazy because they take a day off every seven days. Because in the culture, everyone else worked seven days a week. There was no day off unless there was some kind of public festival where you were required to attend. Other than that, if you were a farmer, you were out working the farm every day. And if you were a blacksmith, you were there working the smith every day, usually for as long as it was light outside, there was no 40-hour work week at this time in history.

So it was a very different culture. So it made it easier to see this idea that we take one day in seven see that as sort of a gift, as a positive thing. Culturally, we’re in a little different place where we kind of take it for granted that we’re going to have a couple of days every week to do what we want.

Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.

So rather than Jesus’ response getting them to understand, look, that’s not what the Sabbath is really about, right? All they fixate on again, just like they didn’t say, “Well, this person was healed, this person was saved.” What they fixate on is he just referred to God as his father. And he said he’s working alongside Him, so he’s making himself equal to God. So now we’ve got false prophet and blasphemy. So now we’ve really got to stone him to death.

And to be fair to them, I try to be fair to them. If Jesus wasn’t God, if Jesus wasn’t God incarnate, if he wasn’t the Son of God, then they would be right. If anyone else had shown up saying these things, they would be a false prophet and they would be blaspheming. If I said these things, I would be blaspheming and I would be a false prophet. So it’s not that they were wrong to identify false prophets, it’s that they misidentified, Jesus is the problem.

Then Jesus answered and said to them,

Notice once again, Jesus doesn’t give up. This is one of the very important things to see in the Gospels, because again and again we see Jesus coming into conflict with Jewish people, especially with their leaders, with the Pharisees. And we tend to think of things in terms of good guy, bad guy, right? So Jesus is the good guy. These Jews, these Pharisees, they’re the bad guys. And then based on that understanding, people will say all kinds of crazy things about the Bible. They’ll say it’s antisemitic. And I’m like, “Jesus is Jewish too. I don’t know how that works”, but they’ll say all these things about the Bible. But what we need to remember is the reason there are all these back and forth and conflicts is that Jesus keeps talking to them. They don’t come and oppose Jesus or insult Jesus, they’re slandering him. They’re calling Him a false prophet, a blasphemer. Jesus doesn’t just say, “Well, forget you then,” and walk away, which he would have had every right to. He doesn’t just abandon them and say, “Well, you’ll find out when you die.” He keeps coming back to them. He keeps coming back to them and trying to reason with them and trying to make them understand, because he loves them too. His disciples don’t get it, as we’ve seen, and he loves them anyway. And he loves the people who do kind of get it, like the Samaritan woman, like Nicodemus eventually. He loves the ones who don’t get it, like the apostles. He loves the ones who are downright wrong and who are opposing Him and who are hating Him and want to kill Him. Jesus still loves them and still comes in and tries to reason with them and tries to get them back on the right path.

So this tells us, I said at the very first Bible study we did on St. John’s Gospel, this is very important, and very central to the Orthodox faith, is that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God. The way we know who God is, what he’s like, is by who Jesus is and what Jesus is like. Because God the Father we can’t comprehend. The Holy Spirit we can’t comprehend. But because Jesus Christ became man, we can know Him through his humanity, because he shares his humanity in common with us, so we can know Him in His humanity. So through Jesus, we can know who God is, what he’s like, what his personality is like, what he cares about. And so this is showing us not just what Jesus’ attitude was historically, but this is showing us who God is, that God is a God who still loves these people even when they hate Him, and who comes to them again and again and again. And so this shows us the character of the God we worship.

And so, this should also inform our understanding of what love is. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies and we see he’s done it, God’s done it. Christ has done it, they’ve been doing it. Even when we’ve been at our most ungrateful, our most our most wicked, our most rebellious against God, God has continued to love us and hasn’t written us off. And so that means if we’re going to be like Him, then no matter how rebellious and wicked and sinful and ungrateful someone is toward us, that means we have to keep loving them, too. We have to keep loving them, too.

It’s easier said than done. And this is the point St. Paul makes when he says, that at just the right time, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He didn’t wait for us to get our act together and then say,

“Okay, now you folks are worthy. You’re good enough people for me to die for you.” He died for us while we still hated him, while we were still off sinning. That’s when he loved us enough to lay down his life for us. So Jesus comes back to them again. Now that they’ve called Him a blasphemer to boot:

“Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself does; and He will show Him greater works than these, that you may marvel.”

So what’s he saying? Well, remember what their criticism was. They say, “You’re making yourself equal with God”. And so Jesus’ response is the Son which is him. So he’s saying, “What I do, is what I see the Father do.” Meaning, it’s not that there’s two Gods. There’s God the Father. There’s Jesus. So there’s these two separate gods that they work together sometimes, and sometimes they do their own thing… That’s not how it is. So what he’s saying is, and this is part of the reason why we know them as Father and Son, is that one is the image of the other. And so the things that Jesus is doing are the things that God the Father does. This is part of what I was just saying, that he’s how we know who God the Father is. For that to work, they have to be doing the same things, working continuously.

So, there’s no separation. There’s no separation between the two, that they’re two separate Gods. And so when you say you’re making yourself equal to God, that’s implying that you’re this other separate person and you’re trying to say you’re a God too, right? Which is not what Jesus is saying. He’s saying there is no separation. There’s nothing that God the Father has and knows that he doesn’t share with the Son. And so what the Son does is what he’s received from the Father. There’s no separation between the two.

For as the Father raises the dead and gives life to them, even so the Son gives life to whom He will.

This is pointing forward, because he just said you’re going to see greater things and you’re going to marvel at them, well this is Him predicting his resurrection. Notice the subtle difference, He says the Father raises the dead, because Christ is going to rise from the dead. So also the Son gives life to all those who… Remember, eternal life is the way that St. John primarily talks about salvation. So what Jesus here is saying is that he is going to be raised from the dead. This is that greater thing they’re going to marvel at, that Jesus is going to be raised from the dead by the Father, and in his rising from the dead, he’s then going to give his life to all those who believe and who follow Him.

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For the Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son, that all should honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.

So why does he shift to judgment? Well, what’s their concern here about Him carrying the bed? It’s that he’s breaking the law. And the big concern of the Pharisees, remember, is that they believe God is going to come to judge the earth. And when he does, there’s going to be the righteous, and they’re going to receive blessings, there’s going to be the wicked, and they’re going to be destroyed. So obviously they want to be the righteous, right? And one of the problems is that they become very convinced that they are the righteous. But their understanding of that then is, “How do I become reckoned on that side when that judgment happens? I want to be on the right side. How do I do that? I do that by keeping all the laws, keeping all the rules. And if I do that, then when God comes…” and so what Jesus is saying to them here is he’s not the one. He’s not the one who’s going to judge. That it’s the Son who’s going to judge. And so rather than being concerned about following all the laws, what do you need to do if you want to be on the right side? What do you just say? You have to receive life from Jesus. That’s the way in which you end up on the right side.

Now, this is continuing what he’s been saying, because what did the paralytic do? Well, the paralytic received new life from Jesus. Remember he said to Nicodemus, if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you need to be born again or born from above. You need to receive this new life. Well, unless you receive that new life from Christ, you’re going to perish. There’s eternal life and then there’s condemnation. So rather than thinking about it in terms of the people who’ve kept all the rules, who are blessed to the people who haven’t, who are cursed. He’s saying, “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got it all wrong because everyone has sinned. Every one of you has sinned. And so every one of you is liable to death. Every one of you is going to die. The only way for you not to die permanently is to receive life from the Son who has received it from the Father. So this is what you should be concerned about.”

Interlocutor: Something I’ve always thought about where did all these Jewish rules come from? Who sat down and said, “Okay, let’s start making a list here”?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this primarily comes from the party of the Pharisees. And the word Pharisee, we’re not sure exactly where it comes from, but most people think it comes from a word that means “to separate”. So they kept themselves separate from the masses. They were holy, they were set apart. And the idea that comes out of the very early rabbinic literature was they referred to it as building a hedge around the law, because in their minds, some of the laws in the Torah, in the first five books of the Bible, are kind of ambiguous. For example, one that seems ambiguous, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Well, what exactly does that mean? So they have to then say, “Okay, what exactly does that mean? What is my obligation to my neighbor and who is my neighbor and who isn’t?” And define all the terms. So that’s what they set out to do. They set out to say, okay, we need to put a fine point on this and list out for people… there’s about 318 commandments in the Torah, and they added thousands more to break those down, what that really means.

So, one really obvious one that comes from that, that Jews still practice to this day is there’s the commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” So how do we make sure we never take the name of the Lord in vain? We’ll never say or write the name of the Lord. If you just never say it, you can’t take it in vain, right? You’re safe. So you build this little hedge to keep you from ever breaking the law. And so they did the same thing, like with the Sabbath, right? You’re not allowed to do work. Well, what constitutes doing work? How far do you have to walk before you’re working? How much weight do you have to carry? If I do this, is that working? If I do that, is that working? And so they came up with rulings and opinions on all these details so that everybody could have… and then as long as I follow all those, I’m fine, I’m a good person, I’m doing everything right. I’m going to heaven, right? The whole shebang.

Interlocutor: Are there people who still practice these?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Orthodox Jews do. So, for example, there are a lot of office buildings… One of the laws that’s actually a commandment in the Torah is that you’re not allowed to kindle a fire on the Sabbath. And so that’s been interpreted in modern times to mean you can’t use electricity on the Sabbath. So there are pneumatic air-powered elevators in a lot of the office buildings in the Jewish sections of New York so that they could use the elevator on the Sabbath without using electricity, or if they’re in an apartment building with an elevator. or they’ll hire a Gentile to be the elevator operator and push the button for them. So they’re not pushing the button.

Interlocutor: But can they cook?

Interlocutor 2: No, they cook one day before.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the problem with that kind of legalism is, first of all, it’s like, “Hey, we invented an air-powered elevator. Like, you really put one over on…” God said, “Oh, you got me on that one.” There’s a problem there. And that’s when Jesus talks about the law and when St. Paul later talks about the law, a lot of people misinterpret it that they’re saying we should ignore the Old Testament, or we should ignore the Old Testament commandments. But that’s not what they’re criticizing. They’re criticizing this. They’re criticizing this view of having all of these picayune commandments and then thinking if you follow all those that then you’re a righteous person before God, rather than trying to understand what the law is really talking about when it says love your neighbor, as another story and another gospel, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And somebody says, “Well, who’s my neighbor?” Because he wants to know. Okay, but who? “Right, like my next-door neighbor. Just him? As long as I love him, I’m okay, right?” And the point, of course, is everyone. In Leviticus. It says you need to love the foreigner the same way you love your fellow Jews.

So, I mean, if you actually read the Torah, the laws weren’t this end in themselves for people to feel righteous because they managed to keep all these things. I think sometimes people look at the Ten Commandments like, “Well, I haven’t murdered anyone and I haven’t committed adultery, and I haven’t stolen anything, so I should get a medal.” Oh, wow, you’re a wonderful person, you haven’t murdered anyone, and miss the point.

And that’s why Jesus, especially in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is always saying, “Look, if you hate your brother in your heart, you’ve already committed murder. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t actually go over and kill him. If you hate him and you want him to die, you’ve broken the commandment. You’ve sinned already. And if you’re sitting there greedily trying to acquire goods, even if you haven’t technically stolen anything, you’ve already gone far into sin.”

And so, one of the major purposes of the law was not for people to try to justify themselves, to try to prove that they’re a good person. It was the opposite; it was to bring them to repentance, to help them look at their lives. For example, if you look in the service books before confession, it has the Ten Commandments there.

Interlocutor: I love that, I guess being brought up Roman Catholic, you know, I took those commandments as I mean, they really meant that. “Do not commit murder.” And I took that as just that. And then when I started studying Orthodoxy and I just love the way it’s explained, because I had never thought of it in those terms.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you probably haven’t gone and worshiped an idol, literally, right? But if you spent more of your life chasing after money than chasing after God, you have been worshiping an idol or fame or a good reputation or whatever it is that you’ve been sacrificing things to, you’ve still broken the commandment.

And so, what the New Testament is trying to do is not reject the Old Testament or reject the law. It’s trying to show the right way to understand and interpret it and apply it to our lives. And one of the big ones is to help us understand our own sinfulness so we can repent and we can change and we can be forgiven and we can be healed. Because that’s where we need to understand the deadness and the sinfulness that’s in us, so that we can then receive healing and life from Christ and be saved. As long as we’re going around saying, “Oh no, I’m righteous, I’ve got everything together, I’m good”, we can’t receive salvation because we don’t think we need it. We don’t think we need to be healed. We don’t think there’s anything wrong with us.