At the Pool, and the Bread of Life

There was a feast in Jerusalem that year, and Jesus went up to it. Near the Sheep Gate stood a pool with five covered porches, called Bethesda. The porches were full of sick people on mats — blind, lame, people whose arms and legs had dried up. They lay there because of the water: every so often it moved by itself, and whoever got in first was said to be made well. One of them had been ill for thirty-eight years. Jesus saw him, knew somehow that he had been there a very long time, and said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The man did not say yes. He explained. “Sir, I have nobody to put me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am crawling over there, somebody always gets down ahead of me.” Jesus did not argue with him about the water. “Get up. Pick up your mat and walk.” And straight away the man was well. He rolled up his mat, put it under his arm, and walked. It was the Sabbath.

He had not gone far before some teachers of the law stopped him in the street. “It is the Sabbath. You are not allowed to carry that mat.” He had lain on that mat for thirty-eight years, and had never once carried it anywhere. “The man who made me well told me to. He said, pick up your mat and walk.” “Who is he?” He could not tell them. Jesus had slipped away into the crowd while he stood staring at his own legs. Later on, Jesus found him in the temple, and said, “Look — you have become well. Do not go on sinning, or something worse may happen to you.” And the man went and told the leaders it was Jesus. After that they hunted him, because he did things like this on the Sabbath. And what he said only made it worse. “My Father is working right up until now. And I am working.” Now they wanted him dead — not only for breaking their Sabbath, but because he had called God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

Instead of taking it back, he told them exactly what he meant. “I tell you the truth: the Son cannot do one single thing on his own. He only does what he sees his Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son does the same. For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything he does himself, and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will stand there astonished. Just as the Father raises dead people up and makes them alive, so the Son makes alive whoever he wants to. And the Father judges nobody: he has handed all the judging over to the Son, so that everybody will honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Anybody who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. “I tell you the truth: anybody who listens to what I say and trusts the one who sent me has life that goes on forever. He does not come up for judging at all. He has already crossed over out of death and into life. I tell you the truth: an hour is coming — it is here already — when dead people will hear the voice of the Son of God, and the ones who hear will live. The Father has life in himself, and he gave the Son to have life in himself too, and the right to judge, because he is a son of man. “Do not be amazed at that. An hour is coming when everyone in a grave will hear his voice and come out — those who did good, into a rising up to life; those who kept on doing worthless things, into a rising up to be judged. I can do nothing on my own. I judge by what I hear, and my judging is right, because I am not after what I want, but what the one who sent me wants.”

Then he counted up the ones who spoke for him, the way you count witnesses in a court. “If I am the only one speaking for myself, what I say does not count. There is somebody else who speaks for me, and I know that what he says is true. You sent men out to John, and John told you the truth. Not that I need a man to speak for me — I say it so that you can be saved. He was the lamp, burning and shining, and you were glad of his light for an hour. “But I have something greater than John speaking for me. The works my Father gave me to finish — the very things I am doing — say that the Father sent me. And the Father who sent me has spoken for me himself. You have never heard his voice or seen what he looks like, and his word is not staying in you, because you will not trust the one he sent. “You go digging through the Scriptures, because you think you will find in them life that goes on forever. And those are the very writings that speak about me — and you will not come to me to have that life. “And do not think I will accuse you in front of the Father. Somebody is accusing you already: Moses, the very one you have put your hope in. If you trusted Moses you would trust me, because he wrote about me. But if you do not trust what he wrote, how will you trust what I say?”

After that he stayed in Galilee, because in Judea they were looking for a chance to kill him. But the Feast of Tents was coming — the autumn week when everybody sleeps in shelters of branches, to remember the desert years. And his brothers told him what to do. “You should not be sitting up here. Go to Judea, so your followers there can watch what you do. Nobody who wants to be somebody hides in a corner. If you can really do all this, show yourself to the world.” They were not saying it kindly. His own brothers did not believe him. He said, “It is not my time yet. Any time is the right time for you. The world cannot hate you; it hates me, because I keep telling it that what it does is evil. You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this one; my time has not come.” So they went, and he stayed. Then, once they were gone, he went up too — quietly. And the feast was full of people asking, “Where is that man?” There was muttering about him everywhere. Some said, “He is a good man.” And others said, “No he is not. He is leading everybody astray.” But nobody said it out loud, because they were frightened of the leaders.

And there was one more time he tried to tell them who he was, and it cost him most of the crowd. It was the day after he had fed the five thousand out on the hillside. The people came looking for him all round the lake, and when they found him he said, “I tell you the truth: you are looking for me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate the bread and had enough. Do not work for the food that goes bad, but for the food that lasts into everlasting life.” And they said: what should we do, then, to do the work God wants? And he said, “This is the work of God: trust the one he has sent.” And they said: our fathers ate manna in the wilderness — what sign will you do? And he said, “It was not Moses who gave you the bread out of heaven. It is my Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven — the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” And they said, “Lord, give us this bread always.” And he said the thing they had not seen coming: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever trusts in me will never be thirsty. And whoever comes to me I will never, ever throw out.”

And they began grumbling, because they knew his family. Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? We know his mother and his father. How can he say he came down out of heaven? And it got harder, not easier. He said, “I am the living bread that came down out of heaven. If anybody eats this bread he will live for ever. And the bread I will give is my own flesh, for the life of the world.” And they argued with one another: how can this man give us his flesh to eat? He did not soften it. He said it again, about eating and drinking and living in him and he in them — and nobody in that room understood it until the night of the last supper, and some of them not for years after that. And a great many of the people who had been following him said, “This is a hard word. Who can listen to it?” And from that day a great many of them turned back and stopped walking with him. The crowd that had wanted to make him king the week before simply melted away. And he turned to the twelve — the only ones left standing there — and asked them a question with no defense in it at all: “Do you want to go away too?” And Peter said, “Lord — who would we go to? You have the words of everlasting life. And we have come to trust, and to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”