After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 2 Now in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate there is a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five covered walkways.[1] 3 In these lay a crowd of sick people — blind, lame, paralyzed. 5 One man was there who had been sick for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to get well?”
7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I’m trying to get there, someone else goes down ahead of me.”[2]
8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, pick up your mat, and walk.”[3] 9 At once the man was healed. He picked up his mat and walked.
Now that day was the Sabbath. 10 So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It’s the Sabbath, and you’re not allowed to carry your mat.”[4]
11 But he answered them, “The man who made me well — he told me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’”
12 They asked him, “Who is this man who told you, ‘Pick it up and walk’?”
13 But the man who had been healed didn’t know who it was, because Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
14 Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “Look, you are well now. Don’t sin anymore, so that nothing worse happens to you.” 15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.
16 And this is why the Jews began harassing Jesus — because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working too.”
18 For this reason the Jews tried all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
19 So Jesus answered them: “Amen, amen, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own. He can only do what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son does in the same way. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything he does. And he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. 21 For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomever he wants. 22 The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, 23 so that everyone will honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.
24 “Amen, amen, I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes the one who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has crossed over from death into life.
25 “Amen, amen, I tell you, the hour is coming — and is already here — when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. 26 For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son to have life in himself. 27 And he has given him authority to carry out judgment, because he is the Son of Man.[5]
28 “Don’t be amazed at this, because the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice 29 and come out — those who have done good to a resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to a resurrection of judgment.
30 “I can do nothing on my own. I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I don’t seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.
31 “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not valid. 32 There is another who testifies about me, and I know that the testimony he gives about me is true. 33 You sent messengers to John, and he testified to the truth. 34 Not that I accept human testimony — I say these things so that you may be saved. 35 John was a lamp burning and shining, and for a while you were willing to rejoice in his light.
36 “But I have a testimony greater than John’s. The works that the Father has given me to complete — the very works I am doing — testify about me, that the Father has sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has himself testified about me. You have never heard his voice or seen his form, 38 and you don’t have his word living in you, because you don’t believe the one he sent.
39 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. And they are the ones that testify about me — 40 yet you refuse to come to me so that you may have life.
41 “I don’t accept glory from people. 42 But I know you — that you don’t have the love of God in you. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you don’t receive me. If someone else comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44 How can you believe, when you accept glory from one another and don’t seek the glory that comes from the only God?
45 “Don’t think that I will accuse you before the Father. The one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. 46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, because he wrote about me. 47 But if you don’t believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”
Notes
Note 1. Bethesda was a twin pool complex just north of the Temple, uncovered by excavation near the Church of St. Anne in Jerusalem: colonnades ran along its four sides, with a fifth along the divider between the two basins — the “five covered walkways.” ↩
Note 2. Many Bibles contain a further sentence here — that an angel came down and troubled the water — but that explanation is absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts, which is why this edition passes from verse 3 to verse 5. ↩
Note 3. Carrying an object from one domain to another was counted among the thirty-nine categories of work later codified as forbidden on the Sabbath. ↩
Note 4. Here the Greek hoi Ioudaioi clearly means the authorities, not the populace — they are the ones with standing to enforce the Sabbath and, later in this chapter, to seek Jesus’s death. The healed man is himself a Jew, as is Jesus. See the note at 1:19. ↩
Note 5. The phrase reaches back to Daniel 7, where “one like a son of man” comes on the clouds and is given everlasting dominion and authority over all nations by God. ↩