John 5:1-23
So Jesus committed two “crimes” – according to the Jewish leaders: He healed the man on the Sabbath, and He told the man to break their Sabbath rule by carrying his bed on the Sabbath. So Jesus’ responses to these two charges: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” (v. 17b) I’ve always been hard pressed to understand His response. Jesus is using the present continuous tense to refer to both the Father’s and His activities. The implication is that both He and the Father are working now and that the Father has been working all along. I don’t have a problem with that – if they quit working, we’re all gone! But working on what…? What is the “working” that Jesus and His Father have been doing? And how does this “working” respond to the Jewish charges? The only answer that I can come up with is that God rested on the seventh day after creating the world on the previous six days. But then, what about the eighth day? …and the ninth? …and…??!! My sense is that we are all living right now that eighth day and that Adam and Eve were living that eighth day – and Abraham and Moses and David and the prophets and Nicodemus and Peter and James and John … Luther, Calvin, and Wesley … and us! The Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are working in us and through us right now, this eighth day! And Jesus was doing His Father’s work that eighth day long ago, when He healed the lame man at the pool of Bethesda. Effectively, Jesus’ response is that …the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. (Mark 2:27). It is the eighth day. Work when you are called to work, rest when you are called to rest.
See also: May 3 / John 5:1-15; May 4 / John 5:16-23