S240P8 – Loaded statements: Jesus

Jn. 5:12‭-‬14

They asked him, “Who is the Man who told you, ‘Pick up your pallet and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away since there was a crowd in that place. Afterward, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

This conversation starts simply enough.  Jesus saw a man who had been an invalid for decades and asked him whether he wanted to get better.  The man responded by saying that he had no one to help him enter the pool of healing water.  It was as if he had spent all those years playing a cat and mouse game with the source of his healing, trying to get to the water but not being able to do so.  Jesus could have helped the man into the pool, but He did something else.  He commanded the man to get up and walk, and the man did just that.  Then, later that day, He made a curious comment.  The question is whether this comment was about the past or the future.

It is easy to take the words of Jesus here and interpret them to mean that the man’s illness was the result of some sin.  Let us consider, however, another way to interpret these words.  This man had endured almost four decades of being an invalid, which certainly was a tremendous weight to bear.  He might have had people speculating regularly whether he or some ancestor had sinned to have caused his sickness.  It would have been a very difficult way to live, and that could be just what Jesus is highlighting here.  The man’s life to date had been very tough and nowhere near the perfect existence originally designed for us.  That imperfect and difficult life, however, is nothing compared to what awaits those who choose to live in sin.

I think Jesus is letting the man know that his difficult life was just the tip of the iceberg.  He clearly was living in some kind of sin, and Jesus was telling him to run from it.  The man had to understand that a fate worse than what he had endured those 38 years would await him if he did not change his life.  Perhaps this was not an admonishment about his past but simply a warning about his future.  If we want to attribute our current illnesses to sin, let it be to the original sin that opened the door to sickness.  Let us also look at this imperfect and difficult world and realize that only worse awaits those who choose to defy God.  Father, give us a greater understanding of the dangers of sin and the fate of those who love it.