John 5:2-18

New Testament for Everyone

² In Jerusalem, near the Sheep Gate, there is a pool which is called, in Hebrew, Bethesda. It has five porticoes, ³ where several sick people were lying. They were blind, lame and paralyzed.

⁵ There was a man who had been there, in the same sick state, for thirty-eight years. ⁶ Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had been there a long time already.

“Do you want to get well?” he asked him.

⁷ “Well, sir,” the sick man replied, “I don’t have anyone to put me into the pool when the water gets stirred up. While I’m on my way there, someone else gets down before me.”

⁸ “Get up,” said Jesus, “pick up your mattress and walk!”

⁹ At once the man was healed. He picked up his mattress and walked.

God’s son breaks the sabbath!

The day all this happened was a sabbath. ¹⁰ So the Judaeans confronted the man who had been healed.

“It’s the sabbath!” they said. “You shouldn’t be carrying your mattress!”

¹¹ “Well,” he replied, “the man who cured me told me to pick up my mattress and walk!”

¹² “Oh, really?” they said. “And who is this man, who told you to pick it up and walk?”

¹³ But the man who’d been healed didn’t know who it was. Jesus had gone away, and the place was crowded.

¹⁴ After this Jesus found the man in the Temple.

“Look!” he said. “You’re better again! Don’t sin anymore, or something worse might happen to you!”

¹⁵ The man went off and told the Judaeans that it was Jesus who had healed him. ¹⁶ That was why the Judaeans began to persecute Jesus, because he did these things on the sabbath.

¹⁷ This was Jesus’ response to them.

“My father,” he said, “is going on working, and so am I!”

¹⁸ So for this reason the Judaeans were all the more eager to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath, but spoke of God as his own father, making himself equal to God.