Book of Common Prayer

Darkened mind, darkened behavior

²⁸ Moreover, just as they did not see fit to hold on to knowledge of God, God gave them up to an unfit mind, so that they would behave inappropriately. ²⁹ They were filled with all kinds of injustice, wickedness, greed and evil; they were full of envy, murder, enmity, deceit and cunning. They became gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, self-important, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, ³¹ unwise, unfaithful, unfeeling, uncaring. ³² They know that God has rightly decreed that people who do things like that deserve death. But not only do they do them; they give their approval to people who practice them.

God’s coming judgment will be impartial, the same for all

2 So you have no excuse—anyone, whoever you are, who sits in judgment! When you judge someone else, you condemn yourself, because you, who are behaving as a judge, are doing the same things. ² We know that God’s judgment falls, in accordance with the truth, on those who do such things. ³ But if you judge those who do them and yet do them yourself, do you really suppose that you will escape God’s judgment?

⁴ Or do you despise the riches of God’s kindness, forbearance and patience? Don’t you know that God’s kindness is meant to bring you to repentance? ⁵ But by your hard, unrepentant heart you are building up a store of anger for yourself on the day of anger, the day when God’s just judgment will be unveiled— ⁶ the God who will “repay everyone according to their works.”

⁷ When people patiently do what is good, and so pursue the quest for glory and honor and immortality, God will give them the life of the age to come. ⁸ But when people act out of selfish desire, and do not obey the truth, but instead obey injustice, there will be anger and fury. ⁹ There will be trouble and distress for every single person who does what is wicked, the Jew first and also, equally, the Greek— ¹⁰ and there will be glory, honor and peace for everyone who does what is good, the Jew first and also, equally, the Greek. ¹¹ God, you see, shows no partiality.

The healing of the disabled man

5 After this there was a Jewish festival, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

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.