John 5:5-7

“ There was a man there, held by his sickness for thirty-eight years. 6. When Jesus saw him lying, and knew that he had been already sick for a long time, he said unto him: Dost thou wish to be healed? 7. The sick man answered him: Sir, I have no one, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool; and while I am coming, another goes down before me. ”

The long continuance of the malady is mentioned, either to set forth how inveterate and difficult to heal it was, or rather, according to John 5:6, to explain the profound compassion with which Jesus was moved on beholding this unhappy man. ῎Εχων might be taken in the intransitive sense (ἀσθενῶς ἔχειν); but the construction is so similar to that of John 5:6, where χρόνον is the object of ἔχει, that it is preferable to make ἔτη the object of ἔχων : “Having thirty-eight years in this condition of sickness.” One has what one suffers. It is not necessary to connect ἔχων closely with ἦν ἐκεῖ, as if John meant to say that the sick person had been there for thirty-eight years.

Jesus appears here suddenly, as it were coming forth from a sort of incognito. What a difference between this arrival without eclat and His entrance into the Temple at the first Passover, John 2:13 ff.! Here it is no longer the Messiah; it is a simple pilgrim. Meyer translates γνούς : having learned, as if Jesus had received information. Weiss thinks that he heard the fact from the lips of the sick man himself. This meaning is possible; γνούς may, however, indicate one of those instantaneous perceptions by which the truth revealed itself to Jesus in the degree which was demanded by His task at the moment. Comp. John 1:49; John 4:17. The 14th verse will show that the entire life of the sick man is present to the view of Jesus. The long time recalls the thirty-eight years of John 5:5: in this way is the identity of construction explained. The feast of Purim was celebrated among the Jews by works of beneficence and mutual gifts. It was the day of largesses. On Purim-day, said a Jew, nothing is refused to children. Jesus enters into the spirit of the feast, as He does also in chaps. 6 and 7, as regards the rites of the feasts of the Passover and of Tabernacles. His compassion, awakened by the sight of this man lying ill and abandoned (lying on a couch), and by the inward contemplation of the life of suffering which had preceded this moment (already), impels him to bestow largess also and spontaneously to accomplish for him a work of mercy. His question: “ Dost thou wish to be healed? ” is an implicit promise. Jesus endeavors thus, as Lange says, to draw the sick man from the dark discouragement in which this long and useless waiting had plunged him, and to reanimate hope within him. At the same time, Jesus by means of this question wishes to turn away His thought from the means of healing on which it was exclusively fixed, and to give him a perception of a new means, the living being who is to become for him the true Bethesda. Comp. the similar words of Peter to the impotent man, Acts 3:4: “ Look on us. ” Faith, awakened by his look fixed upon Him who is speaking to him, will be, as it were, the channel through which the force from above will penetrate within him. The answer of the sick man does not imply the authenticity of John 5:4, nor even necessarily that of the end of John 5:3. It is sufficiently explained by the fact, known or easy to understand, of the intermittent ebullition of the spring. We see by the words: I have no one, that he was solitary and poor.