COMMENTARY.
Our Lord’s own testimony to His Divinity. In this chapter our Lord openly and clearly asserts and proves His equality with the Father. He is one with Him in nature, in power, and action. “My Father worketh until now, and I work.” He too, like the Father, is Lord of the Sabbath. He, like the Father, has life in Himself and can raise the dead to life. The Jews perfectly understood that He made Himself equal to the Father, and our Lord, far from correcting their interpretation, rather confirmed it in the most solemn manner by an appeal to His works: “Amen, amen, I say unto you &c.”, and finally claimed the same honour and worship as the Father.
Jesus the Judge of all men. The Son of God having become Man and redeemed mankind, it is He who will judge men as to the use and misuse of the grace of Redemption.
God's unceasing Action (Old Test. I). About this St. Chrysostom writes thus: “If you observe the rising and the setting of the sun, the movement of the earth, the ponds, springs, rivers, rain, in fact the whole process of nature, whether as seen in plants or in our own bodies and those of the beasts, or in any other thing which the hand of God touches, you will recognize the unceasing work of the Father.”
Observance of the Sabbath. “The Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath” (Luke 6, 5). He permitted the man to prove the completeness of his cure by taking up his bed and carrying it home — therefore it was lawful for the man to do it.
Eternal and Temporal punishment. Grave sin brings on us both eternal and temporal punishment. Our Lord’s words: “Sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee”, are a proof of this.
Relapse into sin. Our Lord warned the cured man not to fall back into sin, because a relapse leads easily to impenitence, and thereby to everlasting damnation.
A type of Baptism. The Pool of Bethsaida was a type of that spring of grace, holy Baptism. As in the one all possible diseases of the body were cured, so in Baptism all possible sins are remitted.
The misery of unredeemed mankind. The condition of the sick man, for so many years miserable and abandoned by all who might have helped him, is, according to St. Augustine, Venerable Bede and others, a striking picture of the misery of unredeemed mankind. Man had turned away from God, and had remained sunk in vice and sin for four thousand years; and there was no one to help him. Then the Son of God had mercy on him and became Man Himself in order to redeem him. He, the Incarnate Son of God, is our helper and comforter!
