And thus we can here also perceive the deep internal connection between Christ's miracle of healing the impotent man' and the address of mingled sadness and severity, [2226] in which He afterwards set before the Masters in Israel the one truth fundamental in all things. We have only, so to speak, to reverse the formal order and succession of that discourse, to gain an insight into what prompted Jesus to go to Bethesda, and by His power to perform this healing. [2227] He had been in the Temple at the Feast; He had necessarily been in contact - it could not be otherwise, when in the Temple - with the great ones of Israel. What a stifling atmosphere there of glitter and unreality! What had He in common with those who received glory one of another, and the glory which cometh from the One only God' they sought not? [2228] How could such men believe? The first meaning, and the object of His Life and Work, was as entirely different from their aims and perceptions, as were the respective springs of their inner being. They clung and appealed to Moses; to Moses, whose successors they claimed to be, let them go! [2229] Their elaborate searching and sifting of the Law in hope that, by a subtle analysis of its every particle and letter, by inferences from, and a careful drawing of a prohibitive hedge around, its letter, they would possess themselves of eternal life, [2230] what did it all come to? Utterly self-deceived, and far from the truth in their elaborate attempts to outdo each other in local ingenuity, they would, while rejecting the Messiah sent from God, at last become the victims of a coarse Messianic impostor. [2231] And even in the present, what was it all? Only the letter - the outward! All the lessons of their past miraculous history had been utterly lost on them. What had there been of the merely outward in its miracles and revelations? [2232] It had been the witness of the Father; but this was the very element which, amidst their handling of the external form, they perceived not. Nay, not only the unheard Voice of the Father, but also the heard voice of the Prophets - a voice which they might have heard even in John the Baptist. They heard, but did not perceive it - just as, in increasing measure, Christ's sayings and doings, and the Father and His testimony, were not perceived. And so all hastened on to the judgment of final unbelief, irretrievable loss, and self-caused condemnation. [2233] It was all utterly mistaken; utter, and, alas! guilty perversion, their elaborate trifling with the most sacred things, while around them were suffering, perishing men, stretching lame hands' into emptiness, and wailing out their mistaken hopes into the eternal silence.
While they were discussing the niceties of what constituted labour on a Sabbath, such as what infringed its sacred rest or what constituted a burden, multitudes of them who laboured and were heavy laden were left to perish in their ignorance. That was the Sabbath, and the God of the Sabbath of Pharisaism; this the rest, the enlightenment, the hope for them who laboured and were heavy laden, and who longed and knew not where to find the true Sabbatismos! Nay, if the Christ had not been the very opposite of all that Pharisaism sought, He would not have been the Orient Sun of the Eternal Sabbath. But the God Who ever worked in love, Whose rest was to give rest, Whose Sabbath to remove burdens, was His Father. He knew Him; He saw His working; He was in fellowship of love, of work, of power with Him. He had come to loose every yoke, to give life, to bring life, to be life - because He had life: life in its fullest sense. For, contact with Him, whatever it may be, gives life: to the diseased, health; to the spiritually dead, the life of the soul; to the dead in their graves, the life of resurrection. And all this was the meaning of Holy Scripture, when it pointed forward to the Lord's Anointed; and all this was not merely His own, but the Father's Will - the Mission which He had given Him, the Work which He had sent Him to do. [2234]