Translate this into deed, as all His teachings have been, are, and will be, and we have the miraculous cure of the impotent man, with its attendant circumstances. Or, conversely, translate that deed, with its attendant circumstances, into words, and we have the discourse of our Lord. Moreover, all this is fundamental to the highest understanding of our Lord's history. And, therefore, we understand how, many years afterwards, the beloved disciple gave a place to this miracle, when, in the full ripeness of spiritual discernment, he chose for record in his Gospel from among those many signs,' which Jesus truly did, [2235] only five as typical, like the five porches of the great Bethesda of His help to the impotent, or like the five divisions into which the Psalter of praise was arranged. As he looked back, from the height where he stood at his journey's end, to where the sun was setting in purple and golden glory far across the intervening landscape, amidst its varying scenes this must have stood out before his sight, as what might show to us that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we might have life through His Name.' [2236]
And so, understanding from what He afterwards said to the Jews' what He thought and felt in going thither, we are better prepared to follow the Christ to Bethesda. Two pictures must have been here simultaneously present to His mind. On the one side, a multitude whose sufferings and false expectancies rose, like the wail of the starving for bread; and, on the other side, the neighbouring Temple, with its priesthood and teachers, who, in their self-seeking and the trifling of their religious externalism, neither understood, heard, nor would have cared for such a cry. If there was an Israel, Prince with God, and if there was a God of the Covenant, this must not, cannot be; and Christ goes to Bethesda as Israel's Messiah, the Truth, and the Life. There was twofold suffering there, and it were difficult to know which would have stirred Him most: that of the body, or the mistaken earnestness which so trustfully looked for Heaven's relief - yet within such narrow limits as the accident or good fortune of being first pushed into the Angel-troubled waters. But this was also a true picture of His people in their misery, and in their narrow notions of God and of the conditions of His blessing. And now Israel's Messiah had at last come. What would we expect Him to have done? Surely not to preach controversial or reformatory doctrines; but to do, if it were in Him, and in doing to speak. And so in this also the Gospel-narrative proves itself true, by telling that He did, what alone would be true in a Messiah, the Son of God. It is, indeed, impossible to think of Incarnate Deity - and this, be it remembered, is the fundamental postulate of the Gospels - as brought into contact with misery, disease, and death without their being removed. That power went forth from Him always, everywhere, and to all, is absolutely necessary, if He was the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. And so the miracles, as we mistakingly term the result of the contact of God with man, of the Immanuel (God with us), are not only the golden ladder which leads up to the Miracle, God manifest in the flesh, but the steps by which He descends from His height to our lowliness.
The waters had not yet been troubled,' when He stood among that multitude of sufferers and their attendant friends. It was in those breathless moments of the intense suspense of expectancy, when every eye was fixed on the pool, that the eye of the Saviour searched for the most wretched object among them all. In him, as a typical case, could He best do and teach that for which He had come. This impotent' man, for thirty-eight years a hopeless sufferer, without attendant or friend [2237] among those whom misery - in this also the true outcome of sin - made so intensely selfish; and whose sickness was really the consequence of his sin, [2238] and not merely in the sense which the Jews attached to it [2239] - this now seemed the fittest object for power and grace. For, most marked in this history is the entire spontaneity of our Lord's help. [2240] It is idle to speak either of faith or of receptiveness on the man's part. The essence of the whole lies in the utter absence of both; in Christ's raising, as it were, the dead, and calling the things that are not as though they were. This, the fundamental thought concerning His Mission and power as the Christ shines forth as the historical background in Christ's subsequent, explanatory discourse. The Wilt thou be made whole?' with which Jesus drew the man's attention to Himself, was only to probe and lay bare his misery. And then came the word of power, or rather the power spoken forth, which made him whole every whit. Away from this pool, in which there was no healing; away - for the Son of God had come to him with the outflowing of His power and pitying help, and he was made whole. Away with his bed, not, although it was the holy Sabbath, but just because it was the Sabbath of holy rest and holy delight!