In the general absorbedness of all around, no ear, but that to which it had been spoken, had heard what the Saviour had said. The waters had not been troubled, and the healing had been all unseen. Before the healed man, scarcely conscious of what had passed, had, with new-born vigour, gathered, himself up and rolled together his coverlet to hasten after Him, Jesus had already withdrawn. [2241] [2242] In that multitude, all thinking only of their own sorrows and wants, He had come and gone unobserved. But they all now knew and observed this miracle of healing, as they saw this unbefriended and most wretched of them all healed, without the troubling of waters or first immersion in them. Then there was really help in Israel, and help not limited to such external means! How could Christ have taught that multitude, nay, all Jerusalem and Jewry, all this, as well as all about Himself, but by what He did? And so we learn here also another aspect of miracles, as necessary for those who, weary of Rabbinic wrangling, could, in their felt impotence, only learn by what He did that which He would say.
We know it not, but we cannot believe that on that day, nor, perhaps, thenceforth on any other day, any man stepped for healing into the bubbling waters of Bethesda. Rather would they ask the healed man, Whose was the word that had brought him healing? But he knew Him not. Forth he stepped into God's free air, a new man. It was truly the holy Sabbath within, as around him; but he thought not of the day, only of the rest and relief it had brought. It was the holy Sabbath, and he carried on it his bed. If he remembered that it was the Sabbath, on which it was unlawful to carry forth anything - a burden, he would not be conscious that it was a burden, or that he had any burden; but very conscious that He, Who had made him whole, had bidden him take up his bed and walk. These directions had been bound up with the very word (Rise') in which his healing had come. That was enough for him. And in this lay the beginning and root of his inward healing. Here was simple trust, unquestioning obedience to the unseen, unknown, but real Saviour. For he believed Him, [2243] and therefore trusted in Him, that He must be right; and so, trusting without questioning, be obeyed.
The Jews saw him, as from Bethesda he carried home his burden.' Such as that he carried were their only burdens. Although the law of Sabbath-observance must have been made stricter in later Rabbinic development, when even the labour of moving the sick into the waters of Bethesda would have been unlawful, unless there had been present danger to life, [2244] yet, admittedly, this carrying of the bed was an infringement of the Sabbatic law, as interpreted by traditionalism. Most characteristically, it was this external infringement which they saw, and nothing else; it was the Person Who had commanded it Whom they would know, not Him Who had made whole the impotent man. Yet this is quite natural, and perhaps not so different from what we may still witness among ourselves.
It could not have been long after this - most likely, as soon as possible - that the healed man and his Healer met in the Temple. What He then said to him, completed the inward healing. On the ground of his having been healed, let him be whole. As he trusted and obeyed Jesus in the outward cure, so let him now inwardly and morally trust and obey. Here also this looking through the external to the internal, through the temporal to the spiritual and eternal, which is so characteristic of the after-discourse of Jesus, nay, of all His discourses and of His deeds, is most marked. The healed man now knew to Whom he owed faith, gratitude, and trust of obedience; and the consequences of this knowledge must have been incalculable. It would make him a disciple in the truest sense. And this was the only additional lesson which he, as each of us, must learn individually and personally: that the man healed by Christ stands in quite another position, as regards the morally right, from what he did before, not only before his healing, but even before his felt sickness, so that, if he were to go back to sin, or rather, as the original implies, continue to sin,' [2245] a thing infinitely worse would come to him.