Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to John · About this commentary
My Father Is Still Working
John 5:16-23
16 For this cause the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him, because he did these things on the Sabbath. · WEB
One sentence about the Sabbath, and his opponents understand it better than most of his followers have.
For this cause the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him, because he did these things on the Sabbath John 5:16.
The intent to kill appears in the fifth chapter of this Gospel, which is far earlier than in the other accounts, and the stated cause is a healing.
"My Father is still working, so I am working, too" John 5:17.
The defense is a single sentence and it does not argue about the law of the Sabbath at all. It makes an observation everyone in the argument already accepted: God did not stop. He rested from creating on the seventh day Genesis 2:2, and he has not since ceased to sustain, to give life, or to judge — nobody thought the world ran itself from Friday evening to Saturday.
So the claim is: the one exception to Sabbath rest is God's own upholding work, and I am inside it.
For this cause therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God John 5:18.
The writer records their reading and does not correct it. That is the crucial thing about this verse. Elsewhere in this Gospel he steps in to explain what was misunderstood — he spoke of the temple of his body John 2:21 — and here he lets the charge stand.
They heard my own Father as a claim of a unique relation rather than the ordinary sense in which any Israelite might call God Father, and they concluded equality with God. Everything that follows in the chapter is his answer, and it does not deny the conclusion.
"The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father doing" John 5:19.
The answer begins with a limitation, which is why it is often read as a retreat. It is the opposite. A claim to independent power would be a claim to be a second God; what is described is a Son who does nothing on his own initiative — and then the sentence finishes: for whatever things he does, these the Son also does likewise.
No creature could say that. The limitation is total dependence, and its content is total scope.
"For the Father has affection for the Son, and shows him all things that he himself does" John 5:20. The word is the warm one for family love. And the picture underneath the paragraph is an apprenticeship: a son in a workshop who does what he sees his father do, and is shown everything.
"For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom he desires" John 5:21.
Two works are then named, and both were held to belong to God alone. Raising the dead is the first — and the last clause is not to whom the Father designates but to whom he desires.
"For the Father judges no one, but he has given all judgment to the Son" John 5:22. The second is judgment, handed over entirely.
"That all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He who doesn't honor the Son doesn't honor the Father who sent him" John 5:23.
The purpose clause is where the argument lands, and it is as far as a claim can go. Even as — the same honor, at the same level, to both. For a monotheist that sentence is either blasphemy or an identification, and the second half closes the middle way that religious people have always wanted: honoring God while declining the Son is not a reduced version of the right thing. It is described as not honoring God at all.
settled What this mark means