Sunday Gathering - John 5 : 1-15 - Andy Holingum - Sermon Only

Andy Holingum takes the healing at Bethesda as a case study in the two things John says Jesus is full of: grace and truth. He opens by asking how we would explain Jesus given two minutes in a lift, then presses the harder question: where did our picture of him come from? We learn Jesus from scripture, from each other, from experience, but also from the culture we swim in, and he admits his own picture drifts at the edges. Returning to the Bible week by week is like going back to a recipe you have cooked from memory: it shows where you quietly changed the quantities.

The room by the Sheep Gate is packed with the blind, the lame and the paralysed, waiting for the water to stir because only the first one in is cured — people jostling like a Boxing Day sale. Jesus walks past them all and stops at one man who has been an invalid for thirty-eight years. Holingum dwells on what that waiting felt like: no one to help him into the pool, others always ahead of him, the system against him, the quiet question of why others were dealt better cards. Grace, he argues, arrives precisely for people with no advocate.

Which makes Jesus’ question strange. “Do you want to get well?” Of course he does. But Holingum reads it as a probe: after thirty-eight years, has he accepted his lot? Healing would cost him his routine, his sheltered accommodation, his benefits — it would mean looking for work. The man answers out of his own limited framework, explaining he cannot get into the water; Jesus ignores the explanation and says, “Get up.”

Then the tone turns. The healing happens on the Sabbath, and the leaders’ first question is not how a man disabled for thirty-eight years is walking, but why he carries a mat — the first note of an opposition that grows through the rest of John. Later Jesus finds him in the temple and says, “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” Grace and truth arrive together. Holingum is blunt that we cannot take the healing Jesus and leave the commanding one, noting wryly that we write many songs about grace and very few about wanting to stop sinning. Sin, he says — quoting a trainer at a recent addictions course — is at root self-obsession, as true of impatience as of anything more dramatic. He closes where the passage does: the man had no idea who healed him, but when Jesus told him to stop sinning, he knew.

Bible passages

• John 5:1-15 — the healing at Bethesda, read in full (NIV), with his aside that verse 4 is missing from the earliest manuscripts
• John 1:14 — Jesus “full of grace and truth”, the frame for the whole sermon
• John 1:35-39 — the calling of the first disciples and Jesus’ question “what do you want?” (described in the sermon as John 2)
• John 2:1-11 and 2:13-22 — the wedding at Cana and the cleansing of the temple: “we can’t have a wedding Jesus without temple Jesus”
• 1 Samuel 16:7 — “man looks on the outside but God looks on the heart”, from David’s anointing among Jesse’s sons
• Colossians 3:5-9 — “rid yourselves of all such things”: anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language and lying
• 2 Corinthians 12:20-21 — Paul’s fear of finding discord, jealousy, rage, selfish ambition, slander, gossip, arrogance and disorder, and grief over unrepented impurity
• Matthew 3:8 — “produce fruit in keeping with repentance” (attributed here to Jesus addressing the Pharisees)

Key points

• Two minutes to explain Jesus exposes how much of our picture comes from culture rather than scripture
• John presents Jesus as full of grace and truth at once; we tend to pick one or the other
• At Bethesda a crowd waits for stirred water and a single cure; Jesus passes many and goes to one man
• Thirty-eight years with no one to help him — grace comes to those without an advocate
• “Do you want to get well?” asks whether he has settled for his lot; healing would overturn his whole life
• The man answers within his own limits; Jesus ignores the answer and simply says “get up”
• The Sabbath complaint reveals the leaders’ priorities: the mat matters, the healing does not
• “Stop sinning” — grace and truth together; the healed man is not free to carry on as before
• Self-obsession is the root of sin, in impatience and anger as much as in addiction
• Integrity means practising values rather than professing them

Calls to action

• Return to scripture regularly, and let it correct a Jesus shaped by the culture around us
• Sit alongside the disadvantaged and overwhelmed, going to where they are rather than preaching from a distance
• Ask honestly whether you have accepted your circumstances instead of wanting to be well
• Count the cost: following Jesus means real upheaval, not an addition to an unchanged life
• Admit and address sin rather than cherry-picking the comfortable parts of the faith
• Practise your values, not just profess them

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/L7p2Os4_huo