John 5: 1-9
[1]"Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. [2] Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a poll, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. [3] Here a great number of disabled people use to lie -- the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. [4] [b] [5] One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. [6] When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, 'Do you want to get well?'
[7] 'Sir,' the invalid replied, 'I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me' [8] Then Jesus said to him, 'Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.' [9] At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked." (New International Version).
In the book, Tyndale Concise Bible Commentary, the authors note that the pool referred to in the passage...
In the 4th sentence, John points out that this pool may have been used by ill and disabled people simply because it was not a regular pool, and if sheep were washed in the pool it is not a pool that "normal" (healthy, non-disabled) people would swim or wash in. The Tyndale commentary suggests that verses 3 and 4 "…may have come to be deleted by a copyist concerned about what seemed to him to be a pagan or superstitious influence."
When Jesus asked the man if he wanted to get well, Jesus was asking him to find out if he really wanted to be able to walk again. Jesus wasn't asking him about his faith, although the Tyndale authors say Christ would ask that later. The reason he cured this person on the Sabbath, even though the Jews kept the Sabbath and they were critical of Jesus for healing on the Sabbath, was to bring out "the true meaning of the Sabbath," which to Jesus was not just "inactivity,"…
