Abram is having a moment of doubt. After all has done, all he has seen, all he
has acquired since he started following God he still lacks the one thing that
he wanted more than anything else, his own child. God promises him much and yet, he says, if I
died today this Eliezar of Damascus would inherit all of it and not a son of my
own. God promises him descendants beyond
imagining and counting and now Abram asks, how can I know these things are
true, talk is cheap. The sign is more
amazing than he could have imagined, God made a covenant with him and swore on
His own life that it would be as promised.
Normally, both parties to the covenant would have passed through the
animals, symbolically saying, let it be to me as it was to these animals,
death, if I fail to keep up my end of
the bargain. This was a one-sided
covenant though, only dependent on God's faithfulness not Abram's. He has God's solemn oath on it.
The man has excuses for why he isn't healed, no one is there
to help him when the water is disturbed.
The pool was believed to have curative powers when the water was, from
time to time, disturbed by some unknown cause and if you got into the water
during these times, you could be healed.
Jesus didn't ask why he wasn't healed and didn't ask if He could help
the man into the water, He only asked if He wanted to be healed. If anyone got healed there it was always
because God did something and here Jesus is the agent of healing, not the
disturbed water. He commands the man to
break the Law after the healing, to carry his bed on Sabbath. For this infraction, the Pharisees, who must
have known the man had been there the last 38 years, call foul. Jesus' response to the man, telling him to
sin no more lest something worse happen, would seem to indicate that his
problem was originally caused by sin.
Why the man went immediately and identified Jesus as the healer and Sabbath
breaker is unimaginable. His answer that
His Father was still working so He could as well indeed is a claim to equality
with God. It is essentially, whatever
God does I can do also.
The covenant with Abram required him to kill animals, to
offer something to God. The animal's
blood, like the animals whose skins were loin cloths for Adam and Eve, sufficed
for man's part of the bargain. In the case of Abram, they cost him something,
he had to forego their productive use in order to comply with God's command. For generations the people then sacrificed
for their sins to maintain the covenant from their side though from God's side
the covenant was eternal because He swore on oath and He is unable to break
that oath and maintain His holiness. In
Jesus, the new covenant was made and His sacrifice was His life laid down for
sin. The thought here is Platonic, that
the earthly temple is a copy of the perfect, heavenly temple, and so serves as
an analog for Jesus entering the most holy place, the throne of God the
Father. He is one with the Father in
sinless, holy perfection, He is of one being with the Father we affirm in the
Creed, whatever the Father is, so the Son.
Ultimately, God was willing to lay down His life to extend the covenant,
to guarantee it as a sign for all time. And
the resurrection proves it to be a covenant of life.
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