John 5:1–23

The Healing at the Pool

5After this, Jesus went to Jerusalem for a religious festival. ²Near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem there is a poolⁱ with five porches; in Hebrew it is called Bethzatha.^{j 3}A large crowd of sick people were lying in the porches—the blind, the lame, and the paralysed.^{kl* 5}A man was there who had been ill for 38 years. ⁶Jesus saw him lying there, and he knew that the man had been ill for such a long time; so he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”

⁷The sick man answered, “Sir, I have no one here to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am trying to get in, somebody else gets there first.”

⁸Jesus said to him, “Get up, pick up your mat, and walk.” ⁹Immediately the man got well; he picked up his mat and started walking.

The day this happened was a Sabbath, ^10*so the Jewish authorities told the man who had been healed, “This is a Sabbath, and it is against our Law for you to carry your mat.”

¹¹He answered, “The man who made me well told me to pick up my mat and walk.”

¹²They asked him, “Who is the man who told you to do this?”

¹³But the man who had been healed did not know who Jesus was, for there was a crowd in that place, and Jesus had slipped away.

¹⁴Afterwards, Jesus found him in the Temple and said, “Listen, you are well now; so stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

¹⁵Then the man left and told the Jewish authorities that it was Jesus who had healed him. ¹⁶So they began to persecute Jesus, because he had done this healing on a Sabbath. ¹⁷Jesus answered them, “My Father is always working, and I too must work.”

¹⁸This saying made the Jewish authorities all the more determined to kill him; not only had he broken the Sabbath law, but he had said that God was his own Father and in this way had made himself equal with God.

The Authority of the Son

¹⁹So Jesus answered them, “I am telling you the truth: the Son can do nothing on his own; he does only what he sees his Father doing. What the Father does, the Son also does. ²⁰For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. He will show him even greater things to do than this, and you will all be amazed. ²¹Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, in the same way the Son gives life to those he wants to. ²²Nor does the Father himself judge anyone. He has given his Son the full right to judge, ²³so that all will honour the Son in the same way as they honour the Father. Whoever does not honour the Son does not honour the Father who sent him.