(Please read the Scripture passage before reading the homily.)
Jesus had just healed a man who had spent waiting 38 years at the pool of Bethesda. It was a Sabbath and some took this as a thing unlawful to do. Today continues this story with a response from Jesus.
Jesus noted that people are born on the Sabbath and people die on the Sabbath. This must mean that God continues to work, even on the Sabbath, to bring life and death. Jesus therefore could claim that just as God worked on the Sabbath so could Jesus.
Now, I should stop here and say that John wrote for the people of his time and that he described the words and work of Jesus as if Jesus were living in bodily form among the people of John’s community. This means that, although Jesus always was God in bodily form, that question probably came up more in John’s community than in Jesus’ own lifetime. The dialogue here seems to represent a discussion or argument of a time later than the actual lifetime of Jesus. This dialogue can remind us that Jesus is present at all times in his Church.
John wrote to affirm that Jesus was the Son of God, that Jesus could see what kind of work the Father was doing and could do similar work himself.
There were probably some in the community of John who had difficulty accepting the truth that Jesus was the Son of the Father. They could easily take such an assertion as blasphemy, just as you might take the statement that John was writing for his community rather than writing to give a historically accurate portrayal of the life of Jesus as a kind of blasphemy.
We have grown up with the truth that Jesus is the Son of the Father. We may have to remember this, but we do not have to hear it for the first time. We do need to remember that we only honor God the Father when we honor Jesus as God’s Son. We cannot honor the one without the other. We still have to listen to hear the Word of God so that we do not proclaim our word. We only pass from death to life in union with the Father and the Son.
John wrote his gospel account of the life of Jesus to support the people of his community. How would he express the life of Jesus for people of our day? Expressing this life for people of the twenty-first century is our task. Ours is to translate Jesus for our generation as it was John’s for the people of his day. Do not be amazed at this.