"5 After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralysed. 5 One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” 7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.
Now that day was the Sabbath."
John 5:1-9
The next sign which John records is the healing of the impotent man at Bethesda. We have already seen, in John's use of the word 'signs' to describe the miracles of Jesus, that these miracles are meant to be illustrations in the physical realm of what Jesus came to do in the spiritual realm, and that Jesus Himself indicates this in the way He proceeds to discourse on their significance. Thus, the healing of the impotent man here becomes the 'text', so to speak, on which the following sermon on the imparting of life to the dead (17ff) is based. It cannot therefore be arbitrary to draw spiritual lessons from this miracle. We have the best of authorities for doing so. John, then, is giving further weight to his main message about the meaning of Christ's coming, by showing the grand initiative of the Son of God Who comes to loose them that are bound and proclaim liberty to the captive. And it is this initiative in its most sovereign aspect, apart from faith on the man's part, for he is singled out from the crowd of blind, halt and withered, and sovereignly blessed by the Saviour. In all this, John's point is: Jesus is an all-sufficient Saviour, and there is nothing He cannot do, no need however great, however long-standing, that He cannot deal with and meet. To spiritualise the miracle in this way is not of course to belittle or decry its validity in the physical realm, for it was a remarkable evidence of the power of God that a man who had been impotent for thirty-eight years should have been made immediately and utterly whole. What could more convincingly demonstrate the breaking in of the kingdom of God into human life than this and the Kingship and Lordship of Christ over all sickness and disease?