'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
Another link between the physical and the spiritual in the impotent man's predicament is seen in the fact that when Jesus met the man later in the temple, He said to him (14), 'Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee'. The infirmity, then, was due to some sin or sins in the man's past. This is a genuine biblical insight; it does not mean that all physical infirmity or impotence is due to sin, but that some of it may be, as was the case with this man.
Here, then, was a man who was a prisoner to his own past. It is not difficult to envisage some of the possibilities that may have lain behind his paralysis - medical science can attest only too well that some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment (1 Timothy 5:24), and that the way of the transgressor is hard. Drunkenness, alcoholism, debauchery - these are only some of the sins that can bring physical disaster and tragedy upon a man of this very nature, and it may well be that he had sown his wild oats, suffering terribly and paying very dearly for his folly. To sow the wind sometimes means to reap the whirlwind. But, being a prisoner to the past is also true in a far deeper sense of every man. We all have a past, and the shadow of guilt rests upon every man's life; this is the sickness of all men everywhere. Sin brings man into bondage, so that he is no longer his own master. This is the theology that the story intends to illustrate, and it explains a good deal about the nature and heart of man's sin. What we mean is this: sin expresses itself in the desire for independence of God and freedom from His control. This we see in the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15 (and is not the man in our chapter another such?) and it traces back directly to man's primal sin in the Garden of Eden, when Satan tempted him to rebel against God and secure his freedom from Him, by holding out the tempting bait of independence which, Satan implied, would give him god-like powers and therefore all the expression of freedom he desired. It was only at a later stage - i.e. when it was too late - that man found that, instead of freedom, he had entered a bondage from which no human means could ever extricate him. All this is implicit in the story of the Pool of Bethesda.