But there is more to this story. John tells us that all this happened on a Sabbath. In fact, John's whole purpose for even telling this story seems to be to set up this confrontation about the Sabbath. When other Jewish authorities see the man carrying his mat on the Sabbath, they immediately recognize a violation of their sacred day. They confront him: "It is not lawful to carry your mat today -- it is the Sabbath." The man replies, "He who healed me told me to pick up my mat and walk."

Some suggest that the man was merely shifting the blame to Jesus, but I think this is unlikely. The sickness which had drained his life for thirty-eight years had just been lifted by Jesus, and this experience of being set free taught the man something about Jesus. He didn't know much about Jesus. He didn't even know His name until later. But he knew that His word was the highest authority -- even higher than the Law itself. Jesus told him to do it, and that was sufficient reason to do it. Learning that Jesus healed on the Sabbath -- that is, performed a work -- and commanded a fellow Jew to do what was not lawful on the Sabbath, these authorities saw Jesus as an enemy.

To understand this hostility, we have to understand the importance of the Sabbath for the Jewish people. If we do not, we will persist in thinking that Jesus' rivals were small-minded legalists who could overlook a miraculous healing because Jesus broke some little rule. We will fail to see ourselves in those opponents, and very often we have more in common with them than we like to admit.

The Sabbath was ordained by God in creation itself. God rested on the seventh day from His work of creation, and Israel is commanded in Exodus to join with God in this rest. Israel saw itself as falling in line with God's will, indeed, imitating God, by abstaining from work on the day which God set apart from all work so that it would be different from all other days.

Moreover, the version of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5 adds another motive for keeping the Sabbath: "you shall remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm." Resting on the Sabbath was a privilege which God had given them, for there was a time when they could not rest. Again they were called to imitate God by extending rest to their own servants and even their animals on the Sabbath day.

Just as the Sabbath was set apart from other days of the week, so those who kept the Sabbath showed that God had set them apart from all other peoples of the world to be God's own people. The Sabbath was thus a "perpetual covenant ... a sign for ever" between God and the people of Israel. The Jews' commitment to be God's holy people, to set themselves apart from all other nations for God, expressed itself fully and visibly in their Sabbath observance.

Violation of the Sabbath, moreover, was no light matter. Exodus itself prescribes the death penalty for the person who violated the holiness of the Sabbath. Jeremiah linked the national fortune of Israel to the keeping and the violating of the Sabbath: "do not carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath or do any work, but keep the Sabbath day holy .... If you ... keep the Sabbath day holy and do no work on it, ... this city shall be inhabited for ever .... But if you do not listen to me, to keep the Sabbath day holy, and not to bear a burden and enter by the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then I will kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem and shall not be quenched" (Jer. 17:19-27).