When the Jewish leaders criticize the healed man and oppose Jesus for their violation of the Sabbath, they have strong reasons for doing so. When they see the Sabbath threatened, they see a threat to their relationship with God, to the rhythms of their lives, and to their hopes for themselves and their nation.

What defense does Jesus offer? "My Father is working still, and I am working." God, He says, is not finished with His work; God is not content to rest and leave creation as it is. Jesus and His opponents would agree on one point: God cannot truly be said to "rest" and abstain from all work on the Sabbath, for if God did, the creation would come to an end. Jesus and His opponents both knew that the visible creation is always dependent on God's sustaining care, and that if God ever stopped working on behalf of His creation we would all cease to be.

Jewish teachers noticed that babies were born on Sabbaths and that people died on Sabbaths -- showing that God was at work giving life and judging life on Sabbaths just as He was on other days. Where Jesus and His opponents part company is in Jesus' claim to be God's co-worker, God's partner working together with God to give life and judge life. Jesus understood that in His own work of healing, teaching, and dying, God was bringing about a new work. Jesus' Sabbath keeping was not merely a memorial of the first Creation and Exodus, but sought to bring about the New Exodus and New Creation which God had planned for His people.

John says in his first letter that Jesus came to "destroy the works of the devil" (3:8), to undo the pain and brokenness brought about by centuries of being enslaved to sin and death. Thus when Jesus bursts into human history, He comes to heal bodies racked by disease and deformity; He comes to release hearts from besetting sin and guilt; He comes even to give life to the dead. But God is doing much more than this. God is working to bring into being a new creation and has invested Jesus with His own authority to give life and to judge life. "The Son gives life to whomever He wants," John writes, creating a new humanity by filling lives with His own Spirit and transforming us into His own image. When we receive the spirit of Christ, we become, as Paul says, "a new creation -- the old things are passing away and everything is made new."

Jesus also will pronounce the last word on our lives, assessing whether or not they have become pleasing to God. A few verses prior to our lesson from 2 Corinthians 5, Paul writes: "we all must appear before the judgement seat of Christ, to receive the reward for deeds done in the body, whether good or bad" (2 Cor 5:10). By obeying Jesus and offering no objection to Jesus' command, the healed man certainly acted wisely in light of Jesus' decisive authority. We should be so perceptive. God's work, moreover, is not limited to our inner lives, but embraces the whole cosmos. We are becoming God's new creation, but we also await a new heaven and a new earth -- a new creation in which righteousness and justice are at home, a world ever so different from this world of injustice and brokenness.