EXPLORE IT! - John 5:16-30

People begin to persecute Jesus because he is working on the Sabbath and comparing himself to God. 

Jesus responds by saying that his power comes from his Father, and that he has been given the power to judge men from the Father. 

Jesus says: “…the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.”

This power is granted to the Son because he is the Son of Man, presumably meaning that because Jesus is fully human he knows all that is to be known about men and so can accurately judge them. 

He then speaks of the future when the dead will rise and the righteous will be given life and the evil condemned. 

Jesus compares himself to God several times in this passage in a number of different ways, some of which are more obvious than others. First of all, Jesus refers to God as “my Father.” Most Jews saw this as too intimate a term to be using. They would sometimes refer to God in prayer as “our Father” or “my Father in heaven,” but they would never just say “my Father,” as though God was their actual Dad. They did not see God as being that close to them, and to infer that he was would be to make yourself seem more special than you probably were.

Jesus goes even farther than this though. He doesn’t just claim that he has a special relationship with the Father, but that he is in fact equal to the Father. He claims to be on the same level as God himself… which of course ticked off the Jewish leaders.

Also, Jesus claims that God has given him power over the resurrection of the dead. The Jewish leaders believed (with the exception of the Sadducees who didn’t believe in any resurrection) that only God could raise people from the dead, and that God did not give this special power to anyone else. But Jesus claims that God has given him that power. …which makes the Jewish leaders even more cranky.

Also, Jesus claims that God has made him the Judge of the world… a role only filled by God himself. Only God can judge humanity. But Jesus says that in his role as the Son he is in fact better equipped than the Father to judge humanity, because in his role as the Son, Jesus is both fully human and fully God, and so he understands both sides equally well and can be a fair judge. But he adds that whatever he does he does not for the sake of his own pleasure but for the pleasure of the Father who sent him into the world.