Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1479
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, June 15, 1879
“He that made me whole, the same said unto me, Take up your bed and walk.” John 5:11.
(On behalf of the Mansion House Fund for the Hospitals of London).
JUST a few observations upon the narrative itself. It was a feast day and Jesus Christ came up to Jerusalem to find opportunities for doing good among the crowds of His countrymen. I see all the city glad; I hear the voice of rejoicing in every house as they hold high festival and eat the fat and drink the sweet. But where does Jesus keep the feast? How does He spend His holiday? He walks among the poor, whom He loves so well. Behold Him in the hospital! There was one notable Bethesda or house of mercy in Jerusalem—it was a poor provision for the city’s abounding sickness, but such as it was, it was greatly prized. There was a pool which every now and then was stirred by an angel’s wing and worked an occasional cure. Around it charitable persons had built five porches and there, on the cold stone steps, a number of blind and crippled and withered folk were lying, each one upon his own wretched pallet, waiting for the moving of the waters.
There were the weary children of pain, fainting, while others were feasting. They were racked with pain amid general rejoicing. They were sighing amid universal singing! Our Lord was at home amid this mercy, for here was room for His tender heart and powerful hands. He feasted His soul by doing good. Let us learn this lesson, dear Friends, that in the times of our brightest joys we should remember the sorrowful and find a still higher joy in doing them good. It well becomes us in proportion as a day is gladsome to ourselves, to make it so to the sick and poor around us. Let us keep the feast by sending portions to those for whom nothing is prepared, for, otherwise, the famishing may bring a curse upon our feasting.
When we are prospered in business, let us set aside a portion for the poor. When we are full of health and strength, let us remember those to whom these privileges are denied and aid those who minister to them. Blessed shall they be who, like the Lord Jesus, visit the sick and care for them. Coming into the hospital, our Lord noticed a certain man whose case was a very sad one. There were many painful cases there, but He singled out this man and it would seem that the reason for His choice was that the poor creature was in the worst plight of all. If misery has a claim on pity, then the greater the sufferer the more is mercy attracted towards him. This poor victim of rheumatism or paralysis had been bound 38 years by his infirmity!
Let us hope there was no worse case on all Bethesda’s porches! Thirty-eight years is more than half the appointed period of human life! One year of pain or paralysis has a weary length of torture about it, but think of thirty-eight! We may well pity the man who endures the pangs of rheumatism even for an hour—but how shall we sufficiently pity him who has not been free from it for hard on 40 years? Even if the case were not one of pain, but of paralysis, the inability to work and the consequent poverty of so many years were, by no means, a small evil. Our Lord, then, selects the worst case to be dealt with by His curing hands as a type of what He often does in the kingdom of Grace—and as a lesson of prudence to us—instructing us to give our first aid to those who are first in point of need.
The man whom Jesus healed was by no means an attractive character. Our Savior said to him, when he was healed, “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto you,” from which it is not an improbable inference that his first infirmity had come upon him by deed of vice or course if excess. In some way or other he had been guilty of that which brought upon his body the suffering which he was enduring. Now, it is considered generally to be a point beyond all dispute that we should help the worthy but should refuse the worthless—that when a man brings a calamity upon himself by wrong doing—we are justified in letting him suffer that he may reap what he has sown.
This cold Pharisaic idea is very congenial to minds which are bent upon saving their coins! It springs up in many hearts, or rather in places where hearts ought to be, and it is generally regarded as if it were a rule of prudence which it would be sinful to dispute—an infallible and universal axiom. Now, I venture to say that our Savior never taught us to confine our alms to the deserving! He would never have bestowed the grand alms of Grace on any one of us if He had carried out that rule! And if you and I had received no more at the hands of God than we deserved, we should not have been in this house of prayer! We cannot afford to cramp our charity into a sort of petty justice and sour our almsgiving into a miniature law court. When a man is suffering let us pity him, however the suffering has come.