Sermons
February 22, 2026 (1st Sunday in Lent)
Learned Helplessness
John 5:1-18
If you have a mouse in a maze with a reward at the end, and you make it so the mouse receives a shock or some other undesirable stimulus whenever they reach for that reward, the mouse will stop reaching for it. And if, later, the shock is removed, the mouse still won’t reach for the reward.
They call it “learned helplessness.” And it happens with people, too, like the man in our reading for today.
For years he’s sat beside the pool of Bethsaida, whose waters he knows will heal him, without even trying to get into the pool. Why?
For one thing, the pool’s healing properties are apparently only present when the water is stirred up. The man doesn’t have anyone to help him get into the pool, and getting there on his own is a slow process, and when he has tried somebody always jumps in front of him.
So one day, Jesus sees him there and asks him a pointed question: “Do you want to be made well?”
He replies with the reality of the situation—but he doesn’t actually say whether or not he wants to get better. He knows that to get better he has to get in the pool, and there are barriers between him and getting in the pool, so he’s pretty well given up. Maybe he does want to be made well, but has decided that’s not going to happen.
If those barriers were removed, would he even try? I don’t know.
So Jesus takes the whole “you have to get in the pool to be healed” issue out of the equation. He just says, “Get up, pick up your bedroll, and walk away.” And that’s all it takes: the man gets up and goes.
This is the third of Jesus’ signs in John’s Gospel—the third time Jesus does something we might call a miracle, revealing who he is. And this sign touches off some conflict between Jesus and the people John persistently calls “the Jews.”
We have to be careful about how we interpret “the Jews” in the Fourth Gospel, because it’s been used to justify bigotry and outright violence against Jewish people by Christians throughout our history. These aren’t necessarily representatives of the whole Jewish people in Jesus’ time, and they sure aren’t representatives of all Jewish people in all times and places.
These may well be just the leaders of the Jews living in Jerusalem, the learned ones and the people who oversaw the work of the Temple, who may have been leaders of the Jews, but who served at the pleasure of the Roman imperial structure. John generally, with a few notable exceptions—like Nicodemus back in chapter 3, then later in chapter 7, and at the very end of the story—portrays these folks as antagonists, who oppose Jesus and are looking from very early on for ways to do away with him.
They are not all the Jews of Jesus’ time, and we cannot use John’s portrayal of these folks as justification for mistreating Jewish people today.
These folks, the scholars and leaders of Jesus’ people, see this man who has been healed and completely miss the point of the sign: a demonstration that the Messiah has come, for it was well known that in the age to come, the lame would walk and the blind be given sight (as we will see a couple weeks from now). Instead, all they see is a violation of the Law. The rabbis had taught that carrying certain things, such as the mat on which the man had been lying, was a violation of the commandments to remember[1] and observe[2] the Sabbath day.
It’s been said that the Sabbath is what has sustained the Jewish people through centuries of living as minorities, persecution, migration all over the world for a variety of reasons. In a way, the Jewish week all leans toward the Sabbath: counting the days until Sabbath, welcoming Sabbath to the home as a guest—as visiting royalty, really—then saying goodbye to the day with thanksgiving and regret, counting the days until the next one.
It’s little wonder, really, that the Jewish leadership of Jesus’ day were disturbed by how he treated that holy day. And it doesn’t do for us to dismiss their objections as legalistic, focusing on rules instead of on the One who gave them as part of the covenant to be our God and we his people, and then insist that legalism is the foundation upon which the Jewish faith is built.
For one thing, we Christians have not exactly been immune to legalism. The strict Christian observance of our version of Sabbath—Sunday—got written into secular law in this country as the so-called “blue laws.” Many of these had gone away by the time I was growing up in a small town in Kansas, except for the law that no alcoholic beverages could be sold on Sunday. My grandpa used to have to put signs up in front of the beer in the coolers at Kwik Stop saying, “No beer sold on Sunday.”
In some places and times, these laws prohibited more than just the selling of alcohol. Methodist minister and author John Holbert, in a book on the Ten Commandments, described the day in 1968 when he arrived in Dallas to attend seminary.
He moved into his dorm late one Sunday afternoon and, finding himself hungry, went out in search of something to eat. It took him quite awhile just to find a store that was open, but he finally did. He went in and picked up a can of soup and some crackers. Since he was just moving in, he also needed a can opener, a pan to heat the soup in, and even a bowl and spoon.
But when he got up to the register, the clerk said she could sell him the soup and crackers, but not the equipment to prepare and eat it. “Can’t buy that stuff on Sunday.”[3]
Both Jews and Christians have, at times, been legalistic about how they observe their Sabbath days. But I’d argue that legalism about the Sabbath is a case of doing the wrong thing for the right reason.
We believe God commanded us to remember and observe the Sabbath as a holy day—a day set apart, different from other days during the week. It’s not a big step from believing that to trying to determine exactly what it means to keep the Sabbath in a way that will please God.
The problem is that legalism turns what was a gift from a loving God, originally given to newly freed slaves who likely had not had a day off in their lives, into a burden. And we do see legalism in today’s reading, in the way the religious leadership reacted to Jesus’ having healed a man on the Sabbath.
They begin by reminding the man who was healed that it wasn’t lawful for him to be carrying his bedroll on the Sabbath. He said, well, the guy who healed me told me to do it.
I don’t know if they would have recognized the man, since they had only seen him as one of the sick and disabled people waiting by the pool of Bethsaida—he had been going there for 38 years! If they did, the whole scene is that much more tragic; but even if they didn’t, as soon as they heard him say he’d been healed, we’d think they would focus on that, not on what he was carrying. But in their rush to make sure all the rules were followed, the fact that a miracle—a sign, as John reckons it—had just taken place sailed right over their heads.
They might have remembered the tradition that, in the messianic age, the lame would walk; and that might have caused them to realize that the Messiah was here, and he was the one who had set that man on his feet for the first time in nearly four decades. But they didn’t remember.
They asked the man who had healed him, and (after a time, because Jesus had at first disappeared into the crowd) he pointed them to Jesus. Was he looking to shift their desire to blame and punish someone for this violation of Sabbath law from himself to Jesus? I doubt it. I think he wanted to make sure others who were in need of healing knew Jesus could help them.
Maybe he thought the religious leaders, who were supposed to be watching for the arrival of the Messiah, would want to give Jesus credit for the healing. But no; they were still blinded by their legalism, so the blame was shifted to Jesus, for healing on the Sabbath. And that’s where the fight started.
The story goes on from here, with a discourse like we see pretty often in the Fourth Gospel. But our reading ends once John has made his point about the meaning of the miracle and its reception by the leaders of Jesus’ own people.
You can’t heal on the Sabbath, the leaders told Jesus. It isn’t allowed. God commanded us, God’s people, to observe this day by doing no work.
Jesus said, yes; but my Father (God) is still working. That’s supposed to be good news, part of the gift of Sabbath: we are able to take the day off because God can be trusted to keep the world turning.
And, Jesus goes on, because God is still working, so am I. In this, the religious leaders recognized that he was claiming a special relationship with God—he was saying he was the Son of God, and thus equal to God. This is John’s point throughout the Gospel: Jesus is the Son of God, and those who believe that and set their hearts on him will receive eternal and abundant life.
The miracles that happen in this Gospel reveal Jesus for who he is, and people either get it and believe, or—as here—they don’t.
Jesus is, as the Synoptic Gospels tell us, Lord of the Sabbath; and when he heals on the Sabbath he is demonstrating what God’s will is for our Sabbath observances, whether they are on Saturday or Sunday or some other day.
Years ago Prevention magazine, not exactly a religious publication, printed an article in which it was argued that taking a full day off to rest was connected with better physical and mental health. We need a day off, it turns out. We were created to take a day off, and we’re healthier when we take it.
Could it be that this is what God had in mind when he commanded us to keep the Sabbath: not a burden, a joyless obligation that keeps us from doing something fun, but a gift from a loving God? We need a day off, and God knows some of us wouldn’t ever take a day off if it weren’t commanded, so God commanded it.
We all need a day off, and the commandment was given in remembrance that when they were slaves in Egypt, the Israelites never got a day off—and they’re told that the day off is for everyone, even foreigners, even livestock.
The Sabbath—this God-given day off—is about tending to our physical, mental, and spiritual wholeness. So in the Gospels, when Jesus encounters someone in need of healing on the Sabbath, he heals them, restoring them to the wholeness God desires for each of us, not just on the Sabbath but every day of the week.
[1] Exodus 20:8
[2] Deuteronomy 5:12
[3] This story is from Holbert’s book The Ten Commandments: A Preaching Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002).