It is possible to walk with Jesus day-in and day-out for twelve months, to see him perform signs, to hear him preach on the biggest stage in all of Palestine during the biggest time of the year, and not hear a word he is saying, not see a thing he is doing.
The story of John 5:1-9 is offensive to some. Jesus walks past hundreds of sick and maimed and heals a single person. The Scripture shows Jesus having compassion on this single paralyzed old man. But what about everybody else? That must mean that he didn’t have compassion for hundreds of people, right?
No, actually. The response of the crowds and the disciples to the time when Jesus shows compassion on the thousands sheds some light on why Jesus does not heal everybody, how it is that our belief would not be stronger “if only we could see him”. We are given a dramatic example of what people had been seeing when they saw Jesus.
One of the most beautiful things about Scripture is that it tells the story not only of God’s interaction with mankind, but the story of man’s response to God’s action. John 6:1-15 is as much about Jesus’ compassion as it is about everyone else missing it. In their search for Leonidas they came across Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, who everyone loves and follows (except the leaders), who has powers of healing and apparently can multiply food. Sounds like an unbeatable general in the making. He can heal his troops and feed entire armies (five thousand men, remember) in the blink of an eye. And this is what turns the table on our reading not only of John 5:1-9 but our reading of anything Jesus does. The question is no longer “why didn’t Jesus heal everyone”, but “why did Jesus heal anyone?” He knew full well that his actions would be misinterpreted. He knew full well that everything he did and said would be misinterpreted, misconstrued, and distorted.
But the Father always has a plan. Everything God does has purpose. And everything Jesus did makes sense in light of the Cross. Everything he said and did was pointing to it; the turning of water into wine pointed to the new life that his death and resurrection would bring to the world; his words with the woman at the well in chapter four spoke of the nature of eternal life that was coming; his healing of the paralyzed man and the feeding of the five thousand were concrete expressions of the new life signified by every word and action up to that point- and everything points to the Cross, the epitome of God’s Word to the world, when Jesus, the Word (John 1:1), who spoke and did so much, finally falls silent with a wordless cry (Mark 15:7), when the heart of God is literally, literally poured out (John 19:34).
We see in the feeding of the five thousand, in every action and word of the Word, Jesus the Christ, the perfect image of God. And the image is of a God who literally pours out his heart, in blood and water, for the world. The challenge for the world, in response to the action of this God, is to have faith. We see in all the Gospels that simply seeing, with our eyes, is not the way to faith, that our faith would not be any stronger were Jesus to stand in front of us and begin to speak. We are left with the task of knowing that Jesus is always in the room (Acts 17:27-28), that anything is possible because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. We are left with the task of living in Truth that already is. And so it is faith that we need, not sight.
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