Thought for the Day - Who, What and Why

Carmen Lomas Garza, La Curandera, 1989, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA

A Thought for the Day given during the lunchtime Eucharist at St Mary le Bow on Wednesday 2nd April 2025 based on the text of John 5.17-30.

Our gospel reading today opens with one of the most succinct and profound statements about who Jesus is, what he has come to do and why. 

We then encounter part of the longest uninterrupted speech of Jesus in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus elaborates on his statement. 

It’s a particularly fascinating text as we all seek answers to these fundamental ‘Who, What and Why’ questions, as each of us strives to know Jesus and follow Him. 

Jesus has just healed a man on the sabbath who had been paralysed for thirty eight years. The Pharisees are furious that he has broken the sabbath law and ask Jesus to explain himself. 

"My Father is at work until now, so I am at work," Jesus replies. 

In naming God as his Father, Jesus is making a statement about who he is - claiming an intimate personal relationship with God and therefore divine inheritance. He then explains what he is here to do and why. By connecting the ongoing work of God to his own mission, Jesus reaffirms his equality with God while at the same time challenging the Pharisees understanding of the law.  

Having healed the paralysed man and declaring that this is a continuation of God’s work, Jesus shows that God’s life creating and sustaining work never ceases. Who God is and what he does cannot be separated. Therefore the commandment to rest on the sabbath cannot mean God’s works of grace should cease, as the Pharisees would have it. 

Jesus’ critics are enraged by what they hear. They strengthen their resolve to kill him. 

Jesus goes on to elaborate on his short statement - revealing who he is, what he has come to do and why these are inseparable. 

He begins by explaining that he can do nothing on His own but only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. Jesus is the perfect bearer of Gods image in the world. Who Jesus is, what he does and why are united in God. The acts of healing, compassion and judgement that Jesus performs reveal the nature of God and his will to the world. 

Central to that will and nature is God’s continual creativity - overcoming darkness and death and bringing light and life. As revealed in Jesus’s healing of the paralysed man, this generative state is both who God is and what he does – it is not something that can be stopped. 

Jesus goes on to explain that God wills this new life for all of us:

“Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life” Jesus explains. 

The lives of those who hear his word, believe in him and act upon it as agents of God’s grace, will be transformed forever.

The passage concludes by Jesus reaffirming his equality with God as judge - but emphasising that although he is equal to his Father he will remain obedient to him to the end.

Today in our gospel reading, Jesus reveals who he is, what he has come to do and why – and how the answers to these questions are inseparable from the nature and will of God.

And as we ask who we are, what we are doing and why, Jesus wants us to understand that the answers are the same.

Image: Carmen Lomas Garza, La Curandera, 1989, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA