Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Do You Want What Jesus Gives or Do You Want Jesus?
Some Sundays in a series like this, we get to sit for a long time in just a handful of verses. This week isn’t one of those weeks. John 5 and 6 together run nearly a hundred verses, and rather than crawl through them line by line, we’re going to take a big swing and look at three signs together: a healing at a pool, a feeding on a hillside, and Jesus walking on water in a storm. Each one asks us a question, and by the end, those three questions collapse into one question that might be the most important one we ever answer.
Sign One: The Man at the Pool
John sets the scene:
“Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda, and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed… One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, ‘Do you want to get well?’” (John 5:1–3, 5–6)
For a long time, skeptical scholars assumed John had invented this pool—no such place existed in ancient Jerusalem, or so the argument went. Then archaeologists found it: a two-sided ritual bathing pool with the bases of the colonnades still intact, right where John said it would be. It’s a small detail, but it’s a good reminder that the more archaeology uncovers, the more John’s Gospel holds up.
Jesus asks the man a simple, direct question: Do you want to get well? It’s really another way of asking, What do you want?
And notice what the man doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “Yes! I want to walk, I want to work, I want to go see the places I’ve missed.” Instead, he explains why it’s impossible: “I have no one to help me into the pool. When the water is stirred, while I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me” (John 5:7). He gives Jesus the reasons it can’t happen. There’s no hope. That’s the whole answer.
Jesus heals him anyway: “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk” (John 5:8). And he does.
But here’s where the story gets interesting. The religious leaders don’t see grace poured out on a man who’d suffered for thirty-eight years. They see a guy carrying a mat on the Sabbath. “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat” (John 5:10). And the healed man’s response is telling—he doesn’t push back or explain the miracle. He just says, essentially, I was told to do this by the man who healed me. He’s a little dumbfounded, a little scared, because grace has just collided with religious rule-keeping.
We should be careful here not to turn “the Jewish leaders” into cardboard villains. They were simply the religious establishment of their place and time—if this story happened in America, they’d be us. And that’s the uncomfortable part: those of us who’ve spent our lives in church often love our rules, and we get twitchy when grace overrides them. We build mental lists of things a “real” Christian would never do, and when grace shows up in someone who’s breaking those unwritten rules, we don’t see the miracle. We see the mat.
Sign Two: Bread for the Crowd
The scene shifts. Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee, a massive crowd follows him up a mountainside, and he turns to Philip with another simple question:
“He said to Philip, ‘Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?’ He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.” (John 6:5–6)
Philip does the math out loud: half a year’s wages wouldn’t buy enough bread for everyone to get a bite. And there were 5,000 men there—which, once you count the women and children who went uncounted in first-century tallies, probably means a crowd closer to 20,000. Andrew chimes in with a boy’s lunch: five small barley loaves, two small fish. “How far will they go among so many?” (John 6:9).
Same pattern as before. Jesus asks a straightforward question, and the answer is a list of reasons it can’t be done. It costs too much. It’s not enough. It won’t work.
Jesus has the people sit down, gives thanks, and everyone eats until they’re full—all from what a boy could carry in a basket.
Sign Three (and the Real Question)
Jesus later says something that makes the crowd recoil: they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood. This isn’t a translation quirk softening a strange metaphor—the Greek is just as blunt as it sounds in English, and people are understandably repulsed. Many disciples say, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” and they leave (John 6:60). Jesus turns to the Twelve and asks a third question: “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Peter answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:67–68).
Three questions. Do you want to get well? How will we feed all these people? Will you leave too? Two of them get answers most of us would probably give ourselves. The third gets an answer that has echoed through church history as one of the great statements of trust.
The Point Underneath the Signs
The next day, the crowd Jesus fed tracks him down across the lake, and Jesus doesn’t let them off easy:
“Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” (John 6:26–27)
He’s connecting this feeding to the manna in Exodus—bread that appeared each morning, enough for that day, and rotted if anyone tried to hoard it. It never lasted. Jesus says there’s bread that does last, bread that endures, and then he says the strange part out loud: I am that bread. You need me, not just what I give.
That’s the question underneath all three signs: Do you want what Jesus gives, or do you want Jesus?
We don’t sit next to healing pools anymore—we go to doctors, and modern medicine handles a lot of what used to require a miracle. We’re not following a rabbi around hoping for a handout because most of us aren’t living at subsistence level. So we don’t relate to these stories the way a first-century audience would. But we’ve built our own version of the same mistake. For roughly the last seventy years—arguably going back further, maybe even to Charles Finney and the Second Great Awakening—American Christianity has often been sold as a transaction: pray to receive Jesus, get eternal life, and you’re in. Fire insurance, purchased and filed away.
If Jesus asked us the same question he asked that crowd—do you want what I give, or do you want me?—I suspect a lot of us would have to sit with that for a while. Because wanting Jesus, not just his benefits, means he’s going to ask things of us that are genuinely hard: love your neighbor (who is, infuriatingly, an actual person who says and does things that annoy you), and then love your enemy, which is even worse. Jesus keeps pulling us toward a life of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control—and that kind of life doesn’t come from securing a ticket to heaven and then coasting.
C.S. Lewis put it better than I can, in The Weight of Glory:
“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
That’s it, isn’t it? We settle. The Gospels barely mention heaven, and neither does most of the New Testament, because heaven was never the deal. The deal is now—a transformed life, rooted in love and grace and mercy, bigger and stranger and more beautiful than a life spent either chasing rules or waiting around for the afterlife.
The Question to Sit With
So here’s what I want you to carry into this week: Do you simply want what Jesus can give you, or do you want Jesus?
It doesn’t matter how old or young you are—this question can reframe the rest of your life from here forward. Chase Christ for who he is, not just for what he offers, and it changes everything.
Questions for reflection:
- When you picture your own faith, is it closer to a transaction (pray, receive, done) or a relationship you’re actively pursuing?
- Where has “grace confronting rules” made you uncomfortable—in yourself or in someone else?
- What would it look like this week to want Jesus, specifically, rather than the outcomes you hope faith will produce?
Prayer:
Heavenly Father, we confess we are often a people who want what you give more than we want you. What you give is wonderful—but what you offer is a life that is transformational, rooted in love and grace and mercy, more wonderful than we could imagine, because in you alone are the words of life. Grip our hearts this morning, so that we might want you, and not just what you offer. Amen.