Commentaries:
Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown
because he had done these things on the sabbath day—What to these hypocritical religionists was the doing of the most glorious and beneficent miracles, compared with the atrocity of doing them on the sabbath day! Having given them this handle, on purpose to raise the first public controversy with them, and thus open a fitting opportunity of laying His claims before them, He rises at once to the whole height of them, in a statement which for grandeur and terseness exceeds almost anything that ever afterwards fell from Him, at least to His enemies.
The Jews—that is, those in authority. (See on John 1:19.)
it is not lawful to carry thy bed—a glorious testimony to the cure, as instantaneous and complete, from the lips of the most prejudiced! (And what a contrast does it, as all our Lord's miracles, present to the bungling miracles of the Church of Rome!) In ordinary circumstances, the rulers had the law on their side (Nehemiah 13:15; Jeremiah 17:21). But when the man referred them to "Him that had made him whole" (John 5:11) as his authority, the argument was resistless. Yet they ingeniously parried the thrust, asking him, not who had "made him whole"—that would have condemned themselves and defeated their purpose—but who had bidden him "take up his bed and walk," in other words, who had dared to order a breach of the sabbath? It is time we were looking after Him—thus hoping to shake the man's faith in his Healer.
Other Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown entries containing John 5:16:
John 7:21-24
John 9:16-17
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