You have to ask yourself as you read through the gospels, why was Jesus ultimately crucified by the religious leaders of the day? John makes one of the issues fairly clear in two stories not found in the other gospels. Here’s the first:

Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked. And that day was the Sabbath. (John 5.2 – 9, NKJV, emphasis mine)

I like several aspects of the way this story was presented in The Chosen.

• The episode is built around an envisioned backstory of the cripple, including what it might be like to lay at that pool waiting for the “stirring of the waters.”
• Chosen takes the position that we don’t know what stirred the water – it could have been a hot spring – and that no one was really healed anyway, including the first one into the pool.
• When Jesus asks does he want to be healed, and the man starts talking about the pool, Jesus says, “You don’t need this pool. You need only me.”
• After the healing, and the inevitable outcry of the Pharisees that Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath, the story ends with this exchange:

“Well,” John adds, “the Pharisees were pretty upset.” Simon says, “That was almost as much fun to watch as the miracle.” “This week should be fun, huh?” John says. “I do have a question, Rabbi.” “Yes, Matthew?” “Waiting thirty more minutes would not have mattered to that man. Why did you do this on Shabbat?” Jesus stops and turns to face the three of them. “Sometimes,” he says, “you’ve got to stir up the water.” – Jerry Jenkins, The Chosen: Come and See

“Sometimes, you’ve got to stir up the water,” and that’s exactly what Jesus does in the story we’ll look at tomorrow.

So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ. (Colossians 2.16, 17, NKJV)

For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” (Matthew 12.8, ESV)