The Disagreement (5:16–18)

[16] And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay Him, because He had done these things on the sabbath day.
[17] But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.
[18] Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.

The Disagreement (5:16–18)

The Jewish leaders did not punish the man who was healed, even though he had broken the law. Instead, they started to punish the Lord Jesus. The Jewish Sanhedrin, which was the religious ruling council, was in charge of making sure that new preachers and teachers who arrived in the land were not false prophets who would lead people astray. They had looked into John the Baptist's ministry (John 1:19ff.) and more recently into Jesus's ministry.

The Sanhedrin was already suspicious because Jesus had healed a possessed person on the Sabbath (Luke 4:31–37). After the miracle in John 5, Jesus would defend His disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath (Matt. 12:1–8) and heal a man's withered hand on the Sabbath (Matt. 12:9–14). He intentionally opposed the strict rules that the scribes and Pharisees followed. They had turned the Sabbath, which was a gift from God to man, into a prison full of rules and restrictions.

When they told Jesus that what He was doing was wrong, He just said that He was doing what His Father was doing. Man's sin broke God's Sabbath rest (see Gen. 3), and ever since the fall of man, God has been looking for lost sinners and saving them. When Jesus said "my Father" instead of the usual "our Father," which Jews used, He was saying He was equal to God.

Because Jesus said He was God, the Jewish leaders quickly changed their charge from breaking the Sabbath to blasphemy. Liberal theologians who assert that Jesus never claimed to be God consider this passage challenging.

Of course, the punishment for this kind of blasphemy was death. This passage is where the "official persecution" of Jesus began, which ended with His crucifixion. In the days that followed, our Lord often told His enemies that they wanted to kill Him (John 7:19, 25; 8:37, 59). They hated Him for no reason (John 15:18–25). They didn't care about the good things He did for people who were helpless and hopeless; instead, they focused on killing Him.

Jesus is God, so He made Himself equal to God. This argument is the main point of John's gospel. The Jewish leaders couldn't prove Him wrong, so they tried to kill Him and get rid of Him. Jesus openly declared His divinity during both His crucifixion and resurrection, utilizing the weapons of His adversaries against them, which ultimately demonstrated His power over death and affirmed His identity as the Son of God.

George MacDonald, a British author, said that John 5:17 provides us a deep understanding of our Lord's miracles. The Father always does things slowly, but Jesus did it right away. For instance, as I said before, the Father is slowly turning water into wine, but Jesus did it right away. The Father is healing broken bodies through the powers of nature, but Jesus did it right away. From planting to harvest, nature keeps making more bread, but Jesus made it right away in His own hands.