Charles Ellicott Commentary John 5:10

"So the Jews said unto him that was cured, It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for thee to take up thy bed." — John 5:10 (ASV)

The Jews therefore said unto him.—But what they cannot deny, they can quibble about. One might have expected from human hearts wonder and thankfulness that the man could walk at all. We find, from the formalism that had bound the letter around people until it had nearly crushed all heart out of them, the murmur that carrying his bed was not lawful on the Sabbath.

This is not the only place in this Gospel where the words and works of Christ clashed with the current views of the sanctity of the Sabbath day (John 9:14). The general question has been treated in Notes on Matthew 12:10-12. Here it will be sufficient to note that the bearing of burdens was specially forbidden in the Prophecy of Jeremiah: Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath day (Jeremiah 17:21; compare Nehemiah 13:15 and following), and that the Rabbis pressed this to include a burden of any kind. They said, for example, “If any man on the Sabbath brings in or takes out anything on the Sabbath from a public to a private place, if thoughtlessly he has done this, he shall sacrifice for his sin; but if willfully, he shall be cut off and shall be stoned.”