Episode Transcript
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Abba, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Abba, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
John 8:42–59 (NIV)
Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”
The Jews answered him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”
“I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.”
At this they exclaimed, “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?”
Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”
“You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”
“Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.
CONSIDER THIS
Our text is part of a larger conversation concerning whose children the opponents of Jesus were. The Jewish leaders, themselves, had insisted that Abraham was their father (John 8:39), but then they moved their case over to the claim, as they continued to dispute with Jesus, that “the only Father we have is God himself” (v. 41). Now, imagine this: in the outer court of the temple—quite publicly, and following the Feast of Tabernacles, no less, so it was likely an area still crowded—Jesus responded to these claims made by his detractors in the following way: “You belong to your father, the devil.” It was only at this point of the dispute that the Jewish leaders shot back: “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”
We have a difficult time with this exchange today. Many of our social sensibilities predispose us not to see what is actually in the text, or if we do indeed allow ourselves enough freedom and the good sense to see it, then we immediately explain it away. We do all of this because we are trying to hold onto a picture, an image, of Jesus that we have constructed over time, and from various sources by the way, one that however cannot be found in the pages of the gospels, any gospel. It’s a concocted image of a Jesus who is always soft-spoken, one who never challenges others publicly, one who never makes people feel uncomfortable, and one who in the end is always in tune with whatever the group wants at the particular moment in which he participates. Groups are always more significant than individuals, right? Numbers are always the most important things of all, right?
Getting along, social cooperation, and harmony are all good things, and they are, to be sure, significant and of great value. However, they aren’t the most important things of all; they never were. What, then, could possibly be more vital, more weighty, more important, than social acceptance and group harmony? In one word: God. The clash between Jesus, on the one hand, and the Jewish leaders, on the other hand, is no minor dispute, no argument over things that don’t really matter. For the sake of upholding the basic, life-affirming truth of who God is, Jesus no doubt realized that this dispute would become an unavoidable and titanic struggle, messy at times precisely because so much was at stake. “If God were your Father,” Jesus cautioned these religious leaders, “you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me.” The problem, however, was that these particular Jews (for several Jews did accept Jesus, see John 8:31) did not love Jesus, not at all. In fact, they rejected both him and his words, a solid indication that their profession of knowing God was deeply mistaken and troubled—yes, troubled. To retreat here for the sake of some imaginary, contrived notion of peace at all costs would be ill-advised. Truth is that important.
Badly stung by the claim of Jesus that their father was neither Abraham nor God, the Jewish leaders (there is nothing inherently contrasting between Jewishness and Jesus) employed a well-worked defense that was often effective in putting opponents in their place. That is, they went the name-calling, bad-mouthing, social-ostracizing route and contended not only that Jesus was a Samaritan—“he’s not one of us”—but also, worse yet, that Jesus was possessed by a demon! In terms of the first charge of being a Samaritan, the Jewish religious leaders had probably heard stories about Jesus being from the north, the Galilee area, and that fact alone (given the history of Samaritans and Jews) would likely be enough to create walls of prejudice and separation in the minds of those Jews who took great pride in living in Judea, not far from the temple where God is rightly worshiped. In terms of the second charge, it was an accusation so strong and dark that it usually meant the conversation was over—but, evidently, not in this particular case, for neither Jesus nor his critics were done.
Ignoring the claim that he was a Samaritan, Jesus declared that he was not possessed by a demon (indeed, he had cast demons out in Matthew 8:28–34; Luke 4:31–41), and then he changed the direction of the conversation. Earlier, the talk had been about who was the father of his Jewish opponents. In that conversation, it was all about them. Now it concerned who was the Father of Jesus. Indeed, the very next words that Jesus uttered, after he had denied that he was possessed by a demon, were: “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge.” After this reply, Jesus said something startling, given the flow of the exchange up to this point: “Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.” The Jews within earshot thought such a claim was evidence of pure insanity and so they now felt confirmed in their earlier judgment by exclaiming, “Now we know that you are demon-possessed!” Interpreting the words of Jesus in the only way they knew how—that is, literally—the Jews failed to distinguish between physical death, spiritual death, and eternal death. Still puzzled by all of this, they continued: “Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?”
Jesus began to answer this most significant question, “Who do you think you are?” which sets up the climax of our passage by drawing a contrast between his relation to his Father, on the one hand, and the relation of the Jews to their supposed father Abraham, on the other. Thus, Jesus pointed out that his Father, whom the Jews before him claimed as their God, is the one who glorifies him. Why couldn’t the Jews then recognize the family resemblance? At any rate, when Jesus turned his attention to Abraham, in particular, he surprisingly enough did not claim him as his father, as we would expect, and as every other Jew undoubtedly would; instead, he observed to those Jews present that “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.” What’s going on here?
Still puzzled and likely exasperated at this point, the Jews responded to Jesus: “You are not yet fifty years old, . . . and you have seen Abraham!” “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “before Abraham was born, I am!” With this last piece of the puzzle in place, we can now begin to see more clearly the picture that Jesus was painting. Oddly enough, in one sense Abraham was not and could not be the father of Jesus simply because Jesus, as the eternal Word made flesh (John 1:1–4), was ever before him, both temporally speaking and, more important, in terms of rank and being: “before Abraham was born, I am!” In other words, Jesus, given his divine nature, as affirmed in the first chapter of John’s gospel, is marked by nothing less than eternity. He is, therefore, ever before Abraham. How, then, could Abraham possibly be his father?
In another sense, however, tracing the lineage of Jesus through Joseph, as the Gospel of Matthew does, Abraham was indeed the ancestor of Jesus and, in that sense, his father. But the larger point of this contentious exchange was to declare publicly that the one who was the Father of Jesus was none other than the I AM WHO I AM who had been revealed to Moses (Ex. 3:14) as the true God, the Holy One of Israel. It is this one who is the Father of Jesus as evidenced by the language of “before Abraham was born, I AM” (emphasis added). The Jews recognized this language, of course, made the proper connections, and then finally realized what Jesus was actually claiming. What was their response? “They picked up stones to stone him.”
THE PRAYER
God, I belong to you. Open my spiritual eyes to fully grasp the beauty of your incarnation, in order that your Son, Jesus, would be glorified in me just as you are in him. Conform my life to the pattern of holiness and goodness that you promise to all of your children.
