The next, harshest words of Jesus are addressed to... Jews who had believed in Him. Evidently, they believed in some way other than the Lord wanted. Therefore we too need to think: do we believe rightly or not? They proudly declare that they were born free, being children of Abraham, the chosen people. Therefore they do not need freedom, for they are not slaves, and they do not need the truth, for they already know it. They call God their father, but this already follows from their belonging to the holy people; no step is required of them in order to be adopted by the Lord.

And what is most frightening is that all this is characteristic not only of the Jews. Do we not believe in the same way? Do we not consider ourselves chosen people who have freedom and truth in our pocket, and who have long since been God’s own people? If so, why do we need to believe in Jesus? Let us think about this...

What made the people listening to Jesus pick up stones? Obviously, His words about Abraham and about Himself. "I Am" (or, in modern Russian, "I am the One Who Is") meant a reference to Himself as the One who bears within Himself the fullness of God. Such a thing was not forgiven: in the eyes of any religious person, it was outright blasphemy. One could be a prophet or even the Messiah, but one could not be God. Whoever declares such a thing is either mad or a pagan, for pagans believed in the "divinity" of certain people, meaning their supernatural qualities or their connection with the world of the gods. This Man does not look mad, so, as can be seen, He must be an apostate who has imagined Himself to be some supernatural being in the pagan sense of the word. In any case, apostasy and blasphemy were evident, and they were punished by death.

It would seem that one might expect something like this from the Messiah; for example, Isaiah of Jerusalem did call the Messiah "father of eternity." But in the Judaism of Gospel times, these words were understood in the context of ideas about the Messiah whom God had conceived from the beginning of time. Naturally, no one considered the Messiah to be God.

And Jesus, as can be seen, wants to bring precisely this truth to His listeners, a truth inseparable from His earthly ministry. Indeed, He came into the world in order to bring the Kingdom into it, and in all its fullness. The Kingdom that from the very beginning He carried entirely within Himself, since, according to His own words, it is "not of this world" - nowhere in the world, except in Him Himself after His birth into the world, could the Kingdom exist. And the fullness of the Kingdom of God and the fullness of God are, in essence, one and the same: the One who contains within Himself the fullness of the Kingdom also contains the fullness of God.

This, apparently, is what Jesus wants to explain to the people listening to Him. And He does this not in order to exalt Himself somehow, but in order to make them understand what the Kingdom is, what it is really like. But to understand this, one must go beyond the frames of one's own religiosity. And they do not want to do this, or cannot do it - and they pick up stones.

Readers of these lines usually think that He said something that the Pharisees had to perceive as obvious blasphemy: after all, He speaks of Himself as God, even using, as it may seem, corresponding expressions applied only to God. Yet in fact everything is not so simple and unambiguous.

In this case Jesus is bearing witness about Himself first of all as the Messiah, if not directly, then by hints. The prophets spoke of the Messiah as the One who exists from the beginning of the world. In Judaism of the Second Temple period, the common view was that the Messiah had been conceived by God before the creation of the world. In this sense people even spoke of the divinity of the Messiah, though of course not in the sense of His being the God-man. But the Savior's words could also be understood in more than one sense. Even "I AM" (more precisely, the Greek and Hebrew expressions corresponding to this "I AM") can be interpreted not only as a declaration of divinity, but also as a proclamation of theophany, in particular, of messianic theophany. There was nothing in the Savior's words that, on mature reflection, should have required stoning.

It is another matter if one very much wants to find a reason to grab stones. Then, of course, all ambiguities are interpreted against the accused. And the Pharisees listening to Jesus evidently understand His words in just this way. Not because there is too much in them that is openly provocative. What was provocative was something else: the entire meaning of the Savior's speech as the evangelist gives it. For the whole speech bore witness that the Pharisees listening to Jesus were not at all the bearers of authentic Tradition and guardians of orthodoxy that they were in their own eyes. More than that: it turned out that, with all their religiosity, they essentially had very little relation to authentic Tradition, if they had any at all. And to a religious person, such a position seems by definition to be a challenge to God.

Such a person truly does not see the difference between authentic Tradition and the tradition of his own religion. With desire, of course, one can see it, though it is not always simple. But in a religious person this desire is often outweighed by fear for his own religious identity, which he will inevitably have to give up if he looks at himself and at the world as Jesus calls him to look. It is this fear that makes the Pharisees grab stones. And it lays out the Savior's road to the cross.