NOTES for Joh 10:31-42

Anyone who has tried to be a Christian knows that it is a difficult thing. We would very much like baptism, like a fairy-tale spell, to make us good and inaccessible to sin. We would very much like the admonition "you are baptized with a second baptism," appointed for confession, to be unnecessary. The power of love that the Holy Spirit gives a person is great, but the degree of our freedom is great as well. Therefore the need to make a choice remains with us forever, and this choice is hard, because the Lord calls us too to love as He loves, that is, by giving our life.

And therefore Christ's promise is so important for us: "...no one is able to snatch My sheep out of the Father's hand". Like the promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church, it opens for us the possibility of relying on Christ without fear and trusting Him. In Orthodox language, this means that salvation consists not in matching some given parameters, but in being together with Jesus.

"If I am not doing the works of My Father, do not believe Me. But if I do them, even if you do not believe Me, believe the works..." The works that Jesus does become, as it were, a bridge, "bringing those on earth up to heaven", a bridge between unbelief and faith, because these are the works of God. The works of God and faith become mutually conditioning acts. It is very important to feel that our faith is not faith in some abstract principles, even if they are beautiful; our faith is inseparable from the very fabric of life.

It is important that the Greek word here is precisely ἔργοις, a work, a deed with a simple everyday meaning, without the loftiness we tend to give to everything connected with our Lord. "To work a miracle," says the New Jerusalem Bible about what Jesus does. This sense of real, daily action and effort, not fully conveyed by the elevated Russian "to create" or "to perform," is hard to render (recall "the arm of the Lord"). The word "work," "do," is one of the very important words for the whole Gospel of John. Recall the text: "The Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever He does, that the Son does likewise" (5:19). The word "do" sounds four times in such a small amount of text.

And now that we have understood that the Lord works so that we may believe, that the Lord enters the fabric of our life so that our faith will not be an abstract ideology, let us recall another text: Then they said to Him, "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent" (John 6:28, 29). That is, not only are the works the Lord does mutually connected with faith, but our works as well, if they are the works of God, are faith. It is difficult, and unnecessary, to separate faith and the works of God. Let us simply understand what the apostle James said: for as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead (James 2:26).

“God called those to whom the Word of God came gods”—this is how Jesus interprets the enigmatic words of the psalm. He meets people who are sick, weak, of little faith, and rejected, and He speaks to them of eternal life, telling them that they are gods—that is, like God, in whose image they were created. To hear and recognize His voice, to believe that He is the Father's Word sent to earth, to humanity—this is what is required of them to fulfill their divine calling, so that God's image may be revealed in them. We are among these people, for the Word has also been sent to us and speaks from the pages of the Gospel, making us like the Father. The divine in the human person is not delirium, idealism, or pride. It is what we are called to, where the Gospel leads us. By faith this image comes alive, awakens within us, and grows, so as to become Heaven on earth.

Those who demand a direct answer from Jesus about whether He is the Christ are not asking because they are truly interested in where the truth is. They have already answered the question for themselves and rejected Jesus, and now they need His positive answer only as a pretext for doing away with Him. At that moment, His direct answer is no longer needed in order to accept Christ; His earlier words are enough to draw the necessary conclusions. And once again we see how, in response to Christ's words, an attempt is made to do away with Him.

This time He leaves His ill-wishers; the time for an unjust execution has not yet come. It is hard for us, and perhaps impossible, to understand fully why His sufferings had to happen under other circumstances. In any case, those who justify Judas by saying that he was carrying out the Teacher's instruction to betray Him should remember that Christ could have been seized even without Judas's help.

And the evangelist has also preserved for us an important testimony: although John the Baptist performed no miracle, this can deny neither the truth of his words nor his holiness. Demanding obligatory miracles from saints has become customary and traditional, but we should not regard them as the only necessary proof of faithfulness to God. The Lord gives the ability to work miracles, but not every miracle is from God; the powers of darkness know how to counterfeit miracles. But a life transformed by union with God cannot be imitated.

Today's reading returns us once again to the testimony Jesus gives about Himself. Apparently, the events in the evangelist's account took place on the day commemorating the dedication of the Temple (v. 22; the “feast of renewal” mentioned in the text could also be called the “feast of dedication,” in keeping with the meaning of the Greek word). For believing Jews, the day of the Temple's dedication was a day of God's triumph, and on that day the coming of the messianic Kingdom was awaited with particular feeling. It is no surprise that on such a day Jesus was expected to give a direct answer to the question of whether He was the Messiah (v. 24).

But Jesus' answer was quite unexpected by those who questioned Him. They apparently hoped He would tell them plainly when He would do what people expected of the Messiah in those days: raise a revolt, drive the Roman troops out of Judea by God's power, and restore an independent Jewish state there, establishing laws in full accordance with the Torah. Yet the Savior tells the people around Him something else. He says: you have already seen everything I do, and I have nothing more to tell you. This answer was entirely logical: Christ had no intention of doing any of the things His listeners expected. He could only reveal the Kingdom to them, as He had already done more than once (vv. 25-27). The Lord's chief gift, clearly, is not a restored Jewish state but the fullness of God's life, which He is ready to offer to everyone willing to receive it (v. 28).

Then comes the testimony about Himself that made devout religious people pick up stones (v. 31). Jesus says: I and the Father are one (v. 30). He reveals to His listeners the central mystery of His messiahship and His ministry: He shares one life with God. He is human, yet the fullness of God has entered the bounds of His human nature, and therefore so has the fullness of the Kingdom; He is ready to give both to everyone who thirsts for them. An ordinary human being, of course, cannot contain the fullness of God as Jesus Himself does. But thanks to Him—and through Him—this fullness, once wholly inaccessible to humanity, has in principle become accessible to everyone. It now depends only on each person whether he will partake of it.

This thought, it seems, was precisely what the people surrounding Jesus found utterly intolerable (vv. 32-33). And no wonder: to accept what He said, they would have to tell themselves and others honestly that the history of religion was over—the history of every religion, including the Judaism to which Christ's listeners belonged. The meaning of any religion lies either in the search for God, when pagan religiosity is concerned, or in maintaining a relationship with the God who reveals Himself to people, when a religion of Revelation is concerned. But the Savior offers something more: He offers the fullness of God's life in His Kingdom. There is nothing to seek here, because the essential thing has been revealed, and there is no need to make special efforts to maintain a relationship with God, a relationship that nothing threatens in His Kingdom. Here people live with God, simply and naturally, communing with Him and participating, according to their opportunities and abilities, in the life of the Kingdom. Here religion becomes unnecessary.

For a religious person, naturally, it is very difficult to accept this, because religion has formed the foundation, purpose, and meaning of his entire life. The Jews surrounding Jesus wanted the messianic Kingdom to be not so much God's kingdom as the kingdom of their religion. Now they had to choose between their own desires and God's revelation, and Jesus calls them to choose the Kingdom. But every person is free, and each makes his own choice.