NOTES for Joh 8:25

The Savior's words about Himself, that He is "the One who is from the beginning," are usually understood as His testimony to His divinity. And such an interpretation of His words is certainly possible. The question is whether it is the main one for us in practical terms. And most important, whether this thought was the main thing Jesus Himself wanted to convey to His listeners. To us today the answer appears self-evident: can anything be more important than the Savior's divinity? After all, this is undoubtedly one of the foundations of Christian right belief, that very orthodoxy about which we speak so much today. Meanwhile, for the first Christian generation, as for a number of later ones, the first place belonged not to orthodoxy but to orthopraxy. Not correct views and opinions, but correct life.

Here the emphases inevitably shift. We can be absolutely sure that Jesus is the God-Man, but this may have no effect on our practical life. This is hardly what the Savior wants from us. In the end, He wants above all to bring us into communion with His life. To make us part of this life. The life of that Kingdom which He brought into the world. That is why He says that where He is going, the people listening to Him will not be able to go.

Because they do not trust Him. And He lives God's life. In all its fullness. In the same fullness in which His heavenly Father lives. Such a thing is accessible to no one, to no human being. Unless, of course, that person entrusts himself to Him, his Savior. Jesus does not simply declare His divine-humanity; He invites those who listen to Him to participate in His divine-humanity. And this is the main thing, for this is why He came into the world. The Kingdom is the fullness of His divine-human life, opened to the world. And therefore to each of us. If only there is the desire to enter. And trust in Him.

It cannot be said that Jesus never spoke directly to His listeners about His Messiahship: at times He does so quite clearly. Thus, calling Himself "the One Who Is from the beginning," He essentially uses one of the epithets applied to the Messiah already by the pre-exilic prophets. But at the same time Jesus behaves completely differently from how, according to generally accepted ideas of that time, the Messiah was supposed to behave: He says nothing about an uprising or about freeing the country from the power of the Gentiles. He does seem to call Himself the Messiah, but only in hints, and when the crowd around Him is already ready to proclaim Him Messiah, He hides. Besides, this strange Messiah breaks Shabbat, associates with sinners without being embarrassed by their company, and clearly does not place traditional piety very high. In short, if He is the Messiah, He is a rather strange one.

And meanwhile Jesus only intensifies this impression by saying something mysterious: that the people listening to Him will not be able to go where He is going. Of course, He is speaking to them about the Kingdom, which they will not enter if they do not accept Him as the Messiah sent by God. But they do not understand Him. They are convinced that the Messiah builds His Kingdom on earth the same way all other kingdoms are built there, although, of course, the laws of this Kingdom will not be like the laws of Gentile kingdoms, and anyone who accepts these laws and agrees to follow them will be able to enter. On this point all the Pharisees without exception were completely confident in themselves: would they be the ones to reject the Torah and the One who will build the Kingdom founded on the Torah!

It was this misunderstanding above all that made Jesus speak of His Messiahship only in hints. He wanted the people listening to Him to rely not on their own knowledge and their own understanding of the Kingdom, but on what He was trying to explain to them, so that the Kingdom would become for them not a concept, not a theory, but a spiritual reality that had already entered the world, and entered through Him. But for His listeners, as is clear, it is too hard to abandon their views, so familiar and so "right."

What makes up the foundations of our life, its most basic realities? Birth and death, water, food, truth, light... Jesus uses all these ideas to describe His mission, as His own names. He wants to tell everyone who hears these words that He is the very foundation of human life. "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men... I am the light of the world..." To tell us about the Father, He speaks our language, and what other language could we understand? He speaks about simple, clear details of daily life, as in the parables of the Kingdom, or, in the Gospel of John, about the most important things, without which we cannot imagine either ourselves or the world. "I am the bread... I am the life... You must be born from above... I will give the water of life..."

And all this is testimony to the One about whom no words can fully speak, whom blind human eyes cannot see: the Father, inseparably dwelling in the Son.

Speaking with the Pharisees, Jesus again and again tries to explain to them who He is and why He came into the world. But it was not easy for them to understand Him, because they wanted not testimony but proofs, formal proofs of the kind required from witnesses in an ordinary earthly court over ordinary everyday matters. Jesus speaks to them about the life that He can give to everyone who is ready to believe Him (v. 12), and in response He hears: where are Your witnesses? And if there are no witnesses, how can we believe You (v. 13)? In answering those who question Him, Jesus tries to speak with them in their own language. He says: there are two witnesses, I and the Father (vv. 16-17).

But such language does not change the essence of the matter: in order to believe Jesus, one needs not legal proofs but simply the ability to see the situation with spiritual sight. One need only understand who Jesus is, where He came from and where He is going, but this cannot be done by relying only on formal legal procedures, even if they are based on the norms of the Torah (v. 14). You, Jesus says to the Pharisees, evaluate (“judge”) everyone only by external, formal criteria (“according to the flesh”); I, He says of Himself, evaluate no one (v. 15). In this way Jesus lets His interlocutors understand that it is pointless to measure His ministry and testimony by earthly measures and formal criteria, for the Kingdom does not fit within any human framework. And Jesus Himself too, according to His own words, judges no one: as can be seen, He did not come into the world for that. His goal was to free people from the sin from which otherwise they would never be freed, and the question of accepting or not accepting Jesus therefore becomes a question of life and death both for those who accept and for those who reject (vv. 21-24).

And although, as can be seen, the listeners still did not fully understand the Savior (vv. 25-27), among them there were many whom Jesus’ words convinced and who believed Him (v. 30). Apparently a division took place among those present between those who were ready to disregard the opinion of the majority and of religious authorities for the sake of the Kingdom, and those who preferred not to risk it. A division between those who seek the Kingdom and those who are ready to live as before, remaining with their religion.