NOTES for Joh 8:25-26

The passage from the Gospel of John that we read today is perceived as the quintessence of dogmatic theology. How could anyone pass by and fail to understand such clear words of Christ? This is, it appears, a feature of human perception: the things that are difficult for us, we simply fail to notice. The Lord Jesus says plainly and openly that He is the One who exists from the beginning. But the Incarnation of the Son of God is such an incredible thing that these words go right past the ears of His listeners; they do not notice them (otherwise they would have tried to stone Jesus).

The Lord says that He is the very God who revealed Himself to the ancestors of the Jews, and He applies to Himself the name of God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. He also says that the Father has not left Him and abides with Him. But we will be able to know, accept, and experience these incredible and incomprehensible things only when the Son of Man is lifted up on the Cross. And perhaps the issue here is not only the stubbornness of the ancient Jews, but also the fact that the mystery of God truly cannot be understood except through the Cross.

At the heart of today's passage stand the mysterious words: I am. Their precise meaning is complex. Different people in the Gospel react to these words in entirely different ways. The disciples, sinking in their little boat, are reassured when they see Jesus coming to them over the waves and hear these words. The Pharisees, by contrast, either do not understand or do not wish to understand. Why such a difference? As modern scholars suggest—and as is evident from the Lord's words, ‘He who sent Me is with Me’—in today's text these words signify a revelation about the Father. The Lord first calls us to believe in this revelation and then says that the Cross will bring knowledge of it into the world. Knowledge, precisely: it is very important to understand this. Knowledge means complete immersion in the object of knowledge, complete union with it—or, more accurately, with Him. Few of us would dare to say that we know God. At times we timidly say, ‘I believe in God’, but here there is something far greater.

Yet we do not move from faith to knowledge through ever greater certainty, as happens in secular sciences. On the contrary, we do so through an ever greater, as it were, unknowing, for ‘God chose the weak things of the world to put the wise to shame’ 1 Cor 1:26–29. Why is this so? Perhaps the apostle answers this question too: ‘so that no flesh should boast before God’.

This is a strange sentence: ‘I have much to say and to judge concerning you; but the One who sent Me is true, and what I have heard from Him I speak to the world.’ We can speak about others. Or we can speak from God. Where is the contradiction? Can we not speak about another person and at the same time speak from God? Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, and surely He was speaking about them when He did so? Most likely, it really is a matter of where the word comes from…

Suppose a child does not want to do homework or household chores, such as setting the table. We can simply start scolding the child for laziness, seeing him as the source of our distress and anger. Or we can look at him through the eyes of a loving God and find in God the source of unconditional love for the child. How will this change our words? The words ‘You are lazy and do not want to do anything’ and ‘I love you and worry that things will be difficult for you later if you do not learn to work now; work is also a way of coming to know God and the world He created…’ are very different.

Of course, there are hundreds of other ways to express the same thing; of course, there are children for whom these words will not be right, while other words will. This is not the place to discuss education, and the example could have come from an entirely different sphere.

But in one case we rely on our own view of the other person and see him as a reason to react. This view always involves an assessment, even if it is not always condemning, whereas judgement belongs to God. In the other case, even if we are speaking about another person, the source of our words is in God, not in our reactions to those around us.

Here we hear a conversation without a dialogue. Christ continues to reveal to people Who He is, but they do not hear Him, nor do they want to. In other situations He taught in parables suited to His listeners' way of thinking and perceiving the world; now He seems unconcerned with being understood and gives discourses that are plainly difficult to understand. The moment must have come when, instead of descending to His listeners' level, He needs to raise the bar and give them an opportunity to rise. What Christ reveals is hard to understand, but it must be remembered, and then His words will begin their inner work in the hearts of those who have heard them.

For now, His listeners do not even react to Christ's calling Himself the One Who Is from the beginning, thus bearing witness to Himself as God. Indeed, many readers of the Gospel text, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, still fail to notice or understand this testimony...

The words ‘you will seek Me and die in your sin’ at first seem to contradict His own words ‘seek, and you will find’ (Mt 7:7). The whole question is what one is seeking for. If it is not in order to accept and believe, but to show off one's eloquence and erudition, then seeking is pointless. You are rejecting the only One capable of saving you.

After all that has been said, the words ‘as He was saying these things, many believed in Him’ sound unexpected. But at the very time when some listeners, including disciples, were leaving Christ, troubled by His discourses, others accepted and responded precisely to the difficult words. And that means His teaching was not in vain.

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.