NOTES for Joh 8:51-59
Throughout the whole eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, the Jews, or more precisely, the scribes, that is, the intellectuals, ask Jesus who He is. And yet His answer, repeated more than once in different forms, "the One who exists from the beginning," "the Light of the world," "I came forth from God and have come," is as though they do not hear it. Or do not want to hear it. In the end, the Truth revealed to them proves unacceptable to them, beyond the capacity of simple human reason. After all, everyday logic truly cannot grasp that the Jesus of Nazareth standing before them is the Christ, the Savior of human beings, God going to death out of love for His creature.
Meanwhile Jesus does more than affirm His divine nature. All the time He is trying to make His listeners think about the choice His coming to earth places before them: between light and darkness, between slavery to sin and freedom in God, and finally between life and death. And when the conversation reaches this last boundary, their inability to receive the Message, and the necessity of faith that comes from the heart rather than the intellect, produces only aggression in His listeners, and they rush at Christ with stones. One should not think that such a reaction to divine revelation belonged only to the intellectuals of the first century AD.