NOTES for Joh 8:58-59

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.