NOTES for Joh 8:21-30
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."