NOTES for Joh 10:22-42

Those who demand a direct answer from Jesus about whether He is the Christ are not asking because they are truly interested in where the truth is. They have already answered the question for themselves and rejected Jesus, and now they need His positive answer only as a pretext for doing away with Him. At that moment, His direct answer is no longer needed in order to accept Christ; His earlier words are enough to draw the necessary conclusions. And once again we see how, in response to Christ's words, an attempt is made to do away with Him.

This time He leaves His ill-wishers; the time for an unjust execution has not yet come. It is hard for us, and perhaps impossible, to understand fully why His sufferings had to happen under other circumstances. In any case, those who justify Judas by saying that he was carrying out the Teacher's instruction to betray Him should remember that Christ could have been seized even without Judas's help.

And the evangelist has also preserved for us an important testimony: although John the Baptist performed no miracle, this can deny neither the truth of his words nor his holiness. Demanding obligatory miracles from saints has become customary and traditional, but we should not regard them as the only necessary proof of faithfulness to God. The Lord gives the ability to work miracles, but not every miracle is from God; the powers of darkness know how to counterfeit miracles. But a life transformed by union with God cannot be imitated.

Today Jesus says to us: "My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all, and no one will snatch them out of My Father's hand." We know that there will be those who want to snatch them away. The father of lies and murderer from the beginning would very much like to gain as many souls as possible. But if we are already the Lord's sheep, no one can lead us out of His flock without our consent.

The words "My Father is greater than all" mean that He is greater not only than any human being and stronger than the devil, but also greater than my weakness, laziness, inertia - my sinfulness. He needs my will; and if my will is given to Him, He will defend and preserve me, and no one will snatch me out of His hand.

"If I am not doing the works of My Father, do not believe Me. But if I do them, even if you do not believe Me, believe the works..." The works that Jesus does become, as it were, a bridge, "bringing those on earth up to heaven", a bridge between unbelief and faith, because these are the works of God. The works of God and faith become mutually conditioning acts. It is very important to feel that our faith is not faith in some abstract principles, even if they are beautiful; our faith is inseparable from the very fabric of life.

It is important that the Greek word here is precisely ἔργοις, a work, a deed with a simple everyday meaning, without the loftiness we tend to give to everything connected with our Lord. "To work a miracle," says the New Jerusalem Bible about what Jesus does. This sense of real, daily action and effort, not fully conveyed by the elevated Russian "to create" or "to perform," is hard to render (recall "the arm of the Lord"). The word "work," "do," is one of the very important words for the whole Gospel of John. Recall the text: "The Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever He does, that the Son does likewise" (5:19). The word "do" sounds four times in such a small amount of text.

And now that we have understood that the Lord works so that we may believe, that the Lord enters the fabric of our life so that our faith will not be an abstract ideology, let us recall another text: Then they said to Him, "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent" (John 6:28, 29). That is, not only are the works the Lord does mutually connected with faith, but our works as well, if they are the works of God, are faith. It is difficult, and unnecessary, to separate faith and the works of God. Let us simply understand what the apostle James said: for as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead (James 2:26).

Anyone who has tried to be a Christian knows that it is a difficult thing. We would very much like baptism, like a fairy-tale spell, to make us good and inaccessible to sin. We would very much like the admonition "you are baptized with a second baptism," appointed for confession, to be unnecessary. The power of love that the Holy Spirit gives a person is great, but the degree of our freedom is great as well. Therefore the need to make a choice remains with us forever, and this choice is hard, because the Lord calls us too to love as He loves, that is, by giving our life.

And therefore Christ's promise is so important for us: "...no one is able to snatch My sheep out of the Father's hand". Like the promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church, it opens for us the possibility of relying on Christ without fear and trusting Him. In Orthodox language, this means that salvation consists not in matching some given parameters, but in being together with Jesus.

When reading the words "My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one can snatch them out of My Father's hand", a reasonable question can arise: what about temptations? After all, some people, unfortunately, do not remain in the Church, but retreat back into the darkness (see John 3:20), yielding to the temptations of this world. How can this be? After all, they appeared to be with the Father, in His caring hands, and suddenly they have been snatched away?

There may be people who offer as an explanation that those who left were never with God at all. But this is not true. The one who communes with the Lord necessarily has the experience of a personal encounter with Him, which once brought him into the Church (we are not speaking of people who come to the Church for the sake of ritual and not for the sake of Christ Himself). And there is no contradiction here.

The point is that the fulfillment of God's will for a particular person is connected with that person's freedom, given to him for the manifestation of love. And if we use this freedom for creative cooperation with the Lord, then we listen to His Word, thereby entrusting our life into His hands. And this Word is embodied in our life, and the Lord's will that no one snatch us out of His hands (see John 10:28) becomes our truth.

We humans sometimes love to simplify very much. We need to know clearly whether something is black or white. We do not recognize third options. We want plain truth, without any of those omissions and hints. And for the most part we apply this approach to others. We need to understand everything about them and put it all neatly on the shelves. But what is going on in our own soul at the same time is "a great mystery." How can our rich and many-sided inner world be described in two words and clear categories?..

The Jews can no longer tolerate the fact that Jesus actually pities them, understanding that His Word has no room in them (see John 8:37). The Lord gives us as much as we are able to understand. But it keeps seeming to us that He is being obscure, that there is some mystery around us carefully hidden from us. So the Jews demand a simple answer from Christ: yes or no. And the fact that He speaks to them only about this and manifests it by all His works is not enough for them, that is, for us (see John 10:25).

But what will change if Christ gives the answer expected of Him? As if those waiting are ready, depending on the answer, to formulate their position clearly - whether they believe in Christ or not. Unfortunately, they are not ready at all. We carry our freedom and finely organized soul around like a prized possession, while being unable to give an account of our hope (see 1 Pet. 3:15). And meanwhile, before God and for God there are no half-tones: "Let your word be: yes, yes; no, no" (Matt. 5:37).

Unlike learned theological treatises, unlike dogmatic definitions directed against various errors, Holy Scripture speaks of the mysteries of God with extreme restraint and reverence. Much is passed over in reverent silence; much is indicated only by a brief hint or a parable. Christ's words in today's reading are a rare moment when the evangelist sparingly transmits the words of the Son of God Himself concerning things that cannot be spoken.

The Lord says: "For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it up again." Listening closely to these words, one should remember the limitation of human language, and yet it is important to try to grasp what the Lord is saying and, above all, why He says it. For since the Spirit of God inspired the evangelist to remember and write down these words, it means He wanted us to hear and understand them.

The Lord explains the love of the Heavenly Father (although from our point of view it is completely beyond explanation) by the fact that the Son lays down His life. And here two important things must be noted. The love of which Jesus speaks is not simply a relationship between Persons, just as the laying down of life is not simply a heroic act. Both speak of the very nature of the unchanging God, and therefore in his epistle the evangelist John writes of Him that He is Love. In addition, according to the principles of biblical language, we see that the Lord places the Father's love for Him alongside His laying down of His life. In essence, this is one and the same nature, manifested differently by the Father and the Son. Since the life of the Son of God is given for us, these words are a priceless hope for us.

And one more thing: in order for us to experience, feel, and as far as possible appreciate this love of God, it is necessary to hear Christ's words that He gives us His life in perfect freedom, without compulsion from external circumstances. Only because we are dear to Him.

As we can see, many of the Pharisees were still ready to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. They correctly understood His hints about His messiahship, and now they wanted only one thing from Him: that He finally declare Himself openly to be the Messiah. But He does not do this, because He knows perfectly well what "being the Messiah" means for these people, and He was not going to become that kind of Messiah - His plans did not include raising a rebellion, beginning a holy war against the Romans, or becoming the ruler of an earthly state.

Instead, He again and again explains to those around Him what the Kingdom He brought into the world is. And He speaks of the main thing that forms the basis of the Kingdom's life by His own example: to live in the Kingdom means to give one's life to God in order then to receive it back from His hands. And the Savior's own path, His death and Resurrection, is a remarkable example of this.

According to the laws of our untransformed world, even the Messiah, bearing in Himself the fullness of God and the fullness of the Kingdom, can die - although, unlike us, death is not a natural inevitability for Him. And when He is killed, He dies like any human being. But His life belongs to the Father; He lives not by His own life, but by the Father's life, which was given to Him by the Father in all its fullness. And in the Kingdom, where there is no place for death, He receives it again from the Father in all its fullness - completely unexpectedly for His enemies, who thought that now, once He had died, everything was over.

And the path of every Christian, every inhabitant of the Kingdom, resembles the path of the One who brought the Kingdom into the world. Of course, God has not given any of us, as He gave Him, the capacity to contain the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness. But the Kingdom is open to us, and one can enter it only by giving up the life that God gave us at birth, so that there in the Kingdom He may return it to us transformed. This new life will no longer be part of our world - a world being transformed but not yet transformed - but part of the Kingdom; it will become the first step on the path of our transformation, the first step on the path to salvation.