August 30, 2015 John 8:12 – 30
Download discussion questions: John 8_12-30 know Me, know My Father
In this passage we resume the interaction between Jesus and the Pharisees (from John 7:52). As our group discussed last week, the familiar “woman taken in adultery” passage (John 7:53 – 8:11) was almost certainly not part of John’s original text. The opening of the present passage highlights the discontinuity between the questionable passage and the flow of John’s narrative. At the beginning of the passage about the woman, “everyone went to his home” (7:53), and at the end of the passage, the subdued crowd dispersed, and “He was left alone, and the woman” (8:9). So the opening at verse 12 seems clearly out of place: “Then Jesus again spoke to them.” To who? To the critical chief priests and Pharisees (7:32) who were still confronting Him in the temple (7:28) and to anyone who supported Him (the crowd they despised, 7:49, or one of their own, Nicodemus, 7:52). The illustration of Jesus’ mercy to the woman may be a familiar and beloved story, but neither the external textual evidence, nor the internal flow of John’s Gospel support its authenticity.
Enough from last week’s discussion. Now Jesus changes His metaphor from water and the Holy Spirit (7:37 – 39) to the light of the world (8:12) and an accompanying renewed emphasis on His Father (8:16,ff; five times in this passage, a total of nine times in the chapter). He also renews a previous theme: “Where I am going you cannot come” (earlier in 7:34, now in 8:21). Even as He is inviting them to follow Him (8:12) He recognizes that they are not willing. As one member of the group paraphrased Jesus’ words, “Follow Me, but you can’t come.” We discussed Jesus’ methods. Was He trying to convince them? Was He intentionally being obscure?
We had just heard the sermon during our church worship service about Jesus’s words “Follow Me” to the rich young man who tragically declined. In that example, one of the group pointed out, Jesus was very direct and clear about what He was asking, specifically, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor… and follow Me.” (Matthew 19:21). Once again we see Jesus responding to different people in different ways, perhaps depending on His perception (human/divine) of their hearts and what they were really seeking. John repeats another factor as He continues engaging the religious leaders, “His hour had not yet come” (John 8:20; cf. 7:30, 2:4). Probably both God’s Providence and His own human wisdom protected Him from premature arrest or even summary execution (see John 8:59, coming soon!). Jesus’ words seem carefully chosen to offer enough hints to those who “have ears to hear” without inciting those who are looking for a pretext to apprehend Him.
Some of Jesus’ language in this passage suggest such hints. When Almighty God revealed Himself and His Name to Moses (Exodus 3:14) He self-identified as “I AM.” The Name is considered to be so sacred that even today, many readers of the Hebrew Scriptures do not pronounce the Name aloud, substituting rather, Adonai, or “Lord.” (This is similar to the way most English translations handle the divine Name, translating it as “Lord” (in small upper case letters). The translation “Lord” (in normal letters) is usually the translation of Adonai in the Old Testament. The same reverence and caution were used by Jews in Jesus’ day. (Again, this will become more clear when we get to the end of John 8. Read to the end of the chapter now to see what the Jews reaction was when Jesus used an unambiguous statement relating to the Divine Name.)
Earlier in John 8, the passage we are presently in, He may be hinting in a more cautious way. One of the members of the group pointed out that he counted twelve times the words “I am” are used in the text (nineteen verses). That is an example of a great observation, and at the same time, it is important not to over-interpret here. Some of those uses reflect the English present tense (“where I am going”) without actually containing the Greek for “I am” (ego eimi, ἐγώ εἰμι). Other instances are common sentences with a predicate nominative (for you grammar fans) such as “I am the Light” or “I am He who testifies.” However, two of those English examples in the passage do begin to sound more like the words of the Divine Name (but not as explicitly as verse 58).
A feature of the New American Standard Bible (and some other translations) is the use of italicized words. As we discussed (probably in the first week of our group), those words are not actually in the original Greek text, but they are inserted by the translators for clarity. This is not adding to the Scriptures. Rather it is way to communicate ideas from one language to another. For example, even in the passage about the woman taken in adultery, John 7:11 says the woman “was in the center of the court.” Those italicized words “in the court” are not in Greek, but the sense of the passage is made more clear if the translators insert the words for the English reader.
Notice in John 8:24 and 28 how the italics are used:
24 Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.”
28 So Jesus said, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He”
The phrase “I am He” is more precisely “I am” without any predicate. These are not blatant expression of the divine name, but they certainly sound like hints for those who really want to know who He is. Perhaps Jesus’ reticence to be more direct (while His hour had not yet come) makes sense when we get to verse 58 and see the reaction when He was unequivocal about the His right to the Divine Name.
The passage also makes it clear that Jesus’ claim (ultimately to His divine nature) is not His own idea alone. He repeatedly invokes the testimony of His Father. Someone in our group raised the question, “What does the testimony of the Father look like? How would the Jews know what He meant?” Probably the primary source would be their own Scriptures and the long line of prophecies pointing to the Messiah, the Suffering Servant, the humble King on a donkey. But as we have seen repeatedly, they really were not listening. They were more interested in making accusations and dismissing Him because they thought (mistakenly) He had been born in the wrong village. The problem was not that there was only one witness testifying to His authenticity. The problem was they were not listening to either of the witnesses, the Son or His Father. The height of their obtuseness is shown in their question, “Who are you?” (v. 25) and John’s narrative comment, “They did not realize that He had been speaking to them about the Father” (v. 27). In what seems to be a very human moment, Jesus can only respond, “What have I been saying to you from the beginning?”
Perhaps the center-point of the passage is in verse 19: “You know neither Me nor My Father; if you knew Me, you would know My Father also.” A central theme we have seen repeated in the Gospel according to John is the centrality of the Father in the Son’s thinking. The incarnate Son’s very sustenance and food and source of energy is to do the work of the Father and to carry out His will (John 4:34), to bring honor to Him (7:18). Our discussion question then turned to, “Do we give as much attention to the Father as Jesus did?”
To honor and follow Jesus means to adopt His priorities, to treat as important those things that He demonstrates as being important in His life. The mission and glory of the Father are at the top of that list. Someone pointed out that in our early Sunday School days, most of the stories are often about Old Testament characters. Much of our teaching as adults may be about the teaching of Jesus and the letters of Paul. But we need to see the centrality of the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus hinted at the outpouring of the Spirit in the previous chapter. He will have much more to say later, just before His arrest. And His single-mindedness about the Father permeates John’s Gospel.
One comment from our group was especially poignant for me. As I responded, I have never heard anyone besides myself say that our appreciation of the Holy Trinity profoundly affects our appreciation of God’s grace. We all generally understand that Jesus died a horrible death of torture. We remember that He agonized in Gethsemane. We lament with His lament, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” When we begin to consider the Trinity that death and agony and lament take on new depth, depth beyond comprehension. The tragedy of the incarnate Jesus being separated from the God He had known for thirty-plus years on earth is horrific. The disruption of the eternal Godhead, the fracturing of the Eternal Community, the interruption of relationships that had enjoyed perfect love since before the foundation of Creation – how do we fathom that? My sin caused that. Your sin caused that. How do we understand such grace? “And can it be, that I should gain?”
The deeper we search into understanding the Holy Trinity, the individual Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the perfectly loving relationships among them, the more we will authentically follow Jesus, and the more genuinely and gratefully we will experience the grace that the Godhead has given us.
A quotation used before in this blog is worth repeating here:
When the Christians of the early centuries faced the task of saying who Jesus is in terms of the ‘lords many and gods many’ of the classical world, they could only do it by means of the Trinitarian’ model. It is significant that when the word ‘God’ is spoken in discussions such as the present, few Christians think immediately of the Trinity. The operative model is not trinitarian but unitarian. [1]
If we operate in Newbigin’s “unitarian model” we will not fully appreciate grace, nor will we be following Jesus on His own terms.
For those of you attending South Fellowship, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed have been recently displayed on the walls. (For those of you not at South, copies are readily available on the internet.) I encourage you to read (maybe even to so far as to memorize) those creeds. Not only do they give us a profound link with the ancient church (where those same words have been recited for thousands of years), but they also help our perspective as Trinitarian followers of the Son who revealed the Father by the power of the Spirit.
[1] J. E. Leslie Newbigin, Christian Witness in a Plural Society (London: British Council of Churches, 1977), 7.