NOTES for Joh 8:58-59

For some reason, it often seems improper and tactless to us to bear witness to our faith. We can somehow manage to say that we believe in God and go to church. But when the truths of the faith come up, we become remarkably timid. Characteristically, we may argue fiercely with brothers and sisters in the faith, yet in conversation with an unbeliever we are so eager to steer around every difficult point and say, “Well, that is a complicated question... I do not really know...” Jesus speaks bluntly: “If I said that I did not know Him, I would be a liar like you.” It might seem an overconfident claim: I know the Father Himself! But false modesty is entirely foreign to Jesus. He speaks only the truth and does not make it His aim to “spare the feelings” of listeners who may be “unready” for that truth.

What does this mean for us? When we firmly know the teaching of the Church, we have no right to smooth over the difficult points and say that we do not know, are unsure, or were merely passing by. Refusing to bear witness to the truth is already a lie.

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.

What made the people listening to Jesus pick up stones? Obviously, His words about Abraham and about Himself. "I Am" (or, in modern Russian, "I am the One Who Is") meant a reference to Himself as the One who bears within Himself the fullness of God. Such a thing was not forgiven: in the eyes of any religious person, it was outright blasphemy. One could be a prophet or even the Messiah, but one could not be God. Whoever declares such a thing is either mad or a pagan, for pagans believed in the "divinity" of certain people, meaning their supernatural qualities or their connection with the world of the gods. This Man does not look mad, so, as can be seen, He must be an apostate who has imagined Himself to be some supernatural being in the pagan sense of the word. In any case, apostasy and blasphemy were evident, and they were punished by death.

It would seem that one might expect something like this from the Messiah; for example, Isaiah of Jerusalem did call the Messiah "father of eternity." But in the Judaism of Gospel times, these words were understood in the context of ideas about the Messiah whom God had conceived from the beginning of time. Naturally, no one considered the Messiah to be God.

And Jesus, as can be seen, wants to bring precisely this truth to His listeners, a truth inseparable from His earthly ministry. Indeed, He came into the world in order to bring the Kingdom into it, and in all its fullness. The Kingdom that from the very beginning He carried entirely within Himself, since, according to His own words, it is "not of this world" - nowhere in the world, except in Him Himself after His birth into the world, could the Kingdom exist. And the fullness of the Kingdom of God and the fullness of God are, in essence, one and the same: the One who contains within Himself the fullness of the Kingdom also contains the fullness of God.

This, apparently, is what Jesus wants to explain to the people listening to Him. And He does this not in order to exalt Himself somehow, but in order to make them understand what the Kingdom is, what it is really like. But to understand this, one must go beyond the frames of one's own religiosity. And they do not want to do this, or cannot do it - and they pick up stones.

The next, harshest words of Jesus are addressed to... Jews who had believed in Him. Evidently, they believed in some way other than the Lord wanted. Therefore we too need to think: do we believe rightly or not? They proudly declare that they were born free, being children of Abraham, the chosen people. Therefore they do not need freedom, for they are not slaves, and they do not need the truth, for they already know it. They call God their father, but this already follows from their belonging to the holy people; no step is required of them in order to be adopted by the Lord.

And what is most frightening is that all this is characteristic not only of the Jews. Do we not believe in the same way? Do we not consider ourselves chosen people who have freedom and truth in our pocket, and who have long since been God’s own people? If so, why do we need to believe in Jesus? Let us think about this...