John 8:48-59

And so we're good to be.

It's good to be back with you.

And glad to have you with us.

Jumping back in John eight, verse 18.

No, I'm sorry, verse.

48, 38, 48

and, I'll go ahead and read this quickly.

Go through the end of the chapter.

This is the pinnacle kind of the mountain

top of an argument slash discussion Jesus has been having.

And it gets continues to kind of heat up here.

So verse 48, the Jews answered him, where are we

not right in saying, you are a Samaritan and have a demon?

Jesus answered, I do not have a demon.

I have my father, and you dishonor me, yet I do not seek my own glory.

There's one who seeks it, and he is the judge.

I tell you the truth.

Whoever keeps my word will not see death.

The Jews said to him, now we know you have a demon.

Abraham died, and so did the prophets.

You say, whoever keeps my word will not taste death.

Are you greater than our father Abraham who died?

The prophets who also died?

Who do you claim to be?

Jesus answered, if I glorify myself, my glory is nothing.

It is my father who glorifies me, of whom you say, he is our God.

Though you do not know him, but I know him.

If I would say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you.

But I do know him, and I keep his word.

Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day.

He saw it and was glad.

Then the Jews said to him, you are not yet 50, and you have seen Abraham.

Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth,

before Abraham was, I am.

So they picked up stones to throw at him.

But Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.

So again, the

culmination of a discussion that's been going on

for most of the chapter here, or much of the chapter here.

And it very pointed here at the end.

It's interesting, Michael, how these conversations in John,

these conversations with the Jewish people, the religious people

always sort of culminate in them wanting to kill him.

Yep. Yeah.

The, the the anger that is unleashed

toward Jesus, as here he says,

Abraham being your father, isn't it?

Yeah. That, God wants you to know me.

I don't have a demon.

They accuse him of being possessed.

Jesus answers those things,

and and again, John uses misunderstanding.

We've seen that consistently in this gospel.

I don't know that that's exactly what's happening here, though.

There is some misunderstood ending.

But ultimately, it comes down to this idea that that Jesus is saying,

as he has, he has seen God.

He is from God.

He presents the truth about God and that the people are not only unable,

but more importantly, are unwilling, unable

because they're unwilling to listen to him.

Yeah.

This is a moment in the Jesus story.

Clint, in John, that I think we are intended

to see the seams beginning to split.

Some of the arguments that Jesus has had

have been, vigorous, of course.

Jesus has already escaped from some really edgy situations.

But here, as this story

sort of continues to ramp up and comes to a conclusion,

I think that we are supposed to see in this that Jesus is

very clearly, explicitly

making connections to the founder,

the father being a son of Abraham, a daughter of Abraham,

is central to the identity of the Jewish people.

So here Jesus is targeting the very center of identity

of these religious Jews.

And he is saying to them, not only

that he

supersedes Abraham, but

he is making this claim at the end

that he is I am he is claiming explicitly

the very same that God claims in his address to Moses.

That is Clint.

I don't think any there would be any debate from a biblical scholar.

That is clear,

an unarguable theological heresy.

This is in the presence of a Jewish audience.

A statement like this, is rightly

the consequence is rightly applied when one is stoned.

I mean, this is the Old Testament law writ large, and Jesus is making

this sort of claim to say that if you knew God, then you would understand me.

And if you understand me, that that would give you access to knowledge of God.

And and that has been tumultuous.

But now, to say that not only that Jesus

is representing God, but that he is before Abraham,

the people, the lights have come on in a substantial way here.

And the reaction, though short, is

clearly identifying that the crowd gets it.

And they're they're seeking to take Jesus's life

because he's claiming for himself, are saying you,

the human, are humans not supposed to claim?

I think we've made this point before, but just quickly

in the

other gospels, we have this unfolding sense of who is Jesus.

And there's these question marks and sort of challenge the reader.

We have said consistently or tried to, that John comes from a different place.

With John.

The reality of Jesus is laid out on nearly every page,

and the reader gets this increasing

witness to who and what Jesus is.

And so the claim here Abraham

rejoiced that he would see my day and again,

if you're going to say there's misunderstanding in this text, it's

misunderstanding that they think Jesus is talking chronologically.

They say, you're not even 50.

What do you mean you were before Abraham.

It actually gets worse because then when Jesus explains it, he says,

oh no, I don't mean chronologically, I mean theologically.

I am before Abraham.

I was before whatever Abraham did.

My purpose is even fuller and deeper and more related to the covenant than that.

And Abraham, your ancestor,

wished that he would see me.

He wished that he would have the privilege that you do.

And he rejoiced when it happens.

And then you have this

this linchpin statement.

I tell you the truth, before Abraham was, I am now.

This is two things, as you said, Michael, that are deeply offensive to his hearers.

First is the implication that he is before Abraham, and again,

not just chronologically,

but that Jesus seems to be saying he's more important than Abraham.

That would of course,

be grounds for deep unhappiness from any Jewish listener.

But then as a kind of, to add

to that, a kind of

additional insult, he says, I am, which

we've talked about in John, the I am statements

hearkening back to Moses at the Bush.

A Jewish person would understand that in doing this,

what seems to be happening is that Jesus is equating himself with God.

So he's claiming a sort of prior place and maybe even a preeminence.

To Abraham, the founder of Judaism, and then saying,

I am, he's claiming the title of God.

Now, the I think it's

there's

nothing shocking about the next part of that story.

They picked up stones to throw.

I mean, it. Now.

What Jesus does there is it is

it just dials the volume up to 50.

I mean, this is the culmination, but John is comfortable with this language

because John wants the reader to know this.

This isn't John isn't unpacking little clues along the way.

John is saying, here's the big whole incredible truth.

What do you make of it? And so,

I, I think.

Again, I think sometimes

we can read past these texts and maybe not get all the depth that's in them.

I think that you're right, Clint.

I think that part of the struggle of this is not

the impact that it would have had on those first hearers,

these Jews who are responding viscerally to what Jesus is claiming.

They understand exactly what he's claiming here.

I think the struggle is with us.

I think that we, especially Christians, if you've grown up in the church,

in Sunday School, if you've, you know, read John before,

then, this kind of language of Jesus being the I am is probably language

that you have heard before that you're comfortable with.

And so it's not going to raise your emotion.

It's certainly not going to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

And I think that maybe

we need a little bit of translation into our experience of it.

Clint.

And I think that there is kind of a modern example that I was holding this back.

I want to share with you here today.

C.S. Lewis has

this very famous quote where he's responding to people

who were claiming that Jesus is a great teacher.

He was a good exemplar for,

maybe even a good leader, but that's all that Jesus was.

And C.S.

Lewis has a really interesting

take about this, and I will read it really, really briefly here.

I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying

the really foolish thing that people often say about Jesus, I'm ready to accept him

as a great moral teacher, and I don't accept his claim to be God.

That's one thing we must not say.

A man who was merely a man and said the sorts of things

Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

He would either be a lunatic on the level with the man who says he's a poached egg,

or else he would be the devil of hell.

You must make your choice.

Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a bad man or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool.

You can spit at him and kill him as a demon,

or you can fold his feet and call him Lord and God.

But let us not come

with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He's not left out open to us.

He did not intend to.

And I think what Lewis is saying is very much rooted in this kind of

Johannine theme, that Jesus was clear

about who he was to these Jews.

So the question was not about the clarity of the revelation,

the the discourse, the words.

The question is how will they respond to it?

And I think that is exactly the same kind of force that John intends

to land on us, that we stand at the threshold of our very own

forced decision in light of who Jesus claims to be.

Jesus claims to be this, and there are many people who consider him

to be someone who might as well claim to be a poached egg.

And that is that is fine.

A lot of people have come to that explanation,

but John is forcing the hand, by the way, that the story is told.

I think that's really good.

Michael, if you wanted to hold that the idea of the incarnation

and the idea of divinity and the idea of Jesus as God's Son and and

co-equal

sources, so to speak, to use some church jargon,

if you wanted to say that those were things attributed to Jesus later,

you have to skip the Gospel of John right now.

There's problems with that in the other gospels as well,

but there's just no way you read

the Gospel of John at its face value and think that Jesus thought

anything other about himself than he is the divine

saving Messiah of God.

There's there's no way around that in this gospel.

Now, if you wanted to argue that that's written into John later,

you could have those arguments.

But as you read the text, this text is not going to let you go there.

I think. I think that's actually really helpful insight.

And it it says something about the character of John as well.

There's this ever present question that comes along with the faith,

and I think that it's mirrored by the crowd here in verse 52.

Jesus, Abraham died and so did the prophets.

Yet you say, whoever keeps my word will never taste death.

You know, Clint, you and I have experienced this now,

over our time of doing this Bible study, you know, we we get the privilege

of having lots of people from even around the world engage in conversation.

And later coming into the comments and, you know, sharing thoughts and ideas and,

and we've talked about before how many people really do

get tripped up and hung up on language like this, the language of that

we will never taste death. Well, what are you talking about?

All of these prophets that the truly the,

patron saints of Judaism, all of them died.

Jesus. What in the world are you talking about?

If they die, how is it that we are going to never die?

And if you read the Gospel of John Clement

and tell me if you disagree with this, but if you read the Gospel of John

and you want to force it into one specific sense,

you want to say, everything I read is going to be

simple and literal.

Or if you say everything I read in John is always allegorical or always

metaphor it,

you're always making a mistake because John is not being confined.

Jesus is not confined to one of those categories.

Jesus is always yeah, because he is God in flesh.

Revelation is reorienting.

I don't even say disorient thing.

So when humans start looking for weight, what do you literally mean by this death?

Saying they are thinking about bodies and graves while Jesus is talking about

an eternal holding in the saving, providential work of God?

When they're thinking about human action, Jesus is thinking about the Spirit of God

at work as comforter, as first foretaste of eternal life right there.

There's this kind of miscommunication that happens

because of a God in breaking into the created order.

And John is, I think of all the Gospels, all the Gospels have miracle stories.

John, the teaching of Jesus itself, the teaching itself,

sort of functions to serve the same kind of disorienting purpose

that we will naturally have, if indeed Jesus is, as he claims to be

the creator, becoming created

the one from before time, taking on time, right?

This is the kind of upsetting turn of reality that happens with Jesus.

The crowd in this story gets it.

John is, I think, as John always does, inviting us

to see if we also understand that implication.

I think it would be difficult

to read the rest of the gospel, particularly to see Jesus die

and then come back and ask literal questions

of those who who believe in me will never see death.

John understands life and death

to mean more than physically being alive

or physically experiencing death.

Those are those are much deeper

concepts, much bigger words in this gospel.

To live is to know and believe in Christ

and to die is to forfeit that life by rejecting Jesus.

And so those who believe can't die in that sense, because they embody

the very meaning of life, as I think John is trying to communicate it.

I want to just end with it.

Maybe this is a little, even possibly a little flippant, Michael, but,

one of

my frustrations of the Gospel of John.

Yeah.

So we get to the end here.

We have this great sentence.

They picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus

hid himself and went out of this temple like it just.

John has built this crescendo and we get to this.

And then he says, And Jesus got away from them. And,

the challenge and I say that a little tongue in cheek,

but the challenge of that is

that that a sentence

like that, when, when John does that sort of just snap ending,

it can raise enough questions that it becomes the focus instead.

And I think, you know, John is just saying, look how Jesus got away.

Isn't that sound important?

All of this stuff that came to that point, that's what you want to focus on.

And so these moments where John just says,

and then something else happened.

It the those are, those are jarring moments.

And the danger in them, I think, is that they can make it harder

to go back and really try to mine the depth of what came before them.

I don't want to over press this, but there's a sense

in which John is not interested in telling a narrative story

that has side ups and arcs, that what

when Jesus determines it's time to get away from the crowd

who wants to stone him?

That's what Jesus does, and any other interpretation

of that action would be for John.

It. Listen, either you believe Jesus because of his revelation of His Word.

By the way, there's no it's not an accident.

That word shows up at the beginning of this book.

If you either believe that he's that his word

reveals the order of the cosmos or you don't.

And if you don't, then he's just going to.

Yeah, just sneak out of the temple and, you know, that's fine,

because you're not going to believe because of his miracles.

If you don't believe the word spoken, there's no miracle that's going to somehow

I push you over, I think, is that the consistent case

portrayed by the way John tells this story?

As a person who likes to dive into narrative,

John frustrates me in that regard.

Like, well, how did he get away?

It doesn't matter. Well, how did they not get him?

It wasn't his time yet.

Those aren't answers.

Come on, John, give us a little something to work with.

And John says, look,

I just gave you 40 verses of the deepest theology about Jesus you can find.

And you're asking how he got away.

And I appreciate that about John, but it frustrates me.

Yeah.

And as a guy who reads nonfiction for fun and doesn't get fiction,

I think that's where probably I land on the other side, because I think John

speaks my language and I get to Matthew and I'm like, are we done yet?

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on the rest of the study of John as we continue in chapter nine next week.

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