Scripture Daily

Context No. 261 of 4322 · John

Context · Reflection

John 8:19-24: in context

19They said therefore to him, “Where is your Father?” Jesus answered, “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” 20Jesus spoke these words in the treasury, as he taught in the temple. Yet no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come. 21Jesus said therefore again to them, “I am going away, and you will seek me, and you will die in your sins. Where I go, you can’t come.” 22The Jews therefore said, “Will he kill himself, because he says, ‘Where I am going, you can’t come’?” 23He said to them, “You are from beneath. I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world. 24I said therefore to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins.”

Jesus is teaching in the temple, in the part called the treasury, and this is a tense, riddling exchange with people who will not accept what he claims about himself. The whole passage runs on the sense of two levels that cannot quite hear each other. When he mentions his Father, they ask, literally, where is your father, as if he means a man across town. You know neither me nor my Father, he answers, for if you knew me you would know him.

He puts the gap in the sharpest terms he has. You are from below, I am from above. You are of this world, I am not of this world. He is not insulting them so much as naming two different origins, two frames of reference, and saying they are trying to understand him from inside the wrong one. Then comes the warning, and he says it twice: you will die in your sins, unless you believe that I am he. Those last words, I am, deliberately echo the name God gave Moses at the bush. Jesus is staking everything on who he is, before anything about behavior. And still they hear him on the wrong level: when he says where I am going you cannot come, they wonder aloud whether he means to kill himself.

That is the quiet danger of the scene. A person can stand right in front of Jesus, listening closely, and keep hearing him from below, missing entirely who is speaking. Which of his words have I been straining to understand from the wrong level, hearing a smaller thing than the one he is actually saying?

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