New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John vol. 2. William Barclay
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your own way and followed your own ideas; the Spirit of God has been unable to gain an entry into your hearts; that is why you cannot recognize me and that is why you will not accept my words.’ The Jews believed they were religious people; but because they had clung to their idea of religion instead of to God’s idea, they had in the end drifted so far from God that they had lost God’s true spirit. They were in the terrible position of people who were going through the motions of serving God.
To be told that they were strangers to God stung the Jews to the quick. They hurled their invective against Jesus. As our present form of the words has it, they accused him of being a Samaritan and of being mad. What did they mean by calling him a Samaritan? They meant that he was an enemy of Israel, for there was deadly enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans, that he was a law-breaker because he did not observe the law, and above all that he was a heretic, for Samaritan and heretic had become synonymous. It would be extraordinary that the Son of God should be branded as a heretic. And beyond a doubt it would happen to him again if he returned to this world and its churches.
But it is just possible that the word Samaritan is really a corruption of something else. To begin with, we note that Jesus replied to the charge that he was mad, but did not reply to the charge that he was a Samaritan. That makes us wonder if we have the charge of the Jews rightly stated. In the original Aramaic, the word for Samaritan would be Shomeroni. Shomeron was also a title for the prince of the devils, otherwise called Ashmedai and Sammael and Satan. So the word Shomeroni could quite well mean a child of the devil. It is very likely that what the Jews said to Jesus was: ‘You are a child of the devil; you have a devil; you are mad with the madness of the evil one.’
His answer was that, far from being a servant of the devil, his one aim was to honour God, while the conduct of the Jews was a continual dishonouring of God. He says in effect: ‘It is not I who have a devil; it is you.’
Then comes the radiance of the supreme faith of Jesus. He says: ‘I am not looking for honour in this world: I know that I will be insulted and rejected and dishonoured and crucified. But there is one who will one day assess things at their true value and assign to all people their true honour; and he will give me the honour which is real because it is his.’ Of one thing, Jesus was sure – ultimately, God will protect the honour of his own. In time, Jesus saw nothing but pain and dishonour and rejection; in eternity, he saw only the glory which those who are obedient to God will some day receive. In ‘Paracelsus’, Robert Browning wrote:
If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time; I press God’s lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
Jesus had the supreme optimism born of supreme faith, the optimism which is rooted in God.
THE LIFE AND THE GLORY
John 8:51–5
‘This is the truth I tell you – if anyone keeps my word, he will not see death forever.’ The Jews said to him: ‘Now we are certain that you are mad. Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you are saying: “If anyone keeps my word, he will not taste of death forever.” Surely you are not greater than our father Abraham who did die? And the prophets died too. Who are you making yourself out to be?’ Jesus answered: ‘It is my Father who glorifies me, that Father, who, you claim, is your God, and yet you know nothing about him. But I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar, like you. But I know him and I keep his word.’
THIS chapter passes from lightning flash to lightning flash of astonishment. Jesus makes claim after claim, each more tremendous than the one which went before. Here he makes the claim that if anyone keeps his words, that person will never know death. It shocked the Jews. Zechariah had said: ‘Your ancestors, where are they? And the prophets, do they live for ever?’ (Zechariah 1:5). Abraham was dead; the prophets were dead; and had they not, in their day and generation, kept the word of God? Who is Jesus to set himself above the great ones of the faith? It is the literal-mindedness of the Jews which blocks their intelligence. It is not physical life and physical death of which Jesus is thinking. He means that, for those who fully accept him, death has lost its finality; they have entered into a relationship with God which neither time nor eternity can sever. They go, not from life to death, but from life to life; death is only the introduction to the nearer presence of God.
From that, Jesus goes on to make a great statement – all true honour must come from God. It is not difficult to honour oneself; it is easy enough – in fact, fatally easy – to bask in the sunshine of one’s own approval. It is not too difficult to win honour from others; the world honours those who are successful. But the real honour is the honour which only eternity can reveal; and the verdicts of eternity are not the verdicts of time.
Then Jesus makes the two claims which are the very foundation of his life.
(1) He claims unique knowledge of God. He claims to know him as no one else has ever known him or ever will. Nor will he lower that claim, for to do so would be a lie. The only way to full knowledge of the heart and mind of God is through Jesus Christ. With our own minds, we can reach fragments of knowledge about God; but only in Jesus Christ is the truth in all its fullness, for only in him do we see what God is like.
(2) He claims unique obedience to God. To look at Jesus is to be able to say: ‘This is how God wishes me to live.’ To look at his life is to say: ‘This is serving God.’
In Jesus alone, we see what God wants us to know and what God wants us to be.
THE TREMENDOUS CLAIM
John 8:56–9
‘Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it and was glad.’ The Jews said to him: ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them: ‘This is the truth I tell you – before Abraham was, I am.’ So they lifted stones to throw them at him, but Jesus slipped out of their sight, and went out of the Temple precincts.
ALL the previous lightning flashes pale into significance before the blaze of this passage. When Jesus said to the Jews that Abraham rejoiced to see his day, he was talking in terms that they could understand. The Jews had many beliefs about Abraham which would enable them to see what Jesus was implying. There were altogether five different ways in which they would interpret this passage.
(a) Abraham was living in Paradise and able to see what was happening on earth. Jesus used that idea in the Parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:22–31). That is the simplest way to interpret this saying.
(b) But that is not the correct interpretation. Jesus said Abraham rejoiced to see my day, the past tense. The Jews interpreted many passages of Scripture in a way that explains this. They took the great promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: ‘In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’, and said that when that promise was made, Abraham knew that it meant that the Messiah of God was to come from his line and rejoiced at the magnificence of the promise.
(c) Some of the Rabbis held that in Genesis 15:8–21 Abraham was given a vision of the whole future of the nation of Israel and therefore had a vision beforehand of the time when the Messiah would come.
(d) Some of the Rabbis took Genesis 17:17, which tells how Abraham laughed when he heard that a son would be born to him, not as a laugh of unbelief, but as a laugh of sheer joy that from him the Messiah would come.
(e) Some of the Rabbis had a fanciful interpretation of Genesis 24:1. There the Revised Standard Version has it that Abraham was ‘well advanced in years’. The margin of the Authorized Version tells us that the Hebrew literally means that Abraham had ‘gone into days’. Some of the Rabbis held that to mean that in a vision given by God Abraham had entered into the days which lay ahead and had seen the whole history of the people and the coming of the Messiah.
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