John's Jesus
John 8:12-20
Have you ever made an argument that you knew could not win people over?
Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash
Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life." Then the Pharisees said to him, "You are testifying on your own behalf; your testimony is not valid." Jesus answered, "Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid because I know where I have come from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. You judge by human standards; I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is valid; for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. In your law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid. I testify on my own behalf, and the Father who sent me testifies on my behalf." Then they said 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." He spoke these words while he was teaching in the treasury of the temple, but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come. - John 8:12-20
Jesus could not have been trying to convince the Pharisees who he is. To the uninitiated, his argument was convoluted and self-supportive at best.
You say that two people can testify to who you are, you and your father, yet you won't say who your father is.
Not very likely to be accepted.
Is he even trying, or is he making fun of them? Of course, it is true that if you knew who I am, you would know who I am, but that doesn't win over people. Does it?
Of course, you should know his father because if you know him, you also know the father.
Sometimes, I wonder if John is trying to shame us into believing in Jesus. The scenes he paints in which Jesus speaks present Jesus as an aristocrat. I am who I am, and you should understand that. Sounds a lot like his father speaking to Moses.
Is that how Jesus actually spoke?
Did he put down the Pharisees in public and act like he was superior to them?
Christians who follow this approach don't win over many followers for Jesus, so I doubt that approach worked back then, either.
After all these years, I have come to realize I can do without John's Gospel. Sure, I will be missing a lot of Easter Week, but we have Matthew and Luke to fall back on.
I wonder if we lived in the first 100 years after Jesus' death, before John's Gospel was written, would we have a more loving view of Jesus?
Or would his arguments be just as convoluted and his criticisms as scathing as they are in John's Gospel?
More to come...