Daily Reflections
John 8:51-59
Inadvertently and even ironically those who opposed and resisted Jesus often asked the right questions. Today’s reading illustrates a classic example of this: ‘Who do you think you are?’ (v. 53 NIV). A fair question which strikes at the very core of the Christian message. The message is: Jesus is God. Muslims find this suggestion intolerable and Jews (both then and now) consider it utterly reprehensible, offensive, sacrilegious and blasphemous. For these believers God is transcendent and holy and would not lower himself by becoming a human being. Herein lies the scandal of the Christian faith.
In the book of Exodus when God revealed himself to Moses, he said: ‘ “I AM WHO I AM.”…Say this to the people of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you”’ (3:14). ‘I AM’ was the name by which God wanted to be known and worshipped. This name, more than any other, expressed his character as the dependable and faithful God who desires the full trust of his people.
By applying this phrase to himself Jesus claimed to be God and therefore risked being stoned for blasphemy. What was Jesus saying? He was saying that God is his Father in an utterly unique and special way that applied to no other human being. Jesus could not have chosen a more majestic and powerful way to announce his divinity than when he proclaimed ‘ego eimi’, which is used with neither noun nor adjective to accompany it. Jesus uses the ‘I AM’ phrase three times in John 8: ‘if you do not believe that I am…you will indeed die in your sins’ (v. 24 NIV); ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am…’ (v. 28 NIV) and, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am’ (v. 58). We will spend the rest of our lives plumbing the depths of this mystery.
The Church Father Athanasius said, ‘The Word of God became man that you may learn how a man becomes God.’ We invite the Holy Spirit to burn the truth that God became man deep into our hearts, causing us to bow before the God who loved us so much that he became one of us.
‘The Word of God, Jesus Christ, on account of his great love for humankind, became what we are in order to make us what he is himself.’ (St Irenaeus)
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