Tuesday in the Fifth Week of Lent, April 5, 2022

John 8, 21-30

Jesus said to the Pharisees: “I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.” So the Jews said, “He is not going to kill himself, is he, because he said, ‘Where I am going you cannot come’?” He said to them, “You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above. You belong to this world, but I do not belong to this world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” So they said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “What I told you from the beginning. I have much to say about you in condemnation. But the one who sent me is true, and what I heard from him I tell the world.” They did not realize that he was speaking to them of the Father. So Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me. The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him.” Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.

The Lord continues his discourse directed mainly to the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders.  He is explaining to them that while he is the Savior, he is not the Messiah they had imagined for themselves and taught to others — he is much greater too, for he was the Son of God.  But they ignore or explain away the evidence of the Father’s validation, his miracles, and judge him according to his flesh: that he seems in every way merely a man.  

“I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin.”  This is more literally translated, “I am departing and you will search for/desire me, but you will die in your sin.”  He is not only separating himself from them in terms of distance, but he is departing their lives.  They have seen his works and heard his words and they have rejected him.  There is no more he can do for them.  He will leave them as thoroughly as he left Nazareth, years before, when its inhabitants rejected him.  He will respect their choice.  “You will search for/desire me”, that is, they will not search for him out of curiosity or to do him harm, but with desire.  Their very being will yearn for him despite their sins.  This is perhaps like the greatest torment in hell, when the soul still desires to be in the presence of God but will never attain this.  “You will die in your sin.”  “Sin” is in the singular.  We can think of one’s sins in a general way, or this might indicate their sin of rejecting Jesus, or the Lord may have meant Original Sin, which must be forgiven in baptism so that the soul may enter heaven.  “Where I am going you cannot come.”  More literally, “Where I am departing to, you are not able to come.”  The Lord is departing this world for heaven; the Pharisees will not be able to go there.  They are unable to go there because they do not have faith and have scorned the One who rules there.  They could hardly face Christ in heaven if they have hated him on earth, and there would be no happiness in heaven when they are surrounded by myriads of angels and saints singing his praise forever.

“He is not going to kill himself, is he?”  They seek to mock his words here, but in fact if he did kill himself, he would go down to the Jewish underworld Sheol, but eventually they would follow too, so they should know that he is speaking of something else.

“You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above. You belong to this world, but I do not belong to this world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins.”  More literally, “You are of those below.  I am of those above.”  This could mean “of those things” or “of those persons”.  The verb to-be is used so that the Lord identifies the Pharisees as “those below”, and himself as above.  The meaning is much stronger than using the verb “to belong”.  A person can belong to a group while desiring not to be, but one cannot escape one’s identity.  We might ask in what sense the Pharisees could be held as culpable for rejecting Jesus if they are already “those below” — the wicked, destined for hell.  The answer is that they chose this identity for themselves throughout their lives until they can hardly be separated from it.  Even so, they could repent at the end of their lives, though it would be very difficult for them to do so.  And so the Lord says to them: “That is why I told you that you will die in your sins.”

“For if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” Jesus is speaking either Greek or Aramaic and so does not say the name of God, which is in Hebrew, but gives its equivalent in one of these languages.  The Lord says that unless we believe in his divinity, we will die in our sins.  Because his hearers do not immediately stone him for what they would consider blasphemy, they must have understood him to mean something else, possibly that unless they believe that he is the Messiah they will die in their sins.  To their repeated question, “Who are you?” the Lord replies, “What I told you from the beginning. I have much to say about you in condemnation. But the one who sent me is true, and what I heard from him I tell the world.”  He has already told them that he was the Son of God, and they had refused to believe, despite the evidence of his miracles.  Rather than dignify their question by repeating himself, he speaks of the veracity of his Father in heaven.  “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me. ”  The Lord here speaks of his crucifixion and Sacrifice.  He says, “When you lift up the Son of Man”.  The Greek word translated here as “Lift up” can also mean “exalt”, so that another meaning to his words was possible.  Jesus means that there are those standing there who will convert when they see him offering himself on the Cross, either at that time or after the Resurrection when they consider what he had done.

“Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.”  The verb tense is aorist, so the text should read, “Many believed in him”.  That is, at that time.  No one had ever spoken like this or had performed such works as he had.  They believed in him at least as the Messiah, and perhaps a little more than that.  The people would not yet understand that he came to save them not from the Romans but from the devil, but the beginnings of faith in “many” in the crowd were there.