Wednesday is Fifth Week of Lent, April 6, 2022

John 8:31-42

Jesus said to those Jews who believed in him, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How can you say, ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free. I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you. I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence; then do what you have heard from the Father.”  They answered and said to him, “Our father is Abraham.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!” So they said to him, “We were not born of fornication. We have one Father, God.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”

Jesus continues his discourse to his in Jerusalem.  Among them are both his followers and Pharisees.  The followers believe that he is the Messiah the Pharisees have promised them — a military leader and ruler.  He is teaching them that he is more than that, pointing to his miracles as signs that God validates his claims that he is his Son.  Still, the people misinterpret what he tells them to fit it with their hopes and beliefs.  In the Gospel reading for today’s Mass, the Lord teaches that if they remain in his word — persevere in their belief in him, they will truly be his disciples, and that they will know the truth, and the truth will set them free.  That is, if they persevere in the level of faith in him which they have now, imperfect though it is, they will come to know the truth about about, and they will be convinced of it.  The truth about Jesus Christ will set them free from their former ignorance and enable them to understand and follow all his commandments.  But they must persevere through his “lifting up” of which he had already spoken to them — his crucifixion — which they probably did not understand. 

“We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.”  They misunderstand what he means by “freedom”.  Believing in a worldly Messiah, they do not think in spiritual terms.  They think in social terms: a free men versus a slave.  These people, zealous for a politically restored Israel, very much resent that Jesus seems to imply that they are slaves.  Jesus clarifies so that a child can understand: “Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.”  Notice how he says that he who “commits a sin” is “a slave” of sin.  That is, a single commission of a sin makes a person its slave.  The Lord is not speaking of the slavery of addiction, but of a darker reality: that one who commits a sin of malice (a mortal sin) makes himself the property of the devil.  The slave is chained and the devil will use him as he wants.

“A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.”  A slave could be assigned to the master’s house and be given a certain amount of responsibility, but his place there could change at any time.  He could be sent back to the fields to work or sold at any time.  He had no power over himself.  But the son in the household could overrule any overseer and had the power to free the slave if he chose.  Here, Jesus states that if those enslaved by sin were freed by him, God’s Son, they would indeed be free.

“I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you.”  The Lord addresses the  heritage of the members of the crowd, which they have brought up as proof that they were never slaves: Abraham their father was not a slave, so how could they, his children, be slaves?  The Pharisees believe this of themselves, most of all, and to them the Lord is speaking when he tells them that he knows of their plots against him.  “I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence; then do what you have heard from the Father.” Jesus explains patiently that the miracles prove that he has stood in the presence of Almighty God, and that he has told them what he has seen there.  For their part, they must turn their backs on sin and follow the commandments of God, which Jesus has taught them.  “Our father is Abraham!”  Jesus speaks of God the Father, but the fervent nationalists to whom he is speaking only see what is physical.  “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham.”  For the people in the crowd, to be a child of Abraham meant to receive the land promised by God to Abraham and his seed, nothing else.  The Lord appeals to them to go beyond this understanding and to become true children of Abraham by acting as he did.  St. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, will speak much of what it truly meant to be a child of Abraham.  “You are doing the works of your father!” If they did the works of Abraham, they would show themselves to be his children.  But if they did the works of the devil — by planning to kill an innocent man — they would show themselves to be the devil’s children.

“We were not born of fornication. We have one Father, God.”  The Greek word translated here as “fornication” has the broad sense of any illicit sexual activity.  It has been suggested by some scholars that members of the crowd were speaking to their supposed belief that Jesus was born as a result of adultery on his Mother’s part, but this seems unlikely because if they had though this, they would hardly have followed him.  Rather, we can consider another possible translation of this Greek word: idolatry. In the books of the Prophets, a common theme is that the virgin daughter Israel has gone off to other lovers — other gods — committing fornication — idol worship (cf. Jeremiah 3, 9).  The crowd is saying that they are not idolaters: they worship the true God.  The Lord has accused the people of serving the devil, an “idol”, for, as it is written in Psalm 96, 5: “All the gods of the Gentiles are demons.”  They counter that they do not worship idols (demons) but God.  “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”  The Lord rebukes them: they did believe that he came from God, for he was the Messiah.  But they did not want to hear any teachings that conflicted with what they already believed.  They wanted to hear him denounce Rome and proclaim the restoration of Israel.

If we read any of the advice columns in the newspapers, we will see how thoroughly secular, materialist people try to help people with spiritual wounds and sicknesses.  It is very grotesque.  Let us pray for the conversion of our society, which is as blind to the truth about the world as the people were in the days of Jesus.