Tuesday in the Fifth Week of Lent, March 23, 2021

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.

“I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin.”  At first glance, the two parts of the Lord’s sentence do not seem to go together: he is going away but they will die in their sin.  If the conjunction were “and” instead of “but”, the sentence would make better sense because we could see that his going away was the cause of their dying in sin.  The key here is to understand the weight of “and you will look for me”:  you will look for me when I have gone away, but you will not find me and you will die in your sin.  The Pharisees and other unbelievers have the Lord before them at that moment and so they can still be convinced by him of the truth he came to proclaim, but once he has gone, their opportunity is gone too.  If they are not convinced by the Lord himself, they will not be convinced by the Church he leaves behind.  They will die in their refusal to believe.  The Lord emphasizes this finality by telling them, “Where I am going you cannot come.”  He is speaking of his own obedience to the Father, in which they cannot share because of their unbelief; into the “hands” of the Father, to which the Lord will commend himself as he dies; and, at the right side of the Father, after the Ascension.  On the other hand, the saints do go to these places.  The response of the Pharisees that the Lord is planning to do away with himself is both crude and unrealistic on their part, and they seem to be aware of this, but they do not ask him what he means.

“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.”  St. John was fascinated by the Lord’s teaching about “of this world” and “not of this world”.  In his Gospel, he quoted the Lord using these terms whenever he could, and he used them himself in his First Letter.  This “world” is not so much the earth as the things that the bulk of people consider important or even necessary here that would be absurd to have in heaven, that other “world”: in a word, materialism, and all that pertains to it, such as lust, pride, and envy.  The Pharisees, then, belong to that world in which material wealth, physical appearances, and high positions in government or commerce are of prime importance.  For the people of this world, there is no other world, and when a person dies, they are no more.  The Lord, and his angels and saints, belong to a world that is eternal, unchanging, and forever beautiful.  A tide of the purest love engulfs all present in this world as they gaze with steady eyes at God himself.

“ ‘Who are you?’ Jesus said to them, ‘What I told you from the beginning.’ ”  They have heard him declare himself to be the Son of Man, and they knew what that meant from their familiarity with the Book of Daniel.  He is divine.  But they have rejected this title for him, this understanding of him, despite the miracles he performed which could only be done with the power of God.  The Lord is not going to rephrase what he has told them to something more to their taste.  “ ‘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.”  Jesus had spoken of his Father in this way often enough that the Pharisees did know of whom he was speaking here; they simply refused to accept it.

“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.”  Interestingly, the Lord says to the Pharisees, “When you lift up, etc.”  He holds them accountable for his coming Death, not the Romans alone.  The “lifting up” was a euphemism for crucifixion, so common at that time.  The words “I am” are translated from the Greek ego eimi, which seems to be a translation of the name God gives himself in the Hebrew language when he first spoke to Moses.  The name means something like “I am”, or, “I am who am”.  It has to do with life and being.  Perhaps the Lord alludes to it when he calls himself “The Life” at the Last Supper.  Armed with this name, Moses went to Egypt to work and suffer for the freedom of his fellow Hebrews from their slavery.  The Lord Jesus, revealing himself thus, goes among the human race to work and suffer for the salvation of us all.

“Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.”  That is, many of the Jews who heard him on this occasion and on others “came to believe” in him — perhaps fully believing after his Death and Resurrection — because of his boldness of speech, and the solid certainty of his conviction.  There were none like him either in speech or in character.  Others possessed wisdom and courage: he appeared to be Wisdom and Courage personified.

We are to speak of him as his emissaries.  May we so speak of him that those who hear us come to believe in him.