Wednesday in the Fifth week of Lent, March 24, 2021

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 said to those Jews who believed in him, ‘If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples.’ ”  In reflecting on this Gospel reading, it is necessary to keep in mind that the Lord Jesus is speaking to some of his own followers — not primarily to the Apostles, but to those who followed him regularly enough to be termed “disciples”, or, “students”.  

Here, the Lord says, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples.”  The present tense of the word translated as “remain” can also be translated as “are remaining”, “do remain”, and “keep remaining”.  The implication is if these followers persist in their learning from Christ, they will “truly” or “certainly” be his disciples.  The conversion of one’s life to the Lord is a lifelong process which must be actively carried out every day.  To call oneself a disciple of the Lord Jesus, then, is a very different matter from calling oneself a disciple of, say, the Pharisees, in which case a person would study their interpretation of the Law and come to know it well at some point.  As a consequence of the conversion of life which Christ demands of those who would become his true disciples, “you will know the truth”, that is, the truth about God and his plan of salvation, and the Truth, the Lord Jesus himself.  “And the truth will set you free”.  The truth about God and his plan of salvation will set his disciples free from ignorance, render them more resistant to sin, and enable them to give heartfelt praise to God.  The Truth, Jesus Christ, will set them free from their past sins and make them adopted children of the Father.

“We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.”  These descendants took the words of the Lord in a societal sense, revealing their belief in the Lord as a political and military Messiah.  If they had understood the Lord as a religious prophet or holy man, they would have continued listening or simply asked him what he meant by “freedom”.  We modern people must be careful reading here: there was only one kind of freedom in ancient times, that of freedom from slavery.  The idea that one could have human rights in our sense was more than a millennium and a half away.  To these Jews, the Lord was implying that since the truth would make them free, they must be slaves of the Romans.

“I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.”  The Lord clarifies his statement to them, but they fail to see that he is speaking of the spirit.  All they can think of is the political situation.  “But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you.”  We ought to consider that his audience was not speaking with a single voice.  While there were some disciples among them who knew him as a “rabbi”, it seems that very many, or at least the loudest of them, were only interested in him as a leader who would lead the revolt against the Romans.  It is to these that he speaks now: his refusal to be their general makes him useless in their sight, and even suspect as a collaborator, this man who speaks of forgiving enemies.

“If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham.”  Their claim to be the “children of Abraham” is based on their biological heritage and not on their imitation of Abraham’s faith and virtues.  The question of who are the true descendants of Abraham becomes a key question for the early Gentile Christians, as we see in the Letters of St. Paul.  The biology, however, is coincidental, while the imitation is essential.  The more raucous members of the crowd claim to be “children of Abraham” as though Abraham’s bloodline contained some quality that made them incapable of becoming slaves.  In fact, the “children of Abraham” had been enslaved more than once in their history, and had been incapable of maintaining an independent political existence for most of their existence.  The kingdom they had once enjoyed fractured irrevocably within two generations of its founding, and neither of these could overcome the successive waves of the major powers of the time.  In short, their pride was seriously misplaced.

“We were not born of fornication. We have one Father, God.”  This is an intriguing retort on the part of members of the crowd,  some scholars think that this refers to doubts about the Lord’s human origins as the legitimate son of Joseph and Mary, and that Jesus was born of an adulterous union, as the pagan author Celsus (died ca. 175 A.D.) would claim in his book against Christianity.  Their assertion that God is their Father seems to collide with their previous assertion that Abraham was their Father.  But here, too, the Lord points out that their behavior is not in accord with God’s will.  But they are doing the works of their father.  Jesus will shortly identify their father as the devil.

“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.”  If they loved God as their father, they would love Jesus, the Father’s only-begotten Son, whom the Father sent into the world to them.  The Lord confronts them with the reality that God is not their Father, although he may be their Creator, and they do not love him, the Son.

We who rejoice in our baptism are rightly called the adopted sons and daughters of God, but we must persevere in the word of the Son so that we may behave as God’s children, and so “truly” be his children.