On the last and greatest day of the feast Jesus had promised that living waters would flow from him. This stirred deep hope in those who were thirsty and recognized their thirst. Those with whom his words resonated came to think that he must be the prophet whom Moses had promised would be like himself (see Deuteronomy 18:15) and others that he must be the Messiah, the promised heir of David. But others found reason to doubt. They doubled down on things they thought they knew about Jesus even though these things were not accurate. They asserted that he was not born in Bethlehem and of David's family and yet both of these were in fact the case.
Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division (see Luke 12:51).
It wasn't just the fact that some people were wrong about the details of the human background of Jesus that was the problem. It was that some were able to see beyond the merely human with eyes of faith. Others got hung up on what they were able to see on the surface. The division was not about correct appreciation of details, but rather a matter of a response to the person of Jesus himself. Some people allowed the Father to draw them to the Son. Others insisted on remaining at the level of what they were capable of understanding on their own. This did lead to mistakes even on the natural level, the result of darkened minds that did not desire the truth, but especially on the supernatural level.
So the guards went to the chief priests and Pharisees,
who asked them, "Why did you not bring him?"
The guards answered, "Never before has anyone spoken like this man."
No one ever spoke like Jesus. The guards, with less need to assert their own intellectual prowess, were able to recognize it. The Pharisees on the other hand were unwilling to accept an uneducated peasant from the backwater of Galilee as their equal, or, heaven forbid, their superior. They tried to disprove him by their supposed knowledge of the law. But since their motive was always driven by the need to reject Jesus their entire process was marked by mistakes from beginning to end.
So the Pharisees answered them, "Have you also been deceived?
Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him?
But this crowd, which does not know the law, is accursed."
Only Nicodemus seemed to realize that the majority of the Pharisees were condemning Jesus before they had any real sense of who he was or what he had to say. Rather than producing good counterarguments the other Pharisees simply turned their ridicule on Nicodemus, including him in their disgust at Jesus himself.
"You are not from Galilee also, are you?
Look and see that no prophet arises from Galilee."
It was a small statement that Nicodemus made, designed to open the door for sensible and rational people to consider Jesus more deeply. And although it seemed to mostly backfire it did make Nicodemus among the first who was blessed "when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake" (see Matthew 10:11). And who knows? Maybe some calmer heads that weren't among those who shouted him down did give things a second thought after hearing him. We do know that Nicodemus was not the only Pharisee who came to believe in Jesus by the end of his ministry.
We can recognize in the reaction of the crowd and of the Pharisees that a merely dispassionate and supposedly objective response to Jesus is an impossibility. His presence itself poses a question to each and every individual human heart. Will we accept the offer of salvation from the loving heart of the Father? Or will we fight tooth and nail for our autonomy? Let us not side with those whom the prophet Isaiah described:
Let us destroy the tree in its vigor;
let us cut him off from the land of the living,
so that his name will be spoken no more.
Those who destroy the tree are the powerful. It is they who first seem victorious in the eyes of the world. But the eyes of faith recognize that the truth is otherwise.
A shield before me is God,
who saves the upright of heart;
A just judge is God,
a God who punishes day by day.
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