“Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever keeps my word will never see death.”
The word of Jesus is different from the word of leaders of other world religions and philosophies. It is different even than that of the prophets, even the greatest of the prophets. The word of Jesus has a power that no one else dared claim, not Abraham, Moses, or any other.
Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died?
Or the prophets, who died?
The prophets called people to keep, not their own word, but the word of God. And even then it was understood that death was still the inevitable fate waiting even for the faithful. There were vague hints that things would be different for the faithful.
Those who trust in him shall understand truth,
and the faithful shall abide with him in love:
Because grace and mercy are with his holy ones,
and his care is with the elect (see Wisdom 3:9).
But even though Wisdom suggested some form of immortality and the Maccabean martyrs looked forward to some form of resurrection, none of that was ever predicated on the words of a single individual, an uneducated rabbi from the backwater of Galilee no less. The Judeans weren't wrong to be so taken aback by the claims of Jesus. No one sane person would dare to claim what he claimed, at least not unless it were true.
Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing;
but it is my Father who glorifies me,
of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’
Jesus did not make the claims that he did in order to glorify himself. He did it because he desired that people would come to him and find life, but they refused (see John 5:40). And yet this was the whole point of his coming, the unifying factor behind all of his ministry, that in him people could have life in abundance (see John 10:10).
Jesus was the only one capable of revealing the Father to humanity, the only one so deeply related to the Father that he could manifest the Father to the world. Others insisted that they did know him already, but how could they? And the way they lived gave the lie to those claims. Specifically, the way they refused to embrace the words of Jesus proved that they did not embrace the Father either, and that the God they thought they knew was at least partially a construct of their own minds, created for their own convenience.
Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day;
he saw it and was glad.”
Those who had true faith always looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, even if they only saw him through a veil and from a distance. Insofar as God's plan hinted in the direction of Jesus these devout faithful accepted that plan, and it was as though in doing so they were putting faith in Jesus himself.
These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth (see Hebrews 11:13).
“You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?”
Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
before Abraham came to be, I AM.”
There can be no equivocating about the claims made by Jesus. Though humble and truthful and sane he appropriated the divine name to himself. He claimed to have no origin in time, but to have always existed since before the foundation of the world, to be being itself, perfectly united with the Father. There can therefore be no abiding in the word of Jesus as a mere philosophy or system of living. It must always be first and foremost a response to Jesus himself, and a trust in who he reveals himself to be. Everything else flows from that revelation.
May we, like Abraham, rejoice in the revelation of Jesus to us. If he is who who says he is we can believe him about everything else he wants to tell us, not only about the Father, but about who we are in him, and who he believes we can yet become. Even the promises made to Abraham and dwarfed by what God has now prepared for those who love (see First Corinthians 2:9).
I will render you exceedingly fertile;
I will make nations of you;
kings shall stem from you.
No comments:
Post a Comment