Some in the crowd who heard these words of Jesus said,
"This is truly the Prophet."
They thought that Jesus was the one promised by Moses when he said that "your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen" (see Deuteronomy 18:15). If this were true Jesus was more significant than if were merely a compelling teacher or miracle worker. In that case he would not be speaking his own words, no matter how clever, since God said, "I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him" (see Deuteronomy 18:18), implying that adherence was no longer an optional extra for those who happened to vibe with what he said. The Lord continued speaking to Moses saying, "And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him" (see Deuteronomy 18:19).
Others said, "This is the Christ."
People were probably primed to debunk messianic claims, since there had been other pretenders to that position in the past. Others had claimed they fulfilled these promises of God to David for the restoration of Israel, but had failed to do so. Now people were on guard against believing hype or daring to hope. They had been disappointed before by people who might have been something but turned out not to be. So they easy thing for them to do was to poke holes in anything which dared them to hope again. They had been jaded. In many ways people in our world share this cynicism. They have placed their hope in many places and been disappointed. Most things that seem too good to be true are, in fact, not true. But the defensive posture of cynicism can lead us to miss the ways that God really at work in the world. We may use confirmation bias to support our assumptions. We may line up any number of purported 'facts' to justify what we believe a priori. We won't be open to the encounter God desires to have with us, nor to the good he desires to do, which far surpasses all our hopes and dreams.
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."
Somehow it is often the sophisticated people who fail to find Jesus, because their own cleverness becomes a trap. Whereas it is the simple who are often less committed to intellectual abstractions and thus able to actually experience encounter with Jesus. The chief priests and Pharisees, if they heard the words of Jesus at all, only heard them through several layers of mental filters. But the guards heard what he actually said. They had probably heard other teachers, sophists, and charlatans. And they knew that this one was not like those others. They knew that he was not like anyone else, then or ever.
Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him?
But this crowd, which does not know the law, is accursed.
Sometimes experts only use their authority to endorse their own existing positions. They take offense at the prospect of anything that would diminish or usurp their authority in the eyes of others. The Pharisees saw themselves as the ones who knew the law, and Jesus as an outsider and a threat to that claim. They became increasingly committed to the idea that Jesus was a fraud in order to protect their own positions. Or most of them did. But some of them were able to remain open enough to at least hear him out.
Nicodemus, one of their members who had come to him earlier, said to them,
"Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him
and finds out what he is doing?"
Nicodemus already had a sense that Jesus someone extraordinary. He saw his fellow Pharisees claiming to object on the basis of the law while not even giving Jesus the fair hearing which the law required. He was suspicious of this rush to condemn too quickly without hearing him out. Nicodemus himself maintained and encouraged a posture of humble openness to the possibility that one or more of the things that were claimed about Jesus were true. Such a posture is an antidote against both jaded cynicism and prideful cleverness. He is in this sense worthy of our emulation. If we open ourselves to the full reality of Jesus, if we allow ourselves to truly hear his words, and if, in response, we give him our hearts, we will find that he not only fulfills our deepest desires but that he indeed far surpasses them.
Elevation Worship - Here As In Heaven
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