Evening: Psalm 145; John 8:46-59
You cannot secularise John’s Gospel. Its readers must make up their minds about God, and about who Jesus is. “I am” on the lips of Jesus is code for: ‘What I say is from God’. “Before Abraham was I am” identifies Jesus as the creative Word of God mentioned in the opening verses of John. Jesus’s hearers want to stone him for this blasphemy, making himself equal with God; they call him possessed and motivated by evil. Against such odds, John still tells Jesus’s story, convinced that Jesus is neither evil nor possessed, but God in human flesh.
I'm reminded of C. S. Lewis' comment that "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell".
ReplyDeletehttps://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6979-i-am-trying-here-to-prevent-anyone-saying-the-really