Reflection on John 8:51-59

Rev. Marcel E. Okwara, CSsR

Thursday, April 2, 2020

In today’s Gospel, Jesus insists, affirms and asserts his pre-existence by telling the Jews, his first listeners, and everyone else that “before Abraham came to be, I AM.”

In recent years, there has been a troubling tendency to reduce Jesus to the level of a great teacher or a great prophet or guru and to turn him into an inspiring spiritual teacher. Some Christian theologians even describe him as someone who is like us by virtue of his identity with the human race but different from us by the constant potency of his God consciousness. They describe him as someone who has a super God’s consciousness. They attempt to understand him not on ontological term but in psychological or relational term. Although this shift is more accessible to the modern mind, it nevertheless has had a negative consequences on how we teach and preach and evangelize. If the only difference between us and Jesus is that he has a superior God’s consciousness, then what really distinguishes him from let’s say prophet Muhammad who claimed he had a heightened awareness of God or the Buddha or a Sufi or a traditional believer or even St. Francis of Assisi? The psychological or relational approach to Christology commonly called the immanent approach turns Jesus into a super-saint. And if Jesus himself is merely a super saint, the question then is: is he really himself the Redeemer? It seems he  would need a redeemer himself as well. If Jesus has God’s consciousness even if it is to the highest degree, the question is: why do we particularly focus on him? Why do we evangelize him in particular? and why should Christians insist that everyone must follow him?

But Scripture teaches us crystal clearly that Jesus is divine. In the Gospel of John 14, Jesus himself declared, “Have faith in God; have faith also in me.” By doing so, he affirms his divinity. And throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus speaks and acts like God. At Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples not what people thought about his teaching, but who people think he is. No other religious figure would focus on himself as Jesus did. As Jesus was comforting Martha, the sister of Lazarus, he made a very bold declaration, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Later in the same Gospel of John 14:8, he said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In today’s Gospel, he claims to the shocking of his Jewish listeners that he was before Abraham came to be. In all these and many more Jesus asserts that he is divine. That he is God. 

Sisters and brothers, it is because Jesus is divine, it is because Jesus is the very incarnation of God, Yahweh in human flesh, that is why he compels us to make a choice. It is either we are with him or we are against him. There is no sitting on the fence, and there is no other way to understand his word. To believe, accept, recognize and submit to the divinity of Jesus is what it means to be a Christian.