Thoughts for the Day

John 8: 58 -59a “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”  At this they picked up stones to stone him …

[Away from Luke for a few days, but we’ll be back!]  Alongside being fully man, Jesus was fully God, and he knew it.  How he came to know it we are not told.  Perhaps, being God, he just knew.  Perhaps there was a moment in his upbringing when this aspect of his identity suddenly came into focus.  But, undoubtedly, he knew it.  The above passage is one of few from before his death in which Jesus’s claim to divinity is explicit, even if it may not look like it to us.  “I am” was the name God had given himself when speaking with Moses.  As we’ve noted previously, Jesus’s audience would have grown up committing these scriptures to memory, and the implication of Jesus using this phrase of himself would have been very clear.  As a possible modern day parallel, imagine I’m describing some action and suddenly started crooning “I did it myyyyyyy way”.  Most people over a certain age would quickly contextualise that and add layers of meaning beyond what I had actually said.  And so in this passage Jesus’s audience understood him to be equating himself with God, something blasphemous unless true, and turned on him, picking up stones to stone him.  But while Jesus knew he was God, he certainly did not make it the focus of his life.  As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “[Jesus], being of very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing…”  His focus was not on his identity, but on his mission.