God was their Father. All over the Old Testament, there is repeated the fact that God was in a special way the Father of his people Israel. God commanded Moses to say to Pharaoh: ‘Thus says the Lord: Israel is my first-born son’ (Exodus 4:22). When Moses was chiding the people for their disobedience, his appeal was: ‘Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you?’ (Deuteronomy 32:6). Isaiah speaks of his trust in God: ‘For you are our father, though Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our father, our Redeemer from of old is your name’ (Isaiah 63:16). ‘Yet, O Lord, you are our Father’ (Isaiah 64:8). ‘Have we not all one father?’ demanded Malachi. ‘Has not one God created us?’ (Malachi 2:10). So the Jews claimed that God was their Father.
‘We’, they said proudly, ‘were born of no adulterous union.’ There may be two things there. In the Old Testament, one of the loveliest descriptions of the nation of Israel is that which sees in her the Bride of God. Because of that, when Israel forsook God, she was said to go awhoring after strange gods; her infidelity was spiritual adultery. When the nation was thus faithless, the apostate people were said to be ‘children of whoredom’ (Hosea 2:4). So when the Jews said to Jesus that they were not the children of any adulterous union, they meant that they did not belong to a nation of idolaters but they had always worshipped the true God. It was a claim that they had never gone astray from God – a claim that only a people steeped in self-righteousness would ever have dared make.
But when the Jews spoke like this, there may have been something much more personal in it. It is certainly true in later times that a most malicious slander against Jesus was circulating. The Christians very early preached the miraculous birth of Jesus. It was put about that Mary had been unfaithful to Joseph; that her lover had been a Roman soldier called Panthera; and that Jesus was the child of that adulterous union. It is just possible that the Jews were flinging at Jesus even then an insult over his birth, as if to say: ‘What right have you to speak to the likes of us as you do?’
Jesus’ answer to the claim of the Jews is that it is false; and the proof is that if God was really their Father, they would have loved and welcomed him. Here again is the key thought of the Fourth Gospel; the real test is how people react to Jesus. To be confronted with Jesus is to be confronted with judgment; he is the touchstone of God by which all are judged.
Jesus’ close-knit indictment goes on. He asks: ‘Why do you not understand what I am saying?’ The answer is terrible – not that they are intellectually stupid, but that they are spiritually deaf. They refuse to hear and they refuse to understand. We can stop our ears to any warning; if we go on doing that long enough, we become spiritually deaf. In the last analysis, we will only hear what we want to hear; and if for long enough we attune our ears to our own desires and to the wrong voices, in the end we will be unable to tune in at all to the wavelength of God. That is what the Jews had done.
Then comes the cutting accusation that the real father of the Jews is the devil. Jesus chooses two characteristics of him.
(1) The devil is characteristically a murderer. There may be two things in Jesus’ mind. He may be thinking back to the old Cain and Abel story. Cain was the first murderer and he was inspired by the devil. He may be thinking of something even more serious than that. It was the devil who first tempted Adam and Eve in the old Genesis story. Through the devil, sin entered into the world, and through sin came death (Romans 5:13). If there had been no temptation, there would have been no sin; and, if there had been no sin, there would have been no death; and therefore, in a sense, the devil is the murderer of the whole human race.
But, even apart from the old stories, the fact remains that Christ leads to life and the devil to death. The devil murders goodness, chastity, honour, honesty, beauty, all that makes life lovely; he murders peace of mind and happiness and even love. Evil characteristically destroys; Christ characteristically brings life. At that very moment, the Jews were plotting how to kill Christ; they were taking the devil’s way.
(2) The devil characteristically loves falsehood. Every lie is inspired by the devil and does the devil’s work. Falsehood always hates the truth and always tries to destroy it. When the Jews and Jesus met, the false way met the true, and inevitably the false tried to destroy the true.
Jesus indicted the Jews as children of the devil because their thoughts were bent on the destruction of the good and the maintaining of the false. Everyone who tries to destroy the truth is doing the devil’s work.
THE GREAT INDICTMENT AND THE SHINING FAITH
John 8:46–50
‘Who of you can convict me of sin? If I speak the truth, why do you not believe in me? He who is from God hears God’s words. That is why you do not hear, because you are not from God.’ The Jews answered: ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan, and that you have a devil?’ Jesus answered: ‘It is not I who have a devil. I honour my Father, but you dishonour me. I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks and judges.’
WE must try to see this scene happening before our eyes. There is drama here, and it is not only in the words, but in the pauses between them. Jesus began with a tremendous claim. ‘Is there anyone here’, he demanded, ‘who can point the finger at any evil in my life?’ Then there must have followed a silence during which the eyes of Jesus ranged round the crowd waiting for anyone to accept the extraordinary challenge that he had thrown down. The silence went on. Search as they like, none could formulate a charge against him. When he had given them their chance, Jesus spoke again. ‘You admit’, he said, ‘that you can find no charge against me. Then why do you not accept what I say?’ Again there was an uncomfortable silence. Then Jesus answered his own question. ‘You do not accept my words’, he said, ‘because you are not from God.’
What did Jesus mean? Think of it this way. No experience can enter into a person’s mind and heart unless there is something there to answer to it; and people may lack the something essential which will enable them to have the experience. Someone who is tone-deaf cannot experience the thrill of music. Someone who is colour-blind cannot fully appreciate a picture. The person with no sense of time and rhythm cannot fully appreciate ballet or dancing.
Now the Jews had a very wonderful way of thinking of the Spirit of God. They believed that he had two great functions. He revealed God’s truth to men and women; and he enabled them to recognize and grasp that truth when they saw it. That quite clearly means that unless the Spirit of God is in people’s hearts, they cannot recognize God’s truth when they see it. And it also means that if people shut the door of their hearts against the Spirit of God, then, even when the truth is fully displayed before their eyes, they are quite unable to see it and recognize it and grasp it and make it their own.
Jesus was saying to the Jews: ‘You have gone your own way and followed your own ideas; the Spirit of God has been unable to gain an entry into your hearts; that is why you cannot recognize me and that is why you will not accept my words.’ The Jews believed they were religious people; but because they had clung to their idea of religion instead of to God’s idea, they had in the end drifted so far from God that they had lost God’s true spirit. They were in the terrible position of people who were going through the motions of serving God.
To be told that they were strangers to God stung the Jews to the quick. They hurled their invective against Jesus. As our present form of the words has it, they accused him of being a Samaritan and of being mad. What did they mean by calling him a Samaritan? They meant that he was an enemy of Israel, for there was deadly enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans, that he was a law-breaker because he did not observe the law, and above all that he was a heretic, for Samaritan and heretic had become synonymous. It would be extraordinary that the Son of God should be branded as a heretic. And beyond a doubt it would happen to him again if he returned to this
