descended into hell.’ It is to be noted that the word hell gives the wrong idea; it ought to be Hades. The idea is not that Jesus went to the place of the tortured and the damned, as the word hell suggests. Hades was the land of the shadows where all the dead, good and bad alike, went, in which the Jews believed before the full belief in immortality came to them. The apocryphal work called the Gospel of Nicodemus or the Acts of Pilate has a passage which runs: ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, the resurrection and the life of the world, give us grace that we may tell of thy resurrection and of thy marvellous works, which thou didst in Hades. We, then, were in Hades together with all them that have fallen asleep since the beginning. And at the hour of midnight there rose upon those dark places as it were the light of the sun, and shined, and all we were enlightened and beheld one another. And straightway our father Abraham, together with the patriarchs and the prophets, were at once filled with joy and said to one another: “This light cometh of the great lightening.”’ The dead saw Jesus and were given the chance to believe and to repent; and at that sight Abraham rejoiced.
To us these ideas are strange; to the Jews they were quite normal, for they believed that Abraham had already seen the day when the Messiah would come.
The Jews, although they knew better, chose to take this literally. ‘How’, they demanded, ‘can you have seen Abraham when you are not yet fifty?’ Why fifty? That was the age at which the Levites retired from their service (Numbers 4:3). The Jews were saying to Jesus: ‘You are a young man, still in the prime of life, not even old enough to retire from service. How can you possibly have seen Abraham? This is mad talk.’ It was then that Jesus made that most staggering statement: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ We must note carefully that Jesus did not say: ‘Before Abraham was, I was,’ but, ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ Here is the claim that Jesus is timeless. There never was a time when he came into being; there never will be a time when he is not in being.
What did he mean? Obviously he did not mean that he, the human figure Jesus, had always existed. We know that Jesus was born into this world at Bethlehem; there is more than that here. Think of it this way. There is only one person in the universe who is timeless; and that one person is God. What Jesus is saying here is nothing less than that the life in him is the life of God; he is saying, as the writer of the Hebrews put it more simply, that he is the same yesterday, today and forever. In Jesus, we see not simply a man who came and lived and died; we see the timeless God, who was the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, who was before time and who will be after time, who always is. In Jesus, the eternal God showed himself to men and women.
LIGHT FOR THE BLIND EYES
John 9:1–5
As Jesus was passing by, he saw a man who was blind from the day of his birth. ‘Rabbi,’ his disciples said to him, ‘who was it who sinned that he was born blind – this man or his parents?’ ‘It was neither he nor his parents who sinned,’ answered Jesus, ‘but it happened that in him there might be a demonstration of what God can do. We must do the works of him who sent me while day lasts; the night is coming when no man is able to work. So long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’
THIS is the only miracle in the gospels in which the sufferer is said to have been afflicted from his birth. In Acts, we twice hear of people who had been helpless from their birth (the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple in Acts 3:2, and the cripple at Lystra in Acts 14:8), but this is the only man in the gospel story who had been so afflicted. He must have been a well-known character, for the disciples knew all about him.
When they saw him, they used the opportunity to put to Jesus a problem with which Jewish thought had always been deeply concerned, and which is still a problem. The Jews connected suffering and sin. They worked on the assumption that wherever there was suffering, somewhere there was sin. So they asked Jesus their question. ‘This man’, they said, ‘is blind. Is his blindness due to his own sin, or to the sin of his parents?’
How could the blindness possibly be due to his own sin, when he had been blind from his birth? To that question, the Jewish theologians gave two answers.
(1) Some of them had the strange notion of pre-natal sin. They actually believed that it was possible to begin to sin while still in the womb. In the imaginary conversations between Antoninus and Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, Antoninus asks: ‘From what time does the evil influence bear sway over a man, from the formation of the embryo in the womb or from the moment of birth?’ The Rabbi first answered: ‘From the formation of the embryo.’ Antoninus disagreed and convinced Judah by his arguments, for Judah admitted that, if the evil impulse began with the formation of the embryo, then the child would kick in the womb and break his way out. Judah found a text to support this view. He took the saying in Genesis 4:7: ‘Sin is lurking at the door.’ And he put the meaning into it that sin awaited human life at the door of the womb, as soon as a child was born. But the argument does show us that the idea of pre-natal sin was known.
(2) In the time of Jesus, the Jews believed in the preexistence of the soul. They really got that idea from Plato and the Greeks. They believed that all souls existed before the creation of the world in the garden of Eden, or that they were in the seventh heaven, or in a certain chamber, waiting to enter into a body. The Greeks had believed that such souls were good, and that it was the entry into the body which contaminated them; but there were certain Jews who believed that these souls were already good and bad. The writer of The Book of Wisdom says: ‘As a child I was naturally gifted, and a good soul fell to my lot’ (Wisdom 8:19).
In the time of Jesus, certain Jews did believe that a person’s affliction, even if it was from birth, might come from sin that had been committed before that person was born. It is a strange idea, and it may seem to us almost fantastic; but at its heart lies the idea of a sin-infected universe.
The alternative was that this man’s affliction was due to the sin of his parents. The idea that children inherit the consequences of their parents’ sin is woven into the thought of the Old Testament. ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation’ (Exodus 20:5; cf. Exodus 34:7; Numbers 14:18). Of the wicked man, the psalmist says: ‘May the iniquity of his father be remembered before the Lord, and do not let the sin of his mother be blotted out’ (Psalm 109:14). Isaiah talks about their iniquities and ‘their ancestors’ iniquities’, and goes on to say: ‘I will measure into their laps full payment for their actions’ (Isaiah 65:7). One of the keynotes of the Old Testament is that the sins of the parents are always visited upon the children. It must never be forgotten that we do not live in isolation from others and we do not die in isolation from others. When we sin, we set in motion a train of consequences which has no end.
LIGHT FOR THE BLIND EYES
John 9:1–5 (contd)
IN this passage, there are two great eternal principles.
(1) Jesus does not try to follow up or to explain the connection of sin and suffering. He says that this man’s affliction came to him to give an opportunity of showing what God can do. There are two senses in which that is true.
(a) For John, the miracles are always a sign of the glory and the power of God. The writers of the other gospels had a different point of view, and regarded them as a demonstration of the compassion of Jesus. When Jesus looked on the hungry crowd he had compassion on them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd (Mark 6:34). When the leper came with his desperate request for cleansing, Jesus was moved with pity (Mark 1:41). It is often urged that in this the Fourth Gospel is quite different from the others. Surely there is no real contradiction here. It is simply two ways of looking at the same thing.
