Faith in Christ does not come from the world. It is not given by the human senses. It is not a gift from any created source. It cannot be turned on and off at will. “It is a Light that no darkness can ever overpower” (Jo. 1: 5). Before it demons and human accusers fall silent. Thus, before the height of Christ’s full and final revelation of His Divine origin in this chapter eight of St. John’s Gospel, this accomplished story teller introduces an incident known as ‘the case of the adulterous woman’.

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple; all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her”. And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord”. And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again”. (John 8: 1: 11).

          “From His fulness we have all received” wrote St. John in his first chapter, “grace upon grace” (Jo. 1: 16). And here is one of those myriads of incidents in which this divine revelation had been made manifest in a potentially hopeless situation.

          Since the main sin of the accusers was one of character assassination, we may confidently assume that Our Blessed Lord extended the dispensing of His fulness of grace to the accusers of the woman by writing on the ground the names of the accusers and the women with whom they had had an adulterous affair. To show that, although their sins were secret and went apparently unpunished, they were still known to God ... Meaning that, if in their brazen audacity they would have carried out their implied threat of stoning the woman, Our Lord could have called them aside to prove that they too ought to be stoned. So, when they saw the danger in which they found themselves, they made the wise decision of leaving the scene of this kangaroo court.

          “Known only to God!” How did this man from Galilee know what had happened in secret in Jerusalem in so many dark hours of so many equally dark nights? The logical answer was of course that He was what He claimed to be: the Prophet. Was there any more to it? Old Testament prophets had shown that they knew about secret sins through a revelation by Almighty God. It had proved to be dangerous knowledge, for they had been killed for possessing it, while the sinners had escaped being stoned. The inference of these facts of Jewish history was clear ...

          When Jesus spoke to the people again he said:

I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

          Here was their answer: a Light had come into the world that no darkness of sin could dim, let alone extinguish. If they thought that a life of sin was to be pursued for personal happiness and satisfaction, then they were grievously mistaken, for here they were offered its antidote.

          What could they say to this in rebuttal? They could try to reject the claim on the grounds that it was not made by someone else on His behalf, but was made by Himself on His own behalf.

The Pharisees then said to him in reply, “You are bearing witness to yourself; your testimony is not true.” Jesus answered,

“Even if I do bear witness to myself, my testimony is true, for I know where I have come from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for I am not alone, as the one who sent me is with me. In your law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid; I may be testifying on my own behalf but the Father who sent me is my witness too.”

          No matter how far the Jews in the past may have gone astray, it was still common knowledge that their Prophets were sent by God and spoke on His behalf. Because the Jews knew that God stood by His prophets and sealed their message, they wanted to kill those He had sent to them. So Our Lord had said nothing they did not know already. In desperation they then fell back on the most lame-duck question of them all:

They asked him, “Where is your Father?” Jesus answered, “You know neither me nor my Father; if you knew me, you would know my Father also.”

          From time immemorial Jewish genealogies and family trees had been meticulously kept. If a son was known to anyone, his father would be known also. No one had ever asked a prophet: “Where is your father?” And truly, here was Someone of Whom they knew what Nicodemus had said on their behalf: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who comes from God; for no one could perform the signs that you do unless God were with him.”

These words he spoke in the treasury, as he taught in the temple; but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.

          St. John, with his deep understanding of Our Lord’s mind, repeats this sentence “for His hour had not yet come” several times in his Gospel. He is driving home a great truth here. Not only does he reveal that the creating God is completely in charge of His own creation, but he also stresses that He is in total charge of every detail of that creation without the least infringement of personal liberty. We can only understand this if we admit that at the moment of creation in time God had before Him the almost infinite possibilities of human histories, the almost infinite varieties in which His intelligent creatures could act. And that, in creating, He put the stamp of His choice and of His approval on this creation, on this history, our history, guiding the inexhaustible possibilities in which His creatures would act in this history to His final end, and their final destination. For those of good will, this is a consoling truth, but – as will come out next – for those of ill-will and determined unbelief, His end and their destination are equally inevitable ...

Again he said to them, “I go away, and you will seek me, and you will die in your sin; where I am going, you cannot come”.

          Three things are being said here by Our Lord:

• “I go away ...” He knew the evil of their sin and guilt and the final outcome, the final destination, to which it would inevitably lead Him. But He would also say: “I am the Good Shepherd. I lay down My life for My sheep. No one will take it from Me”. And this twist, from all eternity ordained by the creating Father, was totally incomprehensible to His adversaries.
• “and you will seek me”. “I shall be with you a little longer, and then I go to him who sent me; you will seek me and you will not find me; where I am you cannot come”. This word is more difficult to understand. If they killed Him why would they go looking for Him? And when? One thing is made clear by these words: they would not be looking for Him with a sincere heart, because then they would find Him and be with Him where He would be going. Maybe the explanation is found in the next part of Our Blessed Lord's warning:
• “you will die in your sin”. Their final destiny ... The inevitable destination of their part in God’s choice of this creation, this history ... Their looking for Him would not be sincere but would be instigated by their determination to prevent Faith in Him to grow in those who would seek Him with a sincere heart. Before the futility of looking for Him in their unbelief, death would have overtaken them. Dying in their sin would for ever make it impossible to come where He is going. It is a warning for all time ...

Then the Jews said to one another, “Will he kill himself, since he says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?”.

          The hopelessness of their case ...

          Once again the pooling of their collective ignorance, asking one another what He could mean. The common practice of our present-day Modernists.

He said to them,
“You are from below,
I am from above;
you are of this world,
I am not of this world.
I told you already that you will die in your sins.
Yes, you will die in your sins
unless you believe that I am he”.

          What is from below cannot raise itself to the One Who is from above. What is of this world cannot by its own power come to the level of Him Who is not of this world. They who do not believe that Christ is the Messiah sent by God cannot change the course of the history on which the creating God has put His stamp. Cannot, by their own power, change the destiny of unbelief. Are powerless to convert everlasting defeat into everlasting victory ...

So they said to him, “Who are you?”

          How insincere and highly charged this seemingly simple question is here must come out, if we compare it with what was asked of Christ, when He stood bound and bleeding before the Jewish Sanhedrin on the night of His Passion not all that long after this dispute:

“If you are the Christ, tell us”.
But he said to them,
“If I tell you, you will not believe;
and if I ask you, you will not answer.
But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God”. And they all said, “Are you the Son of God, then?”
And he said to them, “You say that I am”.
And they said, “What further testimony do we need? We have heard it ourselves from his own lips”.
(Lk. 22: 67-71).

          St. Matthew added to this:

“You have just heard the blasphemy.
What is your opinion?.”
They answered: “He deserves to die”.
(Mt. 26: 66).

          “He deserves to die ...” To this must be added the following:

“We have a law” the Jews replied, “and according to that law he ought to die, because He claims to be the Son of God.”
(John. 19: 7).

          There is no doubt, then, about the reason why the Jews wanted Christ to die and about the malice that lay behind their seemingly simple question in St. John’s Gospel, chapter 8: “Who are you?”

Jesus said to them, “What I have told you: the Beginning”.

          Here we must take the sharpest possible issue with the Jerusalem bible. Both the original Greek in which St. John’s Gospel was first written and St. Jerome’s Latin translation, the Vulgate, of the whole bible in which this Greek text too has been rendered in Latin, have the sentence in the sense that is used above. Of all the English translations only the Douay version is faithful to the original meaning. All the other ones nullify the omnipotent impact of Christ’s words here, where He declares His equality with God, by translating His assertion: “I am the Beginning” with the emasculated rendering: “What I told you from the outset”.

“What I have told you: the Beginning.”

          The Jerusalem bible has a footnote attached to their translation: “What I have told you from the outset”, in which the authors declare: “The Vulgate translation ‘(I am) the Beginning who speak to you’ is grammatically impossible”. But that is not the only translation. Let us see how “impossible” the correct translation is: “What I have told you, the Beginning”!

“I am the Alpha and the Omega”, says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1: 8).

          This is Jesus speaking here just as at one time He was speaking to the Jews. “I am the Alpha, the beginning, and the Omega”, the end, of all there is. Only God can be both at once in His eternity, even if His Son appears as the Son of Man in time.

And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” ... ...“He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son.” (Rev. 21: 6, 7).

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev. 22: 13).

          These are the only three places in the whole of the bible where the words Alpha and Omega occur. The speaker is Christ and the meaning of His words is crystal clear:

“... says the Lord God ...” “... the Almighty”. “... and I will be his God ...”

          So, when Jesus said to the Jews in answer to their question “Who are you?” that He was “the Beginning”, He declared His Godhead. He explained what He meant when He said “I am from above”. “I am not of this world”, and what the final consequences will be when you die in your sin. The episode before the Sanhedrin as retold above testifies to the fact that they knew His claim. But they were never interested in His answer, neither here nor at His trial. They only wanted to condemn Him from His own words.

          After testifying to Our Lord’s declaration before the Jews that He is the beginning, St. John then continues his description of the acrimony to which the Jewish opposition to Our Lord is rapidly degenerating as follows:

“I have much to say about you and much to judge; but he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.”

          “... He who sent Me ...” and “... from Him ...” These words clearly indicate that Christ is speaking here of another Person different from Himself, but Who, like He Himself, “is the Beginning”, “is from above”, “is not of this world”, and Who, like He Himself, is the final Judge, the final Authority “when you die in your sin”. Here then we have the real distinction between two divine Persons, the Father and the Son, united in the same Godhead. And I repeat here that even now, at this eleventh hour, they could have known and believed what Christ was saying, going by the words Nicodemus had said on their behalf:

“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who comes from God; for no one could perform the signs that you do unless God were with him.”

          So, if this teacher says to them that He is the Beginning, that He is from above, that He is not of this world, that, in fact, He is God, they should have accepted that on the works He was doing ...

          Thus, in his profound knowledge that the unbelieving Jews did not accept Our Lord’s revelation of the Blessed Trinity, St. John then says:

They did not understand that he spoke to them of the Father.

          But they did understand that He spoke to them about their God. Hence their fury when Christ insisted that they should accept His equality with God, and that they should accept that He had much to judge about them .... For in chapter 5 of his Gospel (as we have seen), St. John had already testified to their true understanding of what Our Lord was saying:

This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him,
because He not only broke the sabbath
but also called God his Father,
making himself equal to God.

          So they knew what He was saying.

So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him.”

          “When you have lifted up the Son of Man then you will know that I am He ...” When did the Jews finally come to the realisation that Christ is He? That He is their long-awaited Messiah, the focal point of all the Old Testament prophecies? When, lifted up on His cross, He intoned for them Psalm 22. This is of such great importance, that we will print out Psalm 22 here for our readers. For Jewish listeners one only had to intone a Psalm in order fully to bring to mind its contents:

My God, my God, why have You deserted me?
Why are You so far from helping me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.
Yet You are the Holy One, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In You our fathers put their trust;
they trusted, and You rescued them.
they called to You for help, and they were saved;
in You they trusted, and were not disappointed.

But I am a worm, and no man; scorned by men,
and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me; they jeer at me, they wag their heads;
“He committed his cause to the Lord; let him deliver him,
let Yahweh rescue him, if he is his friend.”

Yet You are the one who took me from the womb;
It was You who entrusted me to my mother’s breasts.
placed on your lap from my birth,
and since my mother bore me You have been my God.
Be not far from me, for trouble is near
and I have no one to help me.

A herd of bulls surround me,
strong bulls of Bashan close in on me;
their mouths are wide open to me,
like ravening and roaring lions.
I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are disjointed;
my heart is like wax, melting in my breast;
my strength is dried up like a potsherd,
my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
You have laid me in the dust of death.
A pack of dogs surround me;
a company of evildoers encircles me;
they have pierced my hands and feet,
I can count all my bones,
when they stare and gloat over me.
They divide my garments among them,
and they cast lots for my tunic.

But You, O Lord, be not far off!
You, my help, hasten to my aid!
Rescue my soul from the sword,
my life from the power of the dog!
Save me from the mouth of the lion,
my afflicted soul from the horns of the wild bulls!

Then shall I proclaim your name to my brothers;
Praise You in full assembly.
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
All you sons of Jacob, glorify him,
all you sons of Israel stand in awe of him!

For he has not despised or disdained the afflicted in his affliction;
has not hidden his face from him,
but has answered him when he called.

From You comes my praise in the Great Assembly;
my vows I will honour in the presence of those who fear him.
The poor will eat and be satisfied;
those who seek the Lord shall praise him.
May your hearts live for ever!

All the ends of the earth will remember
and come back to the Lord;
all the families of the nations will bow down before him.
For Yahweh reigns, the ruler of nations.
Before him all the proud of the earth will bow down;
before him bow all who go down to the dust.
My soul will live for him, my children will serve him;
men will proclaim the Lord to generations still to come,
his righteousness to a people yet unborn.
All of this is his work.

          No wonder, then, after Our Lord had guided those who stood around His crucifixion through king David’s graphic description of this event in Psalm 22, that St. Luke could write a few years later in the Acts of the Apostles:

“... and a large group of priests made their submission to the Faith.” (Acts 6: 7).

          Yes, after they had lifted up the Son of Man, then they knew that He was “He”, and that He would be “He” for ever and ever, and that it would be better to accept His Gift of Faith and submit to Him, than to die in their sin of unbelief.

          St. John then continued from where we left off:

As he said this, many believed in him.

          To the Jews who believed in him Jesus said:

“If you make my word your home
you will indeed be my disciples,
you will know the truth,
and the truth will make you free.”

          “... and the Truth will make you free.” Here we see Our Lord quietly embarking on a new development in this dispute. He fore-knew how the Jews would react to this new ‘twist’ in this whole divine drama, but He was not only addressing the Jews here, but all “who would in time make His words their home.” Like our Modernists, the listening Jews would give to these words an entirely horizontal meaning; a meaning only of this earth.

They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham,
and have never been in bondage to any one.
How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’?”

          Now comes the ‘twist’ referred to above. They had it coming:

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not continue in the house for ever; the son continues for ever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.”

          From ‘sin’ to the ‘father of sin’. Sin does not come from God, their true Father.

They answered him, “Abraham is our father”. Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God; this is not what Abraham did. You do what your father did.”

They said to him, “We were not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.”

Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.”

          “Which of you convicts Me of sin?” They could not! If they could, He would be like them. Here was something that they could verify immediately. If they had found a sin in Him, now was not only the time to bring this out: it would have come out! Since it was not brought up there and then, we can see the emptiness of their next rejoinder, the hopelessness and impossibility of their entrenched position:

The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?.”

Jesus answered, “I have not a demon; but I honour my Father, and you dishonour me. Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it and he will be the judge. Truly, truly, I say to you, if any one keeps my word, he will never see death.”

          There is no escape from this inexorable Logic. The Truth known from the foundation of the world but almost unrecognisable through the distortion of sin. The patience of Our Blessed Lord with sinners. He came down from the Father to make it all clear again against every attempt to keep the discussion on a purely horizontal level divorced from any vertical meaning. How truly are our Modernists and feminists represented here!

The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, as did the prophets; and you say, ‘If any one keeps my word, he will never taste death’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died! Who do you claim to be?”.

          For Jews professing to believe in the resurrection to a life after death, this is indeed a very crude way of comparing death in this life with death in the next. For people who did and even could know the difference, the words of Our Lord did not contain any mystery. Life after death had always been held up and kept alive for the chosen race by the prophets sent by God. So here His Son was not demanding a leap in the dark into totally unknown territory. He treated the whole subject as a matter of fact.

Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say that he is your God. But you do not know him; I know him. If I said, I do not know him, I should be a liar like you; but I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad.”

          What can anyone add to this? They are now confronted with the inevitable conclusion that their father Abraham was on His side, not theirs. The call of father Abraham and God’s selection of the Jewish race born from him was to bring this Redeemer, this Messiah, sent by the Father, into the world, their world, in order to restore the relationship with God.

The Jews then said to him,
“You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham?”.
Jesus said to them,
“I tell you most solemnly, before Abraham ever was, I am”.
So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus withdrew, and left the temple.

          “I am ...” That was the divine Name by which God revealed Himself to Moses in the desert from the burning bush. It was the Name by which Yahweh identified Himself, the Name by which He wished to be known to the Jewish people when He ordered Moses to tell the people Who had sent him:

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you’ and they ask me ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO AM”. And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’.” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’. This is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations”. (Ex. 3: 13-15).

Recapitulation of St John’s Chapter 8

          The Son of God, the testimonies, the witnesses, the evidence, the glory all speaking for Him are placed here in direct contrast against the brood of Satan, the children of their father the devil, with their testimonies, witnesses and evidence in defence of a most profound darkness of mind without a shred of glory.

          From a sublime yet simple beginning that Christ is the Light of the world, the impenetrable darkness of the Jewish leaders and their adherents was bound to come out. It showed up, as it did before, in their obstinate penchant of taking everything exclusively in a horizontal sense, the value of this world, with its pseudo-power and surrogate happiness. And once brought to light, the severe warning of ‘dying in their sin’ was sounded by Christ. One could almost hear them say with Pilate at this stage: “Sin? What is sin?” in their next question: “Who are you?” And with a totally unexpected ‘twist’ of the Divine Mind, the whole question of whose side Abraham was on was sprung upon them with this remark of Our Lord: “The truth (Truth) will set you free”. And with this the supreme question of “their sin” and “being in the slavery of sin” and “whose side Abraham was on” became developed in such an inexorable way, that the “spiritually illegitimate children of Abraham” picked up stones to throw at the One who was the Creator of Abraham and whose day Abraham had been privileged to see to his great delight.

          For the whole of the human race it was a most consoling day on which, out of the evil of this display of unbelief, was drawn by God the tremendous good that Jews and Gentiles were here confronted by the same Reality that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. Over all those separating centuries the chosen race had lived in the understanding that the Redeemer, the Messiah, would be so close to God that it really could be said that God had come to the rescue of His people. But not even with the greatest flight of fancy was it possible to ascertain that the Messiah would be God. That the “suffering servant” of Isaiah would be God Himself. And here it was revealed that the One Who spoke to Moses from the burning bush was the same One Who now spoke to them here and now. Who spoke about His fate that they would lift Him up to indicate by what death He would give glory to the Father.

          However, the tremendous grace of believing in Him was not wasted on all the Jews.