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THE FATAL INCOMPREHENSION

John 8:21–30

So he said to them again: ‘I am going away, and you will search for me, and you will die in your sin. You cannot come where I am going.’ So the Jews said: ‘Surely he is not going to kill himself, because he is saying: “You cannot come where I am going”?’ He said to them: ‘You are from below, but I am from above. You belong to this world, but I do not belong to this world. I said to you that you will die in your sins. For if you will not believe that I am who I am, you will die in your sins.’ They said to him: ‘Who are you?’ Jesus said to them: ‘Anything I am saying to you is only the beginning. I have many things to say about you, and many judgments to deliver on you; but he who sent me is true, and I speak to the world what I have heard from him.’ They did not know that it was about the Father that he was speaking to them. So Jesus said to them: ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am who I am, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but that I speak these things as the Father has taught me. And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do the things that are pleasing to him.’ As he said these things, many believed in him.

THIS is one of the passages of argument and debate so characteristic of the Fourth Gospel and so difficult to elucidate and to understand. In it, various strands of argument are all woven together.

Jesus begins by telling his opponents that he is going away; and that, after he is gone, they will realize what they have missed, and will search for him and not find him. This is the true prophetic note. It reminds us of three things. (1) There are certain opportunities which come and which do not return. To each of us is given the opportunity to accept Christ as Saviour and Lord; but that opportunity can be refused and lost. (2) Implicit in this argument is the truth that life and time are limited. It is within an allotted span that we must make our decision for Christ. The time we have to make that decision is limited – and none of us knows what that limit is. There is therefore every reason for making it now. (3) Just because there is opportunity in life, there is also judgment. The greater the opportunity, the more clearly it beckons, the more frequently it comes, the greater the judgment if it is refused or missed. This passage brings us face to face with the glory of our opportunity and with the limitation of time in which to seize it.

When Jesus spoke about going away, he was speaking about his return to his Father and to his glory. That was precisely where his opponents could not follow him, because by their continuous disobedience and their refusal to accept him they had shut themselves off from God. His opponents met his words with a grim and mocking jest. Jesus said that they could not follow where he went; and they suggested that perhaps he was going to kill himself. The point is that, according to Jewish thought, the depths of hell were reserved for those who took their own lives. With a kind of grim blasphemy, they were saying: ‘Maybe he will take his own life; maybe he is on the way to the depths of hell; it is true that we cannot and will not follow him there.’

Jesus said that if they continued to refuse him they would, as the Revised Standard Version translates it, die in their sins. That is a prophetic phrase (cf. Ezekiel 3:18, 18:18). There are two things involved there. (1) The word for sin is hamartia, which originally had to do with shooting and literally means a missing of the target. Those who refuse to accept Jesus as Saviour and Lord have missed the target in life. They die with life unrealized; and they therefore die unfitted to enter into the higher life with God. (2) The essence of sin is that it separates us from God. When Adam, in the old story, committed the first sin, his first instinct was to hide himself from God (Genesis 3:8–10). Those who die in sin die at enmity with God; those who accept Christ already walk with God, and death only opens the way to a closer walk. To refuse Christ is to be a stranger to God; to accept him is to be the friend of God, and in that friendship the fear of death is forever banished.