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THE TREMENDOUS CLAIM

John 8:56–9

‘Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it and was glad.’ The Jews said to him: ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them: ‘This is the truth I tell you – before Abraham was, I am.’ So they lifted stones to throw them at him, but Jesus slipped out of their sight, and went out of the Temple precincts.

ALL the previous lightning flashes pale into significance before the blaze of this passage. When Jesus said to the Jews that Abraham rejoiced to see his day, he was talking in terms that they could understand. The Jews had many beliefs about Abraham which would enable them to see what Jesus was implying. There were altogether five different ways in which they would interpret this passage.

(a) Abraham was living in Paradise and able to see what was happening on earth. Jesus used that idea in the Parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:22–31). That is the simplest way to interpret this saying.

(b) But that is not the correct interpretation. Jesus said Abraham rejoiced to see my day, the past tense. The Jews interpreted many passages of Scripture in a way that explains this. They took the great promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: ‘In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’, and said that when that promise was made, Abraham knew that it meant that the Messiah of God was to come from his line and rejoiced at the magnificence of the promise.

(c) Some of the Rabbis held that in Genesis 15:8–21 Abraham was given a vision of the whole future of the nation of Israel and therefore had a vision beforehand of the time when the Messiah would come.

(d) Some of the Rabbis took Genesis 17:17, which tells how Abraham laughed when he heard that a son would be born to him, not as a laugh of unbelief, but as a laugh of sheer joy that from him the Messiah would come.

(e) Some of the Rabbis had a fanciful interpretation of Genesis 24:1. There the Revised Standard Version has it that Abraham was ‘well advanced in years’. The margin of the Authorized Version tells us that the Hebrew literally means that Abraham had ‘gone into days’. Some of the Rabbis held that to mean that in a vision given by God Abraham had entered into the days which lay ahead and had seen the whole history of the people and the coming of the Messiah.

From all this, we see clearly that the Jews did believe that somehow Abraham, while he was still alive, had a vision of the history of Israel and the coming of the Messiah. So, when Jesus said that Abraham had seen his day, he was making a deliberate claim that he was the Messiah. He was really saying: ‘I am the Messiah Abraham saw in his vision.’

Immediately Jesus goes on to say of Abraham: ‘He saw it [my day] and was glad.’ Some of the early Christians had a very fanciful interpretation of that. In 1 Peter 3:18–22 and 4:6, we have the two passages which are the basis of that doctrine which became imbedded in the creed in the phrase ‘He 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.