For all of John's "high" Christology―about which more will be discussed in a later post in this series―and his stated purpose to engender eternal life-resulting "faith" in Jesus as Messiah and God's "Son" (John 20:31), the Fourth Gospel is fundamentally a book of division. In the Prologue to the Gospel, the eternal "Word," identified later in 1:14-18 as Jesus Messiah, is said to be the bearer of (eternal) "life" that brought an inextinguishable "light" into the darkness of the world of humanity (John 1:4-5). Indeed, John states that Jesus, the true light, "sheds light" (ho phōtizei) on every person (John 1:9). Despite popular misunderstandings to the effect that this entails the impartation of a sort of an indiscriminate spiritual illumination to every person, this verse instead provides a cryptic foretaste of how John will develop his drama of Jesus' life: Jesus' life had an inherently divisive effect; the "light" dispels the darkness precisely by its ability to reveal a person's character, separating those who are transformed by its rays, and hence "believe" and "live by the truth," from those who love evil and thus flee to the dark shadows so as not to be exposed by its shining on them (John 3:19-21).*
The story of John's "Book of Signs" (John 3-12) is the story of how this principle worked itself out over the course of Jesus' career. This point is adumbrated in the Prologue itself, in shocking fashion. The eternal Word, says John, was "coming" into the very world which owed its very existence to his creative instrumentality (1:9-10b). Nevertheless this world failed to recognize him (1:10c). The term "world" (kosmos) here clearly oscillates between the sense of the created world itself and the "world" of human beings who occupy it, a world notable less for its size and scope than by its fallenness, domination by evil, and need of being "saved" (cf., inter alia, John 3:17).** Considering the fact that John's theological presuppositions include the notion that God had revealed himself notionally to his covenant people of Israel alone―indeed, in Sirach 24 (ca. 180-175 BCE) ben Sira writes that God's personified Wisdom, in the form of the Torah itself (Sirach 24:23), was commanded to "make its tent" (kataskēnōsani [cf. John 1:14!] "in Jacob" (Sirach 24:8)―this lack of recognition is, at first glance, hardly surprising. But matters get trickier very quickly. "He came to his own home" (ta idia, "his own things" [neuter], i.e., the land and cultural heritage of Israel), John says, where one might have expected him to be recognized. Shockingly, however, "his own people" (hoi idioi [masculine], i.e., the people of Israel themselves) did not "accept" (parelabon) him. But some nevertheless did: those who did "receive" (elabon) him, those who "believed in his name (tois pisteuousin eis to onoma)" were given the authority or right (exousia) to become God's children (1:12). Here, in a nutshell, is the story of the response to Jesus, both in John's narrative of his career and in the subsequent centuries to come.
Those of us who have known this verse since childhood are prone to overlook the sheer theological radicalness of what John is saying. Indeed, the Jews, on good "biblical" warrant, considered themselves to be God's children (cf., e.g., Exodus 4:22; Deuteronomy 32:6; Isaiah 44:8; 63:16; Jeremiah 3:4-5, 19; 31:9; Hosea 1:10; Malachi 2:10). And this is precisely what the "Jews" who opposed him*** proudly claimed (while perhaps snidely impugning Jesus' suspect parentage): "We**** have not been born of fornication; we have one Father, God himself" (John 8:41b, trans. JRM). But for John, just as it was for the Paul of Galatians, being the spiritual offspring of Abraham and, hence, a true child of God, was not a simple matter of physical heredity. Those who believe in Jesus and hence are given the right to become God's children are "begotten" (egennēthēsan),***** not of human desires or agency, but by God himself (John 1:13). And paternity, both here in John's Gospel and in his first Epistle, is marked by character rather than mere physical genetics: like father, like son or daughter.
Which brings us back to John 10 and Jesus' shocking claim that his interlocutors didn't believe in him because they weren't his sheep in the first place (John 10:26). In other words, it wasn't simply a matter of them choosing not to believe and follow, but rather of their not being able so to believe. To use Jesus' analogy, being a sheep of the Good Shepherd is not, first and foremost, a matter of human decision, but of being gifted to the Son by the Father (John 10:29).
This notion of divine sovereignty as to who is numbered among Christ's people finds its classic expression in Jesus' Bread of Life discourse in John 6:
Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I tell you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives to me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day" …
Jesus answered them, "Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, 'and they shall all be taught by God' (Isaiah 54:13). Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me" …
"It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is of no benefit. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you are some that do not believe." For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones who did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. And he said, "For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father." (John 6:35-40, 43-45, 63-65, NRSV [alt. JRM])
This is a remarkable text, in that it holds together both poles of a paradox or antinomy which separately are found in numerous places throughout the New Testament: the reality of human responsibility with its imperative to "come" and "believe" in Jesus, and the prevenient, enabling, indeed life-creating sovereignty of God who "draws" (elkō) people, whose subsequent "coming" to Jesus in faith is described as a gift to them by the Father himself (hēi dedomenon autōi ek tou patros).******
But such sovereignty as to who can and will come to Jesus implies that others cannot come. Not surprisingly, this implication is stated explicitly elsewhere in John's narrative. For example, in the passage in John 8 referred to above, after "the Jews'" claim to being children of God, Jesus utters perhaps his most scathing indictment:
Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now I am here. I did not come on my own, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot accept my word. You are of your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in 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? Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God. (John 8:39b-47, NRSV)
But nowhere is this more clear than in the twin Old Testament texts from the Book of Isaiah that mark the climax of John's "Book of Signs:"
Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him. This was to fulfill the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah:
"Lord, who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?" [Isaiah 53:1]
And so they could not believe, because Isaiah also said,
"He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, in order that they might not see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn―and I would heal them." [Isaiah 6:10] (John 12:37-40, NRSV [alt. JRM])
The natural human tendency, echoed in scores of commentaries down through two millennia, is to play down the precise force of these quotations and to soften the "could not believe" (ouk ēdunanto pisteuein) to "did not believe" (which, had John intended that, he would simply have written ouk episteusan). No. According to John, this Jewish unbelief was not simply the manifestation of self-seeking bloody-mindedness on the part of "the Jews." Nor was it an unforeseen or inexplicable tragedy. Rather, the failure of Jesus' "own people" to "receive him" (1:11) was the ineluctable result of their inability to believe, an inability grounded in prophetic oracles in the Hebrew Bible uttered hundreds of years earlier. According to John, their unbelief occurred in order that (hina) Isaiah's word might be "fulfilled" (plērōthēi); their inability to belief occurred because (hoti) Isaiah also said that God blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts in order that (hina) they wouldn't see, or understand, or turn, lest they be healed. In other words, John's language clearly implies that it is not a matter of Jewish unbelief resulting in the fulfillment of Scripture. In fact, it is the other way round: it was the words of Scripture themselves that ultimately guaranteed―indeed one could say effected―the tragic Jewish rejection of Jesus.
Now these are very hard words indeed, but they are not unique in the New Testament. Paul famously spent three chapter wrestling with anguish and pathos over his fellow Jews' unbelief, making the ingenious argument that God's present rejection of his covenant people Israel was neither total nor final, that "all Israel" would ultimately be saved after "the times of the Gentiles" were "fulfilled" in a mysterious inversion of standard salvation-historical expectations (Romans 9-11). Even more significantly, John was not the only New Testament author to point to Isaiah 6:10 to explain Jewish unbelief. The Synoptic triple tradition points to this verse as an explanation for Jesus' purposeful use of parables to keep his opponents in the spiritual dark (Mark 4:12; Matthew 13:34-35; Luke 8:10). And Luke later uses the text to explain Jewish rejection of Paul's proclamation of Jesus and his subsequent turn to the Gentiles (Acts 28:26-27).
Of course, Isaiah 6:9-10 is not a prediction of later Jewish responses to Jesus Messiah. It is a record of God's commissioning of Isaiah to a ministry intended to harden the people. As such the verbs there are imperatives: make their hearts hardened; make their ears dull; close their eyes. The point is that the New Testament writers saw the spiritual obduracy of the people in Isaiah's time as a pattern which would be repeated eschatologically in the ministries of Jesus and his apostle Paul. And this, in keeping with a fundamental biblical axiom, all took place in accordance with the sovereign plan of God.
This, of course, begs the question as to why God planned things so. And, to be clear, we have been given no answer to that question. Nevertheless, wisdom dictates that, to be fair to what the biblical authors wrote, we must make sure not to snap the tension or ease the antinomy caused by the dual affirmations of human responsibility and divine sovereignty with respect to the same actions.******* Indeed, just a few verses later, John refers to "many" of the leaders "believing" in Jesus, albeit with a faith of a shallow, distinctly cowardly sort (John 12:42). People remain free agents, and as such are not constrained psychologically in the choices they make. Hence the "necessity" involved is, in the words of Raymond E. Brown, to be understood "on the plane of salvific history."******** Speaking theologically, certainty and psychological compulsion are not necessarily coordinate.
One final thing. John intriguingly claims that Isaiah "said these things" (tauta eipen, i.e., Isaiah 53:1 and 6:10) quoted in verses 38 and 40 "because he saw Jesus' glory (doxa) and spoke about him" (John 12:41). What he meant by this is a perennial conundrum. Presumably John refers to Isaiah's vision of the divine throne room at his commissioning in Isaiah 6:1-13. Thus many, going back to many Patristic writers, have seen a Trinitarian allusion in the trisagion ("Holy, holy, holy is the LORD almighty" [Isaiah 6:3]), and understood his vision of Christ in that sense.********* I would suggest, however, that another understanding lies closer to hand. In the Prologue, John claims that "we have seen (the incarnate Word's) glory, glory as of the one and only one from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14b). Later he makes the astounding assertion that the hour of the Son's "glorification" was when he was lifted up/exalted on the cross of Calvary in exercise of his role as the promised new Temple (John 12:23). Could it be, then, that John understood Isaiah's Temple vision to be a vision of the crucified Jesus, whose death would be the ultimate means of atonement for the people's sins, including their unbelief, and continues to serve as the basis for the continuing call to belief as the world's savior (John 12:44-46)?**********
*This understanding is best associated with the work of C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: CUP, 1953); followed by, inter alia, James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity (Christianity in the Making, vol. 3; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2015) 641 n.217).
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