The
Divine Shepherd
“The Jews” confront Jesus and demand a frank answer about his
identity. They suspect that Jesus views himself as the Messiah (John 10:24). By
further probing, they discover that he has a much higher view of himself.
Jesus begins the match with the rhetoric of evasion: “I did tell you,
but you do not believe” (John 10:25). Commentators admit that Jesus never told
them that he was the Messiah in so many words. As justification for his
comment, Jesus appeals to the works that he does in the name of his Father
(10:25b). In the previous chapter, Jesus healed a blind man who ends up
worshiping him. The healing is extraordinary, surely, but it does not prove
that Jesus was a god or even the Messiah.
After the blind man is healed, John crafts a story to make the Jewish
leaders appear spiritually blind. They do not accept the healing because it was
done on the Sabbath— once again in (apparently deliberate) violation of divine
Law. From John’s perspective, the Jews are pettifogging legalists who cannot
accept the obvious— that Jesus performed God’s work, and is thus approved by
God. Again, Jesus acts as if he were above the Law, and above Jewish
institutions.
Yet the Jews cannot accept that this single Jew is exempt from God’s
Law, or that God would abrogate his Law so that Jesus would be glorified. These
Jews are neither stupid nor blind; they rigorously protect their own religious
identity based upon Torah observance.
Nevertheless, John’s Jesus attributes the Jews’ unbelief to their
nonelect status: they are not “my sheep” (John 10:26). As before, Jesus employs
the rhetoric of radical alterity. Even more quickly than on previous occasions,
the argument degrades into accusation based upon John’s narrative world of
black and white.
Jesus’s rhetoric is again laced with implicitly divine claims. He
claims to give his sheep eternal life, and to hold them securely. Jesus’s
secure grip on his sheep conforms him to Yahweh, whose hold on the sheep also
cannot be weakened (John 10:28b, 29b). In Deuteronomy, Yahweh already declared,
“there is no one who removes from my hand” (Deut 32:39b). (M.
David Litwa, Desiring Divinity: Self-deification in Early Jewish and
Christian Mythmaking [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 84)
