“I and
the Father are One”
At the height of
his speech, Jesus sublimely announces: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
Again, stones are seized, as the Jews instantly recognize a self- deifying
claim. Many commentators are quick to point out that, in context, Jesus does
not say that he is ontologically one with God. Jesus and God share a divine
prerogative (the eternal protection of the elect). Thus the unity that Jesus
speaks of is a functional one. It is doubtful, however, whether the Jews— or
John’s original readers— were aware of the distinction between functional and
ontological unity. If they were, it is unclear how much weight it would have
had. Yet whether Jesus claimed ontological or functional oneness with God, he
still claimed (in some fashion) to be God.
The irony of the
situation is that Jesus claims to be God in the very temple that Antiochus
Epiphanes was thought to deify himself— on the very holiday when the Jews
celebrated his overthrow. Jesus’s rhetorical attempt to make himself God thus
replays the archetypal sin of the Greek king— with a strikingly different
outcome.
With rocks aimed
at him, Jesus is in evident danger. This time, he holds his ground, and asks a
(frankly, loaded) question: “Many excellent works I showed you from the Father.
For which of these works do you stone me?” (John 10:32). The question assumes
that the Jews thought that Jesus’s works were excellent. They did not.
To his opponents,
Jesus’s question seems ludicrous because his works, done on the Sabbath,
involved flagrant disobedience to God. The Jews set the record straight: “We do
not stone you for a work of excellence, but for blasphemy; because you, a human
being, make yourself a god (poieis seauton theon)” (John 10:33).
Whatever good works Jesus had accomplished, he was still a rebel against God.
Any human who proclaimed himself to be a god (or God) was liable to execution,
regardless of what miracles he had performed.
To defuse the
threat, Jesus deploys an argument the reader now finds familiar. He denies that
he deifies himself on the grounds that Yahweh sanctified and sent him. Yet if
Jesus and Yahweh are truly “one” (as Jesus claimed), the distinction between
sender and sent is fragile. Moreover, Jesus will later say in prayer to God
that it was Jesus himself who sanctified himself (John 17:19). (M. David Litwa,
Desiring Divinity: Self-deification in Early Jewish and Christian Mythmaking
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 84-85)
