John 5:40-47

John 5:40-47     Exploring Unbelief - The Power of Human Glory

Despite the witnesses adduced by Jesus, the Jews still refused to accept Jesus. Jesus’ response was not one of attack and anger, but of sadness. He wished them to have life, but was unable to give them that life because of their own closed minds and hearts. Gripped by the sin of the world, they were unable to break free and open themselves to life.

Why did people continue to close their minds and hearts to Jesus? The question was a continual source of bewilderment to the early Christian community. One conclusion they had reached to explain the lack of faith was the power of peer-acceptance, of needing to belong and fearing to be excluded or discounted – in other words, of human honour. While human honour meant nothing to Jesus, it was a powerful force among the Jews of the Diaspora. Invariably, peer-acceptance is a powerful motivating force in all humanly constructed social, religious and cultural systems.

The comment was not a personal attack, but a theological observation: Jesus reveals the true nature of the God who sent him. Failure to accept Jesus involved failure to recognise and surrender to the God of love.

Whatever the synagogue Jews thought about God, by not recognising in Jesus the purest revelation of God, they were captive to their own projections of the divine. Human growth always involves a continual process of becoming aware of, and learning to lose faith in, the mistaken notions about God developed through experience and absorbed from the surrounding culture.

Human Glory

Jesus' comment on glory/honour gave a sociological explanation of his opponents' failure to open to truth (and would recur at the conclusion of Jesus' public ministry [12.43]). 

In the mind of the Disciple, much of the problem affecting mainstream “Jews” lay with the powerful influence of acceptance and respect from their peers. When both Temple and homeland were destroyed in 70 AD, Jews in the Diaspora faced the real problem of potential disintegration. In their struggle to maintain community identity, they chose to close ranks. Loyalty to the community, and to the traditional practices and attitudes that served to express community identity, became of prime importance. To accept Jesus threatened the familiar tradition. Those Jews who accepted Jesus threatened the community’s cohesion and survival. Doing so brought immediate opposition, condemnation and exclusion. Many Jews who might otherwise have accepted Jesus were afraid to do so because they would be peremptorily rejected. They preferred the security and familiarity of belonging and of mutual loyalty, i.e., “glory from one another”, to integrity.

Christian Jews in the Disciple’s community knew only too well the fierceness of that rejection and the loss of reputation that it brought.

With profound irony, and sadness, the Disciple reflected that the Jewish Scriptures, which their opponents searched in order to find eternal life [verse 39], were precisely what accused them: The one accusing you is Moses, in whom you have placed your trust. 

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