Who is This Man?
At that point some of the people of Jerusalem began to ask, “Isn’t this the man they are trying to kill? Here he is, speaking publicly, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities concluded that he is the Christ? But we know where this man is from; when the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.” Then Jesus, still teaching in the temple courts, cried out, “Yes, you know me, and you know where I came from. I am not here on my own, but he who sent me is true. You do not know him, but I know him and he sent me.” At this point they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his time had not yet come John 7:25-30
The setting is the Feast of Tabernacles (7:2). This will be the last of Israel’s great feasts Jesus attends before the fateful Passover when He will be crucified.
The reaction to Jesus is mixed. Many are wondering if He might be the long-awaited Messiah, particularly because the temple authorities continue to let Him preach in the temple grounds. Have they changed their minds about Him?
But in a typical misunderstanding they say it’s difficult to see Him as the Messiah because they know where He came from, whereas if He was the real Messiah, no one would know. There was a common belief at this time that the Messiah would not be known until he was revealed in glory. This was despite the biblical evidence that he would be in the lineage of David and be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). Jesus was commonly thought to have been born in Nazareth (1:45; 8:5,7) when He really was born in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:4-6).
‘Then Jesus, still teaching in the temple courts, cried out.’ In effect He says, ’You think you know me, where I come from and so you think I can’t be the Messiah.’ We could easily imagine that at this point He’s going to insist He is the Messiah and that they don’t really know where He’s come from. But as He so often does, Jesus goes deeper than His hearers expected.
Instead of saying, as we might have thought, ‘But you don’t know where I really came from,’ meaning from God, He turns the question round. There’s something they don’t know, but it’s not about Him. It’s about God. They think they know God but aren’t sure if Jesus came from God. Jesus turns the tables right way up. The real problem is that they don’t know God so how could they ever know if the Jesus they’re seeing is the image of the true God?
Jesus’ claim must have seemed like blasphemy to them because ‘they tried to seize him.’ From one perspective they couldn’t arrest Him because of His popular support; but from another, the real reason was ‘because his time had not yet come,’ the hour of His death, burial and resurrection (2:4; 8:20; 12:23,27;13:1; 16:32; 17:1).
People continue to look at their world and come to faulty conclusions about God. We start with Jesus. We can only understand our God and our world when we see the real Jesus. Rightly or wrongly, this has become just as needful today in the church as outside it.
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