The Gospel for Monday, February 9, 2004
John 7:37-52
On the last day, the great day of the festival, Jesus stood and cried out: ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me! Let anyone who believes in me come and drink! As scripture says, “From his heart shall flow streams of living water.” ’ He was speaking of the Spirit which those who believed in him were to receive; for there was no Spirit as yet because Jesus had not yet been glorified. Some of the crowd who had been listening said, ‘He is indeed the prophet,’ and some said, ‘He is the Christ,’ but others said, ‘Would the Christ come from Galilee? Does not scripture say that the Christ must be descended from David and come from Bethlehem, the village where David was?’ So the people could not agree about him. Some wanted to arrest him, but no one actually laid a hand on him. The guards went back to the chief priests and Pharisees who said to them, ‘Why haven’t you brought him?’ The guards replied, ‘No one has ever spoken like this man.’ ‘So,’ the Pharisees answered, ‘you, too, have been led astray? Have any of the authorities come to believe in him? Any of the Pharisees? This rabble knows nothing about the Law—they are damned.’ One of them, Nicodemus—the same man who had come to Jesus earlier—said to them, ‘But surely our Law does not allow us to pass judgement on anyone without first giving him a hearing and discovering what he is doing?’ To this they answered, ‘Are you a Galilean too? Go into the matter, and see for yourself: prophets do not arise in Galilee.’ -- The New Jerusalem Bible. 1995, c1985. Doubleday: Garden City, N.Y.
A Study
The theme of a Jesus who acts like he is God, or from God, is reiterated in Jesus' "living water" speech. Again, some are convinced that this is The One, while others, thinking that he is not descended from David or born in Bethlehem, are convinced that he cannot be. Is there a repeated subtle message here -- that our hearts and minds must be allowed to override that which has been "preached into us" by religious leadership?
The chief priests and some Pharisees are far beyond any doubt in their self-derived conviction. But arrogance in any context is still arrogance. Their own scripture condemned it. From the Wisdom Literature we have Proverbs 16:5:
"All those who are arrogant are an abomination to the Lord; be assured, they will not go unpunished." (NRSV)
The Hebrew Bible is specific about the rule of Life that God demands from all. Here, from Micah 6:8:
"He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?" (NRSV)
Faced with resistance from the temple guards, who returned empty-handed after being sent to arrest Jesus, the chief priests believe that the "rabble" who don't know the Law as they, the priests do, are too easily led astray. But then Nicodemus, one of their own, also reminds them of their own laws about justice and judgement. Rene Kieffer, in the Oxford Bible Commentary, points out that the chief priests could, by splitting hairs, righteously proclaim that no scripture could be found saying tht a prophet will arise in Galilee, despite the evidence of their own Hebrew Bible that Jonah was from there.
They have rejected Nicodemus' call to justice. Their actions depict people far removed from humility, and a keen observer of this account could hardly report "kindness" as even a subliminal tendency.
This whole setup is reminiscent of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. Jesus appears to be doing almost every possible thing he can do to taunt the chief priests and their allied Pharisees. They are presented with opportunities at every turn to back down and listen to reason, but he provokes them again at each step. He is obviously ready for the workup to the final showdown to begin.
A Reflection
Even cheap paperback novels don't drum a point of plot this hard. There's something more that these four Gospel authors -- and their Inspirer -- are trying to tell us, across the millenia. It would be too easy to chalk up their repeating themes of "those evil chief priests and Pharisees" to some sort of literary naivete -- and pretty naive on our part, too!
Think about this: the next six months of Jesus' mission on earth are compressed into ten chapters in John. These were heady days for Jesus. He was truly about his Father's business. The few episodes we have related to us in John in those ten chapters must be only highlights. There were likely a hundred more just as remarkable, every day, and we have only these few to examine, to study.
And yet the spotlight repeatedly shifts back to the corruption of the priests and their cronies, and yes, even the corruption of the understanding of the Law. When given the opportunity, Jesus uses the abuses of the Law to make the point that humans become slaves to their own creations and to each other through the Law, and that being righteous is not what the Father wants. Recall that the Father re-started His creation with Noah, "a righteous man."
Jesus is using these episodes to remind us to worship the Creator, not our creations. He wants us to love God and love each other. He wants us to remember that love is a verb: more action than words, and that ritual obedience to a code of conduct is not love, but mindless self-preservation.
What does God want from us? "Not your sacrifices -- your hearts."
6:02:29 AM 
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