Biblion Bible Commentary
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I and the Father Are One
John 10:32-42
32 Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of those works do you stone me?” · WEB
Charged with making himself God, he argues from a psalm and then declines to withdraw anything.
"I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of those works do you stone me?" John 10:32.
The question is almost gentle and it is exact. Stones are in their hands, and he asks them to name the offense — putting the deeds in the dock rather than the sentence, which forces them to say what the real charge is.
"We don't stone you for a good work, but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God" John 10:33.
They say it. This is the clearest statement in the Gospels of what his hearers understood him to be claiming, and it is made by hostile witnesses who had every reason to understate it.
The writer does not correct them. In this book he steps in whenever something is misunderstood — he spoke of the temple of his body John 2:21, he said this about the Spirit John 7:39 — and here the charge stands unamended, exactly as it did in chapter five John 5:18.
"Isn't it written in your law, 'I said, you are gods'?" John 10:34 Psalms 82:6.
The reply is a rabbinic argument from lesser to greater, and it needs unpacking. The psalm addresses Israel's judges — men to whom the word of God came — and calls them gods because they exercised a divine function, judging on God's behalf. They then die like men, which is the psalm's point.
The argument runs: if Scripture can use that word of corrupt magistrates merely because God's word came to them, the term is not so absolute that its use is automatically blasphemy. So the charge, as a matter of vocabulary, does not stand on its own.
"And the Scripture can't be broken" John 10:35 is dropped in as an aside, and it is one of the strongest statements about Scripture in the Gospels — made in passing, as a shared premise nobody in the argument would dispute.
"Do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, 'You blaspheme,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?" John 10:36.
The argument is not a retraction, which is how it is sometimes read. He has not said he is a god in the psalm's diluted sense; he has said the Father sanctified and sent him, which is a category the psalm's judges do not occupy. What the argument does is remove their grounds for reaching for stones before he restates the claim.
And he restates it. "Believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in me, and I in the Father" John 10:38 — which says what verse thirty said, in a longer form, to men holding rocks.
"If I don't do the works of my Father, don't believe me" John 10:37. The invitation is remarkable. He offers a test he could fail and tells them to apply it.
They sought again to seize him, and he went out of their hand John 10:39.
He went away again beyond the Jordan into the place where John was baptizing at first, and he stayed there John 10:40.
The public ministry in Jerusalem is over, and it ends where the book began — at the river, in the place where a man once pointed and said behold, the Lamb of God John 1:29.
"John indeed did no sign, but everything that John said about this man is true" John 10:41.
The verdict of the crowd there is the finest epitaph a witness could have. He performed nothing. Everything he said was accurate — and that is what a voice is for.
Many believed in him there John 10:42. Outside the city, in the country, among people with no committee to answer to. The next thing that happens is a message from Bethany about a man who is ill.
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