Encountering the Word
Very truly, I tell you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, and so did the prophets; yet you say, ‘Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? The prophets also died. Who do you claim to be?” Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, he of whom you say, ‘He is our God,’ though you do not know him. But I know him; if I would say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and I keep his word. Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.” Then the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” [Full text: John 8:51-59]
Contemplating the Word
The Gospel writer is playing with time. Long before Einstein arrived at his theory of relativity, and the very nature of time began to be questioned, John recalls that Jesus would speak about time with a degree of fluidity that appeared to be madness to those who listened. Not that Jesus was postulating a scientific theory: he was not. Instead, he was expounding a theological reality: time is nothing to God. We have a tendency to think about God and God’s experience as being somehow similar to ours. We think of God as existing in space in the way we do, as being like us (except more powerful), or as living in much the same way we do (except for a much longer time). This is the way children think of God (an old man with a beard sitting on a cloud who has been there for thousands of years) and many of us, in one way or another, carry this childish view into adulthood. No wonder educated people can have difficulty with people of faith: the way in which we often talk about God is entirely ridiculous!
To have any hope of understanding what Jesus is saying in today’s reading, we need to step outside our narrow concepts of past, present and future, and allow ourselves to contemplate eternity. We cannot focus on developing every aspect of our notion of God here, so let’s just think about God and time. The fundamental thing to understand in this respect is that God does not exist in time. Time is a created reality (i.e. it impacts on creation). God exists in eternity.
Eternity is a state outside time. More precisely, it is a state of being where past, present and future are all present. To God everything that is past and everything that is future is happening now. God has no past and God has no future: all is present to God. When Moses asked God for his name, God replied ‘I am who I am’. That is to say “I exist…in the now” (Exodus 3).
Until we get that point we find much of the different elements of our faith hard to comprehend. For example, we won’t understand death. Death is for each of us a future reality. We don’t know when it will happen but, if you are reading this, it hasn’t happened for you yet.
For God, your death has simultaneously already occurred (the future is present to God) and it will never occur (the past is present to God). That is to say, all are alive to God. God sees us all, from our first ancestors through to our final descendants, and he holds us all in being. Now, re-read today’s Scripture reading: perhaps it will make more sense…
Being the Word
It is significant that Jesus refers to Abraham in today’s Gospel reading. Abraham is a central figure in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Why? This Bronze Age nomadic chieftain stands at the dawn of the divine response to the human plight. Somehow, God managed to break into the consciousness of a man who had never heard of him, and offer him a way forward. God had a plan, and centuries later, not only is his name recalled by Jesus, but we know what he represents too. In spite of impossible odds,
