The words that John quotes as coming from Jesus are like a concentrate that we must reconstitiute.

Wednesday, 4/20/16

The sixteen lines of today’s Gospel are like the whole of John’s Gospel in concentrated form. It would take some deep thought and some help along the way to reconstitute it, to  make it understandable for simple folk. Let’s see what sense we can make of some of the assertions that John attributed to Jesus.

“Whoever believes in me believes not only in me, but also in the one who sent me.”

There Jesus was speaking to people back then. They walked with him and looked upon him. He was telling them that their believe in him should move them to believe and accept the world’s invisible Creator.

Perhaps I should not openly admit to this, but I am having the opposite problem.

Looking out at the endless, orderly universe, and looking inward at the micro-orderly universe with me, I have no difficulty in believing in its creator. Rather, I need the gift of Faith to believe completely in the man Jesus who came into the world and left it twenty-one hundred years ago.

Then, John here quotes Jesus as saying, “Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words, the words that I spoke will condemn him on the last day.”

What I take John as quoting Jesus to be saying there is that if I should weigh all that the Bible quotes Jesus as saying, adding to that what Jesus says to me in prayer, those words would condemn me if I didn’t accept him. As Peter said,  “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”