The chapters we read this week take us to the very gates of Jerusalem, to the days right before Jesus’s final week. The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees escalates, but so does His interaction with the people. Some will love Him, some will hate Him. Again, there is no middle ground.
Every time Jesus meets with the Pharisees, He ends up making them really mad. He keeps insisting that they are slaves to sin, and calls them whitewashed tombs, implying that they are long on rules and short on mercy. Then He has the audacity to claim that He is not only The Messiah, but He is also God! When Jesus says in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was born, I am,” He was using the unspoken Name of God, which is a form of the words “I AM” (see also: God’s response to Moses in the burning bush). The Pharisees are outraged. Several times in this week’s reading Jesus heals on the Sabbath. Both Jesus and the Pharisees are tired of this argument by now. They complain, true, but Jesus finally answers, “Look guys, if your son fell in a well on the Sabbath, would you not pull him out?” They have no reply. But they hate him.
Meanwhile, Jesus went around healing the blind, while preaching in parables His disciples couldn’t see the meaning of (which strikes me as hilarious). One of my favorite “healing the blind” stories in found in John chapter 9. A man is born blind, not as a result of his sin, but simply so that God can be glorified in his healing. Everyone has questions about the man and the One who healed him. The formerly-blind-man’s answer: “I do not know whether or not the man who healed me was a sinner. One thing I do know, I once was blind, but now I see!”
Jesus also preached on the kingdom of heaven, the Second Coming of the Messiah, and the need for repentance. Some of His parables explained that Gentiles would be added to the number of believers. This could not have helped his case with the Pharisees.
We see Jesus interacting with a lot of individuals in these chapters. He does less preaching to the crowds (it seems to me) and more one-on-one discussion and healing. He visits Mary and Martha, and poor Martha gets the sad end of the deal for the next two thousand years. Notice, though, that later when their brother Lazarus dies, it is Martha’s great faith that Jesus praises. There is balance in Mary and Martha’s lives.
In the ending chapters, the ones that seem to bounce all over the place, we read the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ head with extremely expensive perfume. Some of the disciples are shocked at the waste, but Jesus recognizes that she has done this in preparation for His death and burial. The disciples still don’t understand anything that is going to happen in the next week, as the Greatest Story unfolds.
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