10:22-42 The refusal to believe

March 20, 2021

Read John 10:22-42

The Feast of Dedication was a winter celebration of the temple, held about two months after the Feast of Tabernacles. So this passage follows on closely from the incidents between the two feasts (9:1 - 10:21) and the shepherd theme is still in mind. In John’s gospel this was the last act of Jesus’s public ministry in Jerusalem and the Jews there are still asking, “Are you the Christ?” (24). Their failure to understand and believe Jesus’s signs showed that they were not his sheep (26), for otherwise they would have known him and followed him (27; 10:14-15).

Jesus here applies his earlier observation that sheep follow their shepherd (10:4-5; 8:12). By this relationship of following the good shepherd, his sheep receive eternal life, given to them by Jesus (28) who himself has been given the sheep by the Father (29, 6:37,44). So the Father joins with Jesus in holding them securely (29). This shared commitment is the basis of the startling claim of Jesus, “I and the Father are one” (30), which the Jews again see as blasphemy and deserving of death (31-33; 8:58-59).

Yet if Scripture can use the word gods for mere men (as in the verse Jesus quotes from Psalm 82:6 without explanation), then how much more appropriate it is to use it for the one “whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world” (35-36). The works that Jesus did in his Father’s name pointed to his unity with the Father (25,37-38; 5:36). Yet rather than believe that evidence, they again tried to seize him (39). Four months later they would succeed in that. But for now Jesus went to the countryside (40), where (in contrast to the Jews in Jerusalem) many remembered the witness of John the Baptist and “believed in Jesus” (41-42).