March 22nd, 2024
How lightly this man evades our questions! His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God, says St Paul, and so little did he cling to it that the three words the crowd waited to hear never escaped him. I am was enough in yesterday’s Gospel; let the hearers, if they listened to Moses, conclude the third.
Yesterday it was Autumn, but now, John tells us, it is Winter and Jesus was in the Temple walking up and down in the Portico of Solomon. The crowd he never fails to attract hides from the wind in the old double cloister, and a question shivers through them: If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. The world is sick; are you the one who is to rise with healing in your wings, or only another egotist who promises much and gives little?
And he answers them with the Psalm: Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, ‘You are gods’’? If, he says, the Scriptures call you gods, how can it be blasphemy if someone consecrated and sent by the Father says that he is the Son of God? He ties the legitimacy of his claim to the greatness of their own, but this greatness eludes them as surely as he himself does when they try to arrest him moments later.
They do not want to see their own hidden greatness—they want a forthright hero to be great on their behalf. But as we know, staring down the humiliating tunnel towards Holy Week, Jesus is not heroic, not as the world counts heroes. This strange and lovely man will not take up arms against Rome; he will not even rise to defend himself against his accusers. My kingdom is not of this world, he will tell Pilate, and in that kingdom—which is within us—we are no longer the vassals of Rome or of Sin or of Death; we are even, St Paul insists, more than conquerors.
The crowd could not hear it that winter day while the wind whipped through Solomon’s Portico, but the dignity Christ raised them to in the words of the Psalm, Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, ‘You are gods’’ is the same dignity John marvels at: My dear people, we are already the children of God . . . we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is. To know Christ truly is to know ourselves truly.
Christian—St Leo will say at Christmas, but how we need the reminder in this last week of Lent—remember your dignity and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member.
Crawford Wiley is a lay clerk of Christ Church, Oxford. In his spare time he is rereading Proust and working to become one of Reba McEntire's top listeners on Spotify.