8:48 Since the Jews could not refute Jesus' challenge they resorted to verbal abuse (cf. 7:52). Perhaps they called Him a Samaritan because He had questioned their ties to Abraham. This may have been a Samaritan attack against the Jews as well.319Perhaps they also said this because He took a lax view of the tenets of Judaism as they understood them. This is the only record of this charge in the Gospels. However, there are several other instances of the Jews' claiming that Jesus was demon possessed (cf. 7:20; 8:52; 10:20). Perhaps these superficial believers concluded that only a demon possessed heretic would accuse them as Jesus did. Jesus had claimed that their father was the devil, and now they accused Him of being the devil's agent. This charge came after Jesus' repeated statements that He had come from God, and it illustrates the unbelief of these believing Jews (v. 31).
8:49 Jesus soberly denied their charge. His claims resulted from His faithfulness to His Father, not from demonic influence. Jesus' aim was to honor His Father by faithfully carrying out His will. The Jews' goal was to disgrace Jesus. They tried to do this by rejecting the testimony that the Father sent through Him.
8:50 Jesus did not try to justify Himself. He sought the Father's glory, not His own. What others thought of Him was relatively immaterial. God's approval was all that mattered to Him because God, not man, was His judge (cf. 1 Cor. 4:2-5).
8:51 The central purpose of Jesus' mission was not glory for Himself but glory for His Father through salvation for humankind. Jesus' introduction of this strong statement shows its vital importance. Keeping Jesus' word is synonymous with believing on Him (cf. 5:24; 8:24). The death in view is eternal death (cf. 11:25).
"The assurance relates to life which physical death cannot extinguish, and so to the death of the spirit; the believer receives eternal life, i.e., the life of the kingdom of God, over which death has no power and which is destined for resurrection."320
8:52 The Jews interpreted Jesus' statements as referring to physical death. They judged that only a demoniac would claim that His words were more powerful than the revelations that Abraham and the prophets had received and passed on. Tasting death means experiencing death (cf. Heb. 2:9).
8:53 If Jesus' words had the power to prevent death, then Jesus must have been claiming to be greater than anyone who had died. The Jews' question in the Greek text expects a negative answer. Certainly Jesus could not mean that He was greater than these men, could He? Ironically He was. They asked who Jesus was proudly claiming to be (cf. 5:18; 10:33; 19:7).321They missed the point that He had been stressing throughout this discourse and throughout His ministry, namely that He did not exalt Himself at all. He simply did the deeds and said the words that His Father had given Him (vv. 28, 38, 42, 50).
Jesus rarely asserted His deity. He did not promote Himself. Instead He chose to live a godly life before people and let them draw their own conclusions as God gave them understanding (cf. Matt. 16:13-17).
8:54 Jesus then refuted His critics' accusation that He was glorifying Himself. Any glory apart from glory that God bestows amounts to nothing (cf. Heb. 5:5). Rather Jesus said that it was the Father who was glorifying Him. Ironically His critics, who claimed to know God, failed to perceive that this was what God was doing.
"Their relation to God was formal; his was familial."322
8:55 Jesus next identified these superficial believers as unbelievers. They had not yet come to believe that He was God even though some of them thought that He was a crazy prophet. For Jesus to deny knowing God would be as much a lie as His critic's claim to know God was. The proof that Jesus really did know God was His obedience to Him.
Jesus knew (Gr. oida) God inherently and intuitively, but His critics did not know (Gr. ginosko) God by experience or observation. We should not put too much emphasis on the differences between these two Greek words though, since John often used synonyms without much distinction.323
8:56 Jesus was, of course, referring to Abraham as the physical ancestor of His hearers, not their spiritual father. The occasion of Abraham's rejoicing to which Jesus referred is unclear. The commentators have suggested various incidents in his life that Moses recorded (i.e., Gen. 12:2-3; 15:17-21; 17:17; 21:6; 22:5, 8). I think the most likely possibility is Genesis 12:3, the prediction that God would bless the whole world through Abraham. In any case Jesus said that Abraham anticipated His day. Jesus was claiming that He fulfilled what Abraham looked forward to. We need to be careful not to read back into Abraham's understanding of the future what we know from revelation that God gave after Abraham died. Clearly Abraham did know that his seed would become the channel of God's blessing to the entire world.324
8:57 The Jews did not understand Jesus' meaning because they disregarded the possibility of His deity. To them it seemed ludicrous that Abraham could have seen Jesus' day in any sense since millennia separated the two men. Evidently they chose 50 years old as a round number symbolic of the end of an active life (cf. Num. 4:3). Jesus was obviously not that old since He began His public ministry when He was about 30 (Luke 3:23), and it only lasted about three and a half years.325
8:58 This was the third and last of Jesus' solemn pronouncements in this discourse (cf. vv. 34, 51). If Jesus had only wanted to claim that He existed before Abraham, He could have said, "I was."By saying, "I am,"He was not just claiming preexistence but deity (cf. vv. 24, 28; 5:18; Exod. 3:14; Isa. 41:4; 43:13).326
"It is eternity of being and not simply being that has lasted through several centuries that the expression indicates."327
Jesus existed before Abraham came into being (Gr. genesthai).
8:59 The Jews understood that Jesus was claiming to be God. They began to stone Him for making what they considered to be a blasphemous claim (5:18; Lev. 24:16). However, Jesus hid Himself because His hour had not yet come (2:4; 7:6, 8, 30, 44; 8:20; 18:6). Then He departed from the temple. He did not protest or retaliate, another indication of His submission to the Father.
This concludes Jesus' light of the world discourse (vv. 12-59). The Light of the World now symbolically abandoned the Jews by leaving the temple and went out to humanity in general, which the man born blind represents.
