Recognising Jesus

“My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether this teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.” John 7, 16-18.


The writer of the fourth gospel, whom we know as St. John the Evangelist, faced a central problem as he looked back over the life of Jesus: how was it that some people recognised him for who he was, whereas most did not? Since Jesus was the life of the world, why did most people fail to see that? He states the problem at the start of his gospel: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (Jn 1, 10-11). John had seen something overwhelming and unmistakable in Jesus; as he puts it in his first epistle, “We declare to you … what we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands … the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us” (1 Jn 1, 1-2). Yet most people missed it entirely.

What is involved in knowing Jesus? This question is central to Christianity; if it was a question for John, it remains a question for our time. Most of our contemporaries do not see, in Christ, what we claim to see. For them, Jesus is a great moral teacher, a religious reformer, perhaps a victim of religious bigotry; but not the eternal life of the Father incarnate in our world.

Nor is it a problem just for those who stand outside the church. When Christians talk about ‘knowing Jesus’, what kind of knowing are they talking about? It is not like knowing the person next door, or even ‘knowing’ a figure from history, such as Spinoza or Queen Victoria. It is not a matter of direct physical encounter or biographical information or familiarity with a body of ideas or even theological definition. To know Jesus, as John presents it, is a matter of recognition; of seeing something quite outside the range of our experience which is at the same time familiar, already known, intimately related to who we are and to the direction of our lives.

But where does this recognition come from? John makes this a central issue for Jesus himself. Throughout his gospel, he shows us Jesus talking about knowing and recognising, about how people come to know him for who he is. His meeting with Nicodemus, like his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, is all about recognition: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet do not understand these things?” (Jn 3, 10). John even makes recognition an issue for Pilate, who struggles to decide what it is that he is looking at in this strange prisoner, suddenly brought before him.

In chapter 7 of the gospel the immediate issue is whether or not Jesus is to be recognised as the Messiah. This is the debate that is going on around him, in Galilee and in Jerusalem when Jesus goes up for the Feast of Tabernacles. The question for his followers and for the crowds is ‘how would we know?’ For some the matter is settled by the miracles that Jesus has performed. For others, Jesus’ Messianic status is confirmed by placing him within the prophesied sequence: first will come Elijah, then ‘the (unnamed) prophet’, and then the Messiah himself. If John the Baptist were the prophet, then Jesus must be the Messiah, the chosen one of God.

Jesus rejects both these arguments because they obscure who he really is. If people follow him because of his miracles, they will see him simply as a wonder-worker. If they understand him in terms of traditional Messianic expectation as a national leader, again they will miss the point. In verse after verse Jesus can be seen struggling against these modes of false recognition, against being assimilated to a pre-determined model that will prevent people from recognising his true identity.

But if these approaches are misleading, what is the true one? How can people recognise who he really is? Jesus has an answer, but it may not at first glance seem a very helpful one. Essentially he says that whoever knows the Father will know him too, will know who Jesus is. So he says things like “If God were your Father, you would love me” (Jn 8, 42) and “Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God” (Jn 8, 47). So in order to recognise who Jesus is, we need already to know the Father. But elsewhere in the gospel, Jesus tells us that the way to the Father is through him: “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14, 6). We need to know the Father in order to know Jesus; but we need to know Jesus in order to know the Father. There seems no way into the circle if we find ourselves on the outside of it.

This corresponds, I think, to many people’s experience of faith. To find a way in, it seems as though they must already be at a point that they cannot reach without the faith that they are looking to find. So rather regretfully, like John Humphries in his recent book, they say that they lack ‘the gift of faith’. Faith is fine for people who find themselves within the circle; but from outside, it is hard to see where you begin. By giving assent to a set of dogmatic statements? By trying to live a virtuous life? People are intuitively aware that neither will open the Kingdom of Heaven. They seem fated to hover on the margins.

Can John in his gospel do any better than that? There are two clues, I think, that help to open this self-enclosed circle. One is in verse 17 of our reading. Jesus says, “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.” Those who try to do the will of God will recognise that Jesus comes from God. This recognition arises not from miracles or a study of the Messianic prophecies or a degree in theology, but from something practical, the steady directing of one’s life toward God’s will. The people who know Jesus are those whose living tends toward God. Their recognition is not an intellectual act but the outflow of a whole life: such people will know who Jesus is, and where he has come from.

But how is ‘doing the will of God’ different from doing what most people do, trying to lead a moral life, keeping an eye on the rules? If trying to be good was all that it took to recognise who he was, the Pharisees would have flocked to Jesus; but they didn’t. They were the experts on the will of God, but that did not bring them to Jesus. Something else is involved, and again Jesus provides a clue, in the next verse of this same chapter: “Those who speak on their own seek their own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him” (Jn 7, 18).

There are two kinds of teacher, says Jesus. There is the one who speaks on his own behalf, out of what he himself possesses, out of the learning that he has made his own. And there is the one who knows he possesses nothing, and simply teaches that. The Pharisees are of the first type. They ‘own’ the law, speak from their understanding of it, condemn Jesus for healing a man on the Sabbath. But Jesus is different. As he keeps on insisting, “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me” (Jn 7, 16). Everything that he gives to others is given him by the Father, including his own being. He lives within an economy, not of possession, but of gift. This, Jesus says, is the only way not just to speak the truth, but to be the truth: “the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him.”

What Jesus wants us to recognise in him is his total openness to the Father, an openness so complete that it is impossible for him to set a boundary between the two. Jesus cannot say where his being ends and that of the Father begins. This is why he is so sure that those who know him also know the Father; not because of some moral perfection, but because he cannot separate who he is from the Father who gives him everything that he is.

Well: fine if you are the second person of the Trinity (we might think) but what about us? Let’s go back a step. Jesus directs us to doing the will of his Father. But for Jesus, doing the will of the Father was not any kind of rule-keeping but that mutuality of giving, that borderless exchange of love, that he knew in his life with the Father. So e can start on the way to seeing who Jesus is when we begin to realise that our efforts to do the will of the Father will always fail as long as they remain our efforts, our project, a goodness that we seek to own for ourselves. But Jesus is not about owning, not even the owning of virtue. The eternal life of the Father, the life that Jesus shared, is nothing to be possessed, but pure gift; Jesus knew himself to be living within that gift, that he was that gift. Gifts do not require historical or intellectual credentials; whatever is offered in love is a gift. We recognise Jesus for who he is when we see that he is not defined by any formula but by his total gift of himself, a gift that comes from the heart of the Father and draws us back into that eternal life. Amen.