Read: John 8:12-30
In the Marvel movie, “Doctor Strange”, Dr. Steven Strange journeys to Tibet after a near-fatal car accident to seek healing from a famed mystic known as the, “Ancient One”. When Steven meets the Ancient One, he quickly loses his patience. He’s in a hurry, she’s calm and at ease; he’s angry at the world, she’s at peace; his mind is narrow and focused on material facts, her mind is open to greater realities. In a heated exchange, Dr. Strange shouts, “We are made of mater and nothing more! You’re just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe. You think you see through me, well you don’t. I see through you!” Immediately after saying this, the Ancient One grips Dr. Strange and strikes him in the chest. Terrified, Strange looks on for a moment as his soul floats outside his body.
Scene’s like these are pretty far-fetched, but they give us chills—and for good reason. They illustrate our God-given intuition which tells us there is more beyond the neurons firing in our brains; something bigger and ‘realer’ than our skin and bone. We see this same tension at play between Jesus and the pharisees in John 8:12-13, only Jesus describes their thoughts as being of “flesh” and His as being of “the Father”.
Again and again in this passage Jesus refers to His words and authority as coming from the Father, and again and again the pharisees don’t understand. They act like Jesus is speaking another language, and in some ways He is. For language to be understandable, there needs to be some level of a common experience about the things being talked about; in this case, the common experience of knowing the Father. After all, these are Israel’s religious elites; if anyone should have the mysteries of the Father revealed to them it’s the pharisees. But Jesus reveals that their thoughts are all reasoned without any divine understanding; they “judge according to the flesh”.
I imagine if you were to have a conversation with a pharisee, you would walk away saying to yourself, even if you disagreed, “he makes a reasonable point. You have to admire how real he is about spirituality”. You might actually feel refreshed by how practical and ‘down-to-earth’ their views on religion are. But Jesus is not impressed by practical reasoning and water-tight logic. He knows the limits of human reasoning, and knows you cannot claim real understanding of anything without first being taught by the Father. It’s this kind of deep, heaven-rooted knowledge Jesus calls the “light of life”. An intimate relationship with the Father was not just one of Jesus’ unique quirks. He came to give us the same access to divine knowledge that He has, that is, an understanding truer than the flesh can afford.
The obvious question now is how do we access this understanding? How do we hear the voice of the Father speaking to us? It’s not just through Scripture reading; the pharisees believed that and made it their life’s goal to obey Scripture, and still Jesus told them they’d missed the point. What Jesus is talking about is a divine intuition, a life from within, a discernment of the will of God whether or not there’s a bible handy.
Read verse 12 again and meditate on it. Can your belief in Christ be boiled down to human reasoning? Or is it a product of living out of the “light of life”? The reality of our faith is not that it’s a more water-tight religious system than the next, but that we are following the One who knows the truth better than we ever could.
