The Holy Martyr Pelagia
Acts 12:25-13:12; John 8:51-59
Read John 8:51-59
Christ is risen! Truly, He is risen!
“Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM.”
Christ unequivocally asserts His divinity in today’s reading. We hear one of four “I AM” statements of Jesus in John’s Gospel that does not include a predicate. He does not say “I am such-and-such,” but rather He simply says: “I AM” – God’s own divine name revealed in the Old Testament (see Exodus 3:14, Isaiah 43:25, and Isaiah 45:18).
When the Jews converse with Jesus, they see a man. When they hear Him claim to be God, they cannot possibly understand His words to be anything other than the greatest blasphemy deserving of death. Enlightened by faith, we see through the mystery of the Incarnation that Christ is fully God and fully man, but the Jews in today’s passage did not recognize His divinity.
Today’s passage shows the desire to find out who exactly Jesus is. The Jews could not believe Jesus’ claim that all who keep His word will never see death because even the patriarch Abraham died, and they could not fathom that Jesus could be greater than Abraham. Christ does not glorify Himself above Abraham but answers them saying that it is God His Father Who glorifies Him. Their understanding of death was limited to bodily death, but we know that Christ spoke not only of the death of the body but also the death of the soul. Christ offers life abundantly to those who will freely accept Him, the Eternal Word.