The Feast of Dedication is early December on our calendar. Everyone in Jerusalem was wearing their winter garb. As Jesus walked in Solomon’s Portico, a bunch of scribes and Pharisees surrounded Jesus and demanded He state plainly whether He was the Messiah.
Jesus said it didn’t matter what He said, because they refused to believe Him. Then He pointed out the one thing they refused to consider: His miracles were clearly consistent with the Covenant. They were commissioned by the Father. These men were incapable of believing those miracles because their hearts were closed; they were not committed to God’s Word but to something else. They couldn’t receive the obvious truth because they didn’t belong to God or to the Messiah.
But the sheep His Father gave Him would always recognize His voice as the voice of God. They belonged to Eternity and no one could take that away from them. More to the point, they belonged to Jesus as the Messiah, a gift from His Father, and no one had authority or power to take them from the Father’s hands.
Then Jesus said flatly that He and the Father were One. Someone listening would have to wonder just what those Jews would have accepted as evidence of that claim. Since Jesus was not one of them, He couldn’t be from the God they knew, but Jesus’ whole point was that they didn’t know Jehovah in the first place. At any rate, they took up stones in preparation for striking Him.
He asked them for which miraculous work were they going to stone Him. They said it was not about the miracles, but what they considered His blasphemy. Specifically, He made Himself out to be God. So using their own rules of logic, He quoted Psalm 82:6 where David quotes God saying that He had made the nation of Israel like gods among the rest of the nations of the earth. He did this by giving them His own Word, but so many had rejected it. It was a psalm of pleading for justice against those who rejected the revelation of God, the same problem Jesus noted with the Pharisees and scribes.
The Scripture cannot be broken, but if the nation breaks away from it, they lose the blessings of the Covenant. How painfully obvious it was they rejected the One whom God sent to them as the Living Word because they didn’t recognize the truth in the first place. Claiming to be a Child of God was the birthright of anyone born under the Covenant in the first place, so why was it a crime for Jesus to claim that honor? If His miracles led people away from the Scriptures, then they rightly rejected Him. But if His miracles were clearly in accordance with the Covenant, then never mind His words. They should believe in the blessings of the Covenant, and thus recognize that the Father was in Him, and He in the Father.
They tried again to seize Him, but it was not His time yet.
