Week 11 Post

This week's readings consisted of John's Gospel in the Common English Bible. I first want to complement the Common English Bible for its simplicity and depth. It is very easy to read and it is organized very well.

As I read on through John's Gospel, a couple stories caught my eye. The first was on page 166, titled: Feeding of the Five Thousand. This passage comes just before the famous passage where Jesus walks on water, and alike many stories in this Gospel, we see Jesus performing miracles and displaying his divinity. There was a large crowd approaching Jesus and he asks, "where will we buy food to feed these people?" Jesus then has the people sit down. He took the bread, gave thanks, and he distributed it to those sitting there. He did the same with fish and all the five thousand were fed, with leftovers. Jesus' changing of five loaves of bread and two fish into a plentiful amount of food, enough to feed 5,000 and have leftovers, shows his true divinity. Because he is able to do such a miraculous act, the people's response is how we could imagine. They say, "this is truly the prophet who is coming into the world." This passage in particular characterizes Jesus in a divine nature. This passage goes well with this course because we have been discussing the characterization of Jesus for weeks.

The next passage that caught my eye was called The Pharisees Test Jesus. Before even reading this passage I thought to myself, what are they going to do? How is he going to respond? These questions were answered after reading further. The Pharisees bring a guilty woman to Jesus in efforts of getting a reason to bring an accusation against him. Jesus flips the situation on end and tells the Pharisees that whoever has not sinned before, can follow through with stoning this woman. Because everyone had indeed committed a sin, of different levels obviously, no one stayed to throw any stones. Jesus then tells the woman to not sin from now on, showing is sympathy for those who get caught in sin either by accident or because they are "lost."

These two passages give us great detail of Jesus' implications. He is characterized in the first one as a divine human, and in the second, as a sympathetic man. These two passages go well with what we have doing with our analysis of Gospel pericopes. The question, is Jesus more divine or human, makes me think, and as I look at these passages from the Gospel, it is evident that Jesus is either divine, human, or both in all of these stories, proving that he has a relationship with God, and is His son.