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Context
March 22, 2023
Isaiah 49:8–15 | Psalm 145:8–19 | John 5:19–29
The 274 words of the Gospel reading from John (5:19-29) really covers a huge amount of material and a lot of the basic fundamentals of Christianity. There is so much articulated in these eleven verses that I thought surely, I can pick something out of there to blog about. Then I began to wonder, why did John cover the relationship of “God, the Father and Jesus, the Son,” notions regarding “judgement,” “honoring the Father and Son,” “anyone who hears my word and believes…has eternal life,” and “the resurrection of life” in these verses? Good question!
It wasn’t until I looked at the beginning of this chapter (John 5:1-18) that I had the “ah-ha” moment, …the context was missing. Jesus had just cured a crippled man on the Sabbath, and this made the Jews extremely angry. He was “not only breaking the Sabbath, but by calling God his own Father, he claimed equality with God” (John 5:18). Now it all made sense and the following passages beginning with verse 19 were really meant to clarify Jesus’ Devine Sonship, declaring that he is one with the Father.
Our days are full of trying to understand things, trying to make sense of things. Unfortunately, in our contemporary society, much of the information we are fed on a daily basis is construed to sway our understandings one way or another by leaving out some of the details, some of the “context”. We tend to form our opinions based only on a part of what we know, part of what we believe, and part of what we understand.
In wrestling with this blog, it was made more clear when I looked at “the bigger picture,” grasping the “context” of today’s reading, that I made good sense of its “content.” It made sense to me why these fundamentals of Christianity appeared in this Gospel where they did. Having “context” is so important as we try to understand things in our daily lives and especially in our understanding of the Bible. Putting things “into context” really does help shed new light, new understanding and discernment.
Roger Cichy
