In today’s gospel we would hear Jesus make a bold assertion on his divinity – of the unity of his holy human nature with the one Person of the Word, equal to the Father, and one entity with Him. The religious Jews to whom this assertion was addressed understood it as a blasphemy that, driven in their anger, they wanted to stone Jesus to death.
Same is true with the fathers of our faith who were accused and persecuted because they chose to uphold Jesus’ assertion. Among them was Saint Basil who said, “For two charges at the same time are made in the accusation against me. One, that I separate the Persons, and the other, that I never employ in the plural any of the names appropriate to God but speak in the singular, of one Goodness, one Power, one Godhead, and all the others similarly.”
Oftentimes, we are driven with maddening frustration and anger whenever we could not provide rational explanations or contain feelings, events or phenomena into the limited confines of letters or words, more so, of our intellect. However, Jesus implied, in the preceding lines before this assertion, a different kind of “knowing” in order for us to embrace his divinity. A kind of knowing that stems from deep love of and for God, an unwavering faithfulness to His promise and a generous self-surrender to Him. Just like in the case of Abraham, who according to Pope Paul VI, “rejoiced at the thought of seeing the Day of Christ, the Day of Salvation: he ‘saw it and was glad.’
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