Jesus Goes To The Feast Of Tabernacles
JESUS GOES TO THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES
JOHN 7:1-13
Are you rushing ahead of God in a friendship? A change of job? An important decision?
The clouds of conflict increasingly overshadow the ministry. Jesus still continues with his offer of life for his own people and for the world. His own people have decided upon his death. Jesus pauses for a while in Galilee. When the Feast of Tabernacles comes round Jesus’ brothers are most anxious that he should go and reveal himself in Judea. For this was one of the great festivals at which there would be present pilgrims from all over the world. But his brothers, who had still not come to faith in him, were arguing with purely human strategy. Galilee, to them, was an unimportant backwater; Judea was where he ought to be if he was to gain acceptance. Let him be venturesome and dazzle men with an open display of power! Jesus is concerned about the divine strategy. The thing that really matters is whether his hour has come. We are no more entitled to try to push him into action.
In the end, after a delay in Galilee, Jesus went up to Jerusalem, not publicly, as he did for the final Passover when the issues had to come to a head, but privately. The people had expected that he would come and there was a great deal of excited informal discussion about him, though largely at a superficial level which failed to wrestle with the challenge of his claims. Clearly, at this juncture there was much uncertainty, influenced by official hostility which muzzled discussion (7:12f.). Both opinions expressed were somewhat nebulous. The discourses which follow show Jesus presenting himself to God’s people as life and light for themselves and for the world, and being rejected (1:4f.,9-13).
Notes 7:2: the festival was held in September or October and was the most popular in the calendar. It was a thanksgiving for harvest (Exodus 23:16) and for the provision which God had made for the people when he led them through the wilderness (Leviticus 23:39-43). To commemorate this the pilgrims erected tents all over Jerusalem and lived in them for eight days. 7:3: “His brothers”—the natural assumption is that they were sons of Joseph and Mary born affer Jesus. 7:8: the apparent difficulty of reconciling this statement with 7:10 seems to have led to a scribal alteration of “not” to “not yet.” But it may be that the word “go up” carries with it the sense of going up to the Father by way of the cross (3:13; 6:62; 20:17). 7:13: “fear of the Jews”—cf. 19:38; 20:19.