John 7:20-24 20The crowd answered, “You have a demon! Who is seeking to kill you?” 21Jesus answered and said to them, “I did one work, and you all marvel. 22On account of this, Moses gave you circumcision , not that it is from Moses but is from the fathers, and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. 23If on the Sabbath a man is circumcised so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man’s whole body whole? 24Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”
The ignorant and unbelieving crowd went crazy at this point in the story with their accusation that Jesus had a demon. Their platitude that no one was wanting to kill him rings a bit empty, but John already clued the reader in on their plot to kill in verse 1. The crowd likely included more than the religious authorities and had admirers and even disciples present. By calling Jesus demon-possessed, they were essentially calling him crazy, but often insanity was explained as demon-possession (see 10:20). As Mark 3:22 indicates, some of the teachers of the law from Jerusalem accused Jesus of being possessed by Beelzebul, the prince of demons. It is one thing to not believe the revelatory truth Jesus spoke. It is another to call him demon-possessed. Jesus’ words sounded nice, and he was a good teacher, so the crowd could not understand why anyone would want to kill him. But there were others present, especially the leaders, who were already scheming.
As always, Jesus gets right to the heart of the problem in the following verses and addresses those who were indeed trying to get rid of him. His argument focuses on the Sabbath, which was a major conflict between him and the legalistic Jews of the time, especially the Pharisees. The whole problem revolves around Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath. No specific miracle is mentioned in this passage. Either Jesus did a miracle on a Sabbath during the festival gathering or the reference in verse 23 might be back to healing of the man at the pool of Bethesda in chapter 5, which could have bothered the leaders so much that the many months later, the incident still boiled in their minds and they had been scheming the whole time how to get rid of Jesus. The miracle for them did not lead to faith, amazement, or praise for God’s healing in a poor man’s life but condemnation, hardness of heart, and plans to kill Jesus for how he broke their interpretation of the Sabbath law.
Jesus compares his situation to Moses and the tradition of circumcision. On account of this (dia totou) is an awkward transition and could go with verse 21 since verses and punctuations are not part of the original Greek text. Likely, Jesus is making a connection between what he did on the Sabbath with what the Jews were doing by circumcising men on the Sabbath. They believed they were fulfilling the law, but Jesus points out that the practice of circumcision was given before the law. Even their interpretation of circumcision was incorrect. Their whole Sabbath observation was called into question based on their faulty interpretation. His healing of the man on the Sabbath has even earlier precedence that the fathers (referring to the Patriarchs) because he made the man whole. His reference goes all the way back to the beginning and creation. Jesus, as the creative Word, remade the body of a broken man. The perceptive person with faith could have reasoned this out, but the Jews were too stuck on their interpretation of Sabbath rules to see the creative Word in the flesh. The evidence about Jesus speaks for itself, but one must start to accept it in faith for it to make sense.
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