John 7:20-21

Jesus was going to explain Himself, when the portion of this multitude which was not acquainted with the designs of the rulers, interrupts Him and charges Him with giving Himself up to gloomy ideas and suspicions without foundation. Despondency, melancholy, sombre thoughts were attributed to a diabolical possession (the κακοδαιμονᾷν of the Greeks). Jesus, without noticing this supposition, which must fall of itself, simply takes up again and continues His argument which had been already begun. He acknowledges having done one work, not a miracle in general, but an act in which one can see a work contrary to the Sabbatic ordinance: “And thereupon,” He adds, “behold you are all crying out with offense and wishing for my death because of this work!” The word θαυμάζειν expresses here the horror which one feels at a monstrous act. ῝Εν ἔργον, one single work, in contrast to all theirs of the same kind, which they, every one of them, do in the case which He is about to cite to them.

The first words of John 7:22: Moses has given you circumcision, reproduce the analogous words of John 7:19: Has not Moses given you the law? and complete them. The point in hand is to render this fact palpable to them: that Moses indeed, their own lawgiver, places himself on His side in the act which He is about to call to their minds. Indeed, this Moses who gave them the law of Sinai and established the Sabbath (John 7:19), is he who also prescribed to them circumcision (John 7:22). Now, by giving you this second ordinance, he has himself made all the Israelitish fathers of families transgressors of the first. For, as each one of them is bound to circumcise his child on the eighth day, it follows that every time that the eighth day falls upon a Sabbath, they themselves sacrifice the Sabbatic rest to the ordinance of circumcision. In the single word of Moses relative to circumcision (Lev 12:3), the inevitable collision of this rite with the Sabbatic ordinance was neither provided for nor regulated. It was the Israelite conscience which had spontaneously resolved the collision in favor of circumcision, rightly placing the well-being of the man above the Sabbatic obligation. In our first edition, we referred the διὰ τοῦτο, for this cause, with most modern interpreters (Weiss, Keil, etc.; Waitz does not decide), to the verb: you are in astonishment, of John 7:21.

This reference is justified by the difficulty of making the for this bear upon the following idea: Moses has given. How, indeed, can we make Jesus say that Moses has given to the Jews the command to circumcise with a view to the conflict which would result from it with the Sabbatic command? We do not discuss the opinion of Meyer and Luthardt, who make the διὰ τοῦτο, for this cause, of John 7:22, refer to the clause οὐχ ὅτι, not that..., an interpretation which evidently does violence to the text. But is it not possible to justify the grammatical reference of the words: for this, to the totality of John 7:22 ? The following, in that case, is the sense: “It is precisely for this, that is to say, with the design of teaching you not to judge as you are doing when you are scandalized (θαυμάζετε) at my Sabbath work that Moses did not hesitate to impose the rite of circumcision upon you, while introducing into his law this conflict with the law of the Sabbath. Thereby, he has justified me in advance, by making all of you commit the transgression for which you are seeking to kill me.” Thus understood, this for this cause contains the most piquant irony: “Moses has in advance pleaded my cause before you, by making you all jointly responsible for the crime with which you charge me, and by himself proving to you in this way that, when the good of man demands it, the rest of the Sabbath must be subordinated to a higher interest.” If we accept this sense, we must make the for this cause refer also to the last clause of John 7:22: “ For this cause indeed has Moses given you...and consequently you perform the rite of circumcision even on the Sabbath.”

It is not easy to understand the purpose of the limitation: Not that circumcision is of Moses, but of the fathers. If it were intended, as a large number of interpreters will have it, to exalt the rite of circumcision by recalling to mind its high antiquity, it would weaken rather than strengthen the argument; for the more venerable the rite of circumcision is, the more natural is it that it should take precedence of the Sabbath, a point which diminishes the force of the argument. Besides, might it not have been answered: The Sabbath also is anterior to Moses, it is anterior even to Abraham, for it dates from the creation? Hengstenberg and many others think that, in inserting this remark, Jesus means to defend His Scriptural erudition, which was praised in John 7:15, from the charge of inaccuracy which the preceding declaration might bring upon Him. This explanation is puerile; if it were well founded, nothing would remain, as Lucke says, but to impute this parenthesis to the narrator.

The true explanation is, perhaps, the following: “Although circumcision does not form a part of the totality of the Mosaic code, given by means of the angels and placed in the hands of the mediator (Galatians 3:19; Hebrews 2:2), and although it was only the result of a patriarchal tradition, nevertheless Moses did not hesitate to assign to it, in the Israelitish life, a dignity before which he made the Sabbath itself give way; an evident proof that everything which is of importance to the salvation of man takes precedence of the Sabbath.” This remark would serve to confirm the entire argument of the Lord. Or it might be necessary to explain the matter in this way: In general, the more recent regulation abolishes ipso facto the earlier one. It would seem, then, that the ordinance of circumcision must yield precedence to that of the Sabbath, which was more positive and more recent. And yet here there is nothing of the kind; it is the Sabbath that must give way. This circumstance would also rise in evidence against the absolute, exaggerated importance which was attributed by the Jews to the Sabbatic rest. Renan cites this passage as one of those which “bear the marks of erasures or corrections” (p. xxxii.). When properly understood, the passage becomes, on the contrary, from one end to the other, an example of the most concise logical argumentation.

The words of John 7:23: that the law of Moses may not be broken, have a special force: the Jews transgress the Sabbath (by circumcising on that day) precisely to the end that they may not disobey Moses! In order thoroughly to understand the a fortiori of John 7:23, we must remember that there are in these two facts which are placed in a parallelism, circumcision and the cure wrought by Jesus, at once a physical and a moral side. In circumcision, the physical side consists in a local purification; and the moral side in the incorporation into the typical covenant of the circumcised child. In the miracle of Jesus, the physical fact was a complete restoration of the health of the impotent man, and the moral end, his salvation (John 7:14 “ Thou hast been healed, sin no more ”). In these two respects, the superiority of the second of these acts to the first was beyond question; and consequently the infraction of the Sabbath was justified, in the point of view of its utility for the human being, in the second case still more than in the first. We must avoid the explanation of Bengel and Stier, who think that by the expression: a whole man, Jesus here means to designate the physical and moral man, in contrast to the purely physical man, the end in view in circumcision. Circumcision was not, in the eyes of the Jews, a merely medical affair.

What is remarkable in this defense is, in the first place, the fact that Jesus does not set forth the miraculous nature of the act which was made the subject of accusation; one work, He modestly says: it is nevertheless clear that the marvelous character of this work forms the imposing rear guard of the argument. In the next place, there is the difference between this mode of justification and that of chap. 5: Jesus here speaks to the multitudes; His demonstration is not dogmatic; He borrows it from a fact of practical life, of which every Jew was constantly a witness, if even he was not a participator in it: “What I have done, you all do, and for much less!” What could be more popular and more striking? We find again, at the foundation of this argument, the axiom which is formulated by Jesus in the Synoptics: “Man is not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is made for man” (Mark 2:27).