John 3:36

Ver. 36. “ He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life; but he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him. ”

This is the practical consequence to be drawn from the supreme greatness of the Son. These last words present a great similarity to the close of Psalms 2: “ Do reverence to the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way when, in a little time, his wrath will be kindled; but blessed are they that put their trust in him. ” Only John, the reverse of the Psalmist and of Jesus Himself (John 3:19-21), begins with believers, to end with unbelievers. It is because he would give a stern and last warning to his disciples and the entire nation John declares, as Jesus had said to Nicodemus, that all depends for every man on faith and unbelief, and that the absolute value of these two moral facts arises from the supreme dignity of Him who is the object of them: the Son. This name is sufficient to explain why faith gives life, why unbelief brings wrath. The phrase ὁ ἀπειθῶν, he who disobeys, brings out the voluntary side in unbelief, that of revolt.

The Son is the legitimate sovereign; unbelief is the refusal to submit. The words: the wrath abides, have often been understood in this sense: The natural condemnation abides, because the act which alone could have removed it, that of faith, has not taken place. But this sense seems to us weak and strained, and is only imperfectly connected with what precedes. The question is rather of the wrath called forth by the very refusal of obedience, and falling upon the unbeliever as such. Is it not just that God should be angry? If faith seals the veracity of God (John 3:33), unbelief makes God a liar (1Jn 5:10). The future shall see is opposed to the present has. Not only does he not have life now, but when it shall be outwardly revealed in its perfect form that of glory he shall not behold it; it shall be for him as though it were not. Here is a word which shows clearly that the ordinary eschatology is by no means foreign to the fourth Gospel. The verb μενει, abides, in spite of its correlation with the future ὄψεται, shall see, is a present, and should be written μένει. The present abides expresses, much better than the future shall abide, the notion of permanence. All other wrath is revocable; that which befalls unbelief abides forever. Thus the epithet eternal of the first clause has its counterpart in the second.

Respecting the fact which we have just been studying, the following is Renan's judgment: “The twenty-second and following verses, as far as John 4:2, transport us into what is thoroughly historical....This is extremely remarkable.

The Synoptics have nothing like it” (p. 491). As to the discourse, it may be called: the last word of the Old Covenant. It recalls that threatening of Malachi which closes the Old Testament: “ Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. ” It accords thus with the given situation: In view of the unbelief which was emphatically manifested even among his disciples, the forerunner completes his previous calls to faith by a menacing warning. All the details of the discourse are in harmony with the character of the person of the Baptist. There is not a word which cannot be fully explained in his mouth. John 3:27; John 3:29-30 have a seal of inimitable originality; no other than the forerunner, in his unique situation, would have been able to create them. John 3:35 is simply the echo of the divine declaration which he had himself heard at the moment of the baptism. In John 3:34 there is formulated no less simply the entire content of the vision which was beheld at that same moment. John 3:28 is the reproduction of his own testimony in the Synoptics (Matthew 3 and parallels). John 3:36 also recalls his former preachings on the wrath to come (Matthew 3:7) and that axe already laid unto the root of the trees (John 3:10) with which he had threatened Israel. There remain only John 3:31-32. We believe we have indicated the very probable origin of these verses (see on John 3:32). Will any one find an objection in the Johannean coloring of the style? But we must recall to mind the fact that we have here the Greek reproduction by the evangelist's pen of a discourse given in Aramaic (see Introd. pp. 172-175). It is entirely impossible to imagine a writer of a later epoch carrying himself back thus into the midst of the facts, drawing all the words from the given situation, and, above all, adapting to it with so much precision the progress of the discourse (John and Jesus), and binding together the two parts of it by the admirable saying of John 3:30. Weizsacker himself cannot refrain from acknowledging (p. 268) “that there are in this discourse elements of detail which distinctly mark the Baptist's own point of view” (John 3:27; John 3:34-36).

We have already replied to the objection derived from the special and independent position which John the Baptist keeps, instead of going to rank himself among the disciples of Jesus. As long as the aim of his mission to lead Israel to Jesus, was so far from being attained, that preparatory mission continued, and the Baptist was not free to exchange it for the position of a disciple which would have been more satisfactory to him (John 3:29). It is asked how, after such a discourse of their Master, John's disciples could have subsequently formed themselves into an anti-Christian sect? But a small number from among the innumerable multitude of those baptized by John were present at this scene, and it would, in truth, be much to expect of a discourse to suppose that it could have extirpated a feeling of jealousy which was so deep that we even find the traces of it again in the Synoptics (Matthew 9:14 and parallels). On the point in Matthew 11:2, also alleged in opposition to the authenticity of this discourse, see on John 1:34.

Weiss holds, like Reuss, that this discourse contains authentic elements, but worked over by the evangelist, and that he has fused them into one whole with his own ideas. Thus, he proves the authenticity of the saying of John 3:34 by this argument: The perfection of Jesus' teaching is here ascribed by the forerunner to the action of the Holy Spirit, while John the Evangelist ascribes it to the remembrance which He had of His knowledge of the Father in His pre-existent state. This difference between the idea of the evangelist and that of the Baptist must prove the historical character of the discourse, at least in this point. But we have seen hitherto and we shall continue to discover that this way of conceiving of the higher knowledge of Jesus, which Weiss attributes to the evangelist, is by no means in harmony with the text and with the thought of our fourth Gospel. This alleged difference between his conception and that of the Baptist does not exist.

Our Gospel does not give an account of the imprisonment of John the Baptist. But the saying of Jesus (John 3:35) implies the disappearance of the forerunner. This took place, therefore, very shortly after this last testimony uttered by him in Judea (see at John 4:1). The fact of John's death was omitted here, like so many other facts with which the author knows that his readers are well acquainted, and the mention of which does not fall within his plan.

I cannot believe (see p. 258) that the account which occupies our attention was written without some allusion to the disciples of John, who were moving about in considerable numbers in Asia Minor; not, surely, that I would wish to claim, that the entire fourth Gospel owes its existence to this polemical design, but it has entered as a factor into its composition (comp. Introd., pp. 213, 214).