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To listen to an audio version of this post, visit www.covenantchurch.ca/podcasts/covenant-weekly.

Good Morning, Covenant Family. One huge blessing that Angie and I have been able to enjoy from time to time in the past year is connecting with some of our young adults to read and study scripture. This past Sunday evening, we met to consider the passage in John which we talked about on Sunday morning. In the conversation, they brought up a couple of really great things that  we didn’t talk about on Sunday morning, but are very significant to what John seems to be trying to help us learn. We’re going to learn from our young adults in this Covenant Weekly for February 10, 2026.

The final verses that we looked at on Sunday morning say this:

Because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. 17 In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” 18 For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

Once we read the passage on Sunday evening, one young man said, “I’m sorry! I got distracted during the sermon because I kept reading the big monologue Jesus launches into after that in the rest of chapter 5.” That led us, on Sunday evening, to eventually spend a bunch of time considering the rest of Jesus’ interaction with the Jewish leaders. At the end of verse 18, they are so upset with Jesus that they want to kill him. They think he is equating himself with God.

So how does Jesus respond to that?

He continues to speak in ways that intimately connect him to the Father. He says things like:

  • Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. (19)
  • Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. (21)
  • The Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. (22-23)
  • He [the Father] has given him [the Son, Jesus] authority to judge because he is the Son of Man. (27)
  • If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. (46)

Rather than diffusing the tense situation with the Jewish leaders, Jesus doubles down again and again. He is, in this monologue, confirming their worst fear: that he is equating himself with God!

As we talked about this, another student suggested that this is basically the end of the beginning of John’s gospel. After this, John’s story turns. If this concludes John’s introduction to Jesus, it is good to note how that introduction began.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1:1-3)

This lengthy intro from John begins with John’s testimony that Jesus was God. It ends with Jesus’ own words confirming John’s foundational claim about Jesus: that Jesus is united with God, acting in line with the heart and character of God, and doing so with the authority of God. In short. Jesus is God. And God looks like Jesus.

A third young adult highlighted something else, in considering these chapters as John’s lengthy introduction. Between John’s big claims at the beginning and this monologue reasserting the claims, Jesus primarily encounters four people:  a Pharisee with questions, a “sinful” Samaritan woman at a well, a desperate temple official, and a hopeless invalid. Four radically different people. The kind of people who would likely never find themselves in the same room and would likely avoid each other as much as possible. But Jesus meets each of them where they are and does so in a way where each of them are seen, heard, and responded to.

God in the flesh isn’t choosing sides, religious or political. God in the flesh isn’t alienating people or condemning them. God in the flesh is here for all of them - all of us - meeting them, and us, with love and compassion.

John is making a powerful statement, not only about the divine nature of Jesus, but also, through story, about the heart and character of God which Jesus embodies. Jesus is God, in the flesh, who came for each of us and all of us so that we may meet with him and receive God’s gift of love.

I pray you will be encouraged by this reminder of God’s presence and love today. I pray you will have an opportunity to embody it with others today. And, I pray the words of Paul in Ephesians 3 for each of us today.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.