John 8:21-30 – 5/16/2026
Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am.”
John 8:28 (NRSVue) – alternative translation (see footnote in the NRSVue Biblical text)
Perhaps no where is Jesus more explicit about his divinity than in the Gospel of John where he declares several times that “I am.” Jesus’s identity is not a question of who or what Jesus is but that he is. The statement of Jesus “I am” echos Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai, told in the book of Exodus, where God declares to be “I am” as well. When Jesus uses these words to refer to himself while teaching in the Temple, the listeners would be aware of the allusion Jesus is making to the Lawgiving story of Moses and to identification with Yahweh, the God of Israel, through the “I am” statement.
That the “I am” is a claim to divinity has long been recognized with passages like today’s cited as evidence for the Trinity, for the claim that Jesus Christ is fully God even while being truly human. What I want to focus on here is what it means for a God—whether an incarnate God or a transcendent one—to be “I am.” It’s important to notice how strange this sentence construction is. Jesus is not claiming to be a subject “I” of whom something could be truly predicated. If Jesus had uttered the sentence “I am God” it would make perfect grammatical sense, and we could interpret it straightforwardly. The construction “I am,” however, is one we do not often encounter. What does this way of speaking mean?
At the most basic level to declare that “I am” is to say that I exist. The one who says “I am” can always say “I am some x,” for example “I am a human” or “I am Justin.” Here the declaration of “I am” is made with a kind of ellipses, with the simple declaration of existence implying that one exists AS something. Jesus’s declaration “I am” does not function this way. Jesus is claiming to be God, but he is not saying “I am…” with “God” implied as the object of the sentence. Instead, in stating “I am” Jesus is both claiming to be God and making a radical claim about what it is to be God. In the Gospel of John’s and Exodus’ “I am” statements, we receive one of the most provocative understandings of divinity in all of Scripture.
Jesus is not the “I” of the “I am” nor is he an implied predicative object that would continue the sentence (I am God). Jesus is the entirety of the “I am” what the sentence expresses as a whole. But what does the sentence express? Jesus is making the wild and unintuitive claim that as God, he is predication itself. God does not exist in the same way that you and I and rocks and stars exist. God is not a being among other beings, not even the greatest being. Rather, God (and by extension Jesus) is the possibility of being anything definite at all. Instead of a thing named or a concept applied to a subject, God is naming itself, conceptualization itself, Being itself.
Here human concepts and our way of dividing up the world into objects with discrete existence and fixed, stable identity betray us. We are used to talking about bicycles, cats, stars, and books. We are even used to talking about abstract things like sadness, hope, heat, biology, and softness, among other abstract nouns. What our language and our cognitive faculties are not well suited to thinking about are the underlying conditions that make identifying things possible at all. This is not God as the cause of beings as a creator. This is God as the ground of beings that is not itself a being. It’s beyond the scope of this reflection to fully unpack what this means (if we could fully unpack it). What I want to point toward is the idea that God is not a person like we are people and not an object like the things that science studies. God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Rather God is the very capability of existing, the very act of naming, the very process of becoming that gives rise to being.
Consider this analogy. When I am speaking English I use various words representing all of the parts of speech. I use articles (the, a, some), nouns (I, Justin, elephant, electron), verbs (play, write, to be), and so on. Each of those words is a thing, an object, in the universe of the English language. Every word is a part of the language but is not the language itself. The language itself is the structure that makes speaking possible, that makes words possible, that makes meaning possible. God as “I am” without a predicative object is like the language rather than the words within the language. With respect to creation and the universe of subjects and objects that we speak about, God functions as the condition of possibility, the structuring logic that is not itself a part of the structure.
As unintuitive as this way of conceptualizing God is, we might find ourselves capable of affirming this picture for a transcendent God whom we never encounter except perhaps in mystical experiences that defy human language. Here God is a condition of possibility, not the possibilities themselves. God is what makes existence logically possible but does not itself exist. What today’s text from John shows is that this strange, unintuitive way of speaking about God in God’s transcendence applies also to the human person Jesus, the incarnation of God in the flesh, God made immanent to human life. Of Jesus one can predicate many things in a straightforward way. “Jesus is a human” “Jesus was born to a human mother.” “Jesus was from Galilee” and others like it are meaningful, true, standard predicative sentences. What does it mean for Jesus to be a flesh and blood ordinary human and also the condition for saying anything at all, the very structure of predication itself?
First, this way of understanding Jesus means that the conditions for the possibility of us speaking and making meaning at all are not some abstract, remote principles from which we remain distant and which are transcendent to the human domain. Jesus as “I am” means that God is among us. If God is the condition of the possibility of speaking and making sense of things at all, the condition of the possibility of existence, then Jesus as God means that the conditions of the possibility for existence are human conditions. The logic that structures our reality and the organization of possibilities that is itself not a possibility are created by a human person. Our language that names and the very horizon of our being are essentially human. Naming that human person Jesus is then an expression of hope, the hope that love, care, and peace are written into this organizing structure of things. It’s a bold and perhaps even crazy hope. It is something that cannot be known, only trusted and hoped for with a daring and irrational leap of faith.
This reflection has been a far too brief dive into the an existential theology that has God as both ground of being and a human person. I have barely scratched the surface in this attempt to give expression to this idea and begin to make sense of it. Christianity, on this picture, starts from the commonplace truism that reality exits, we experience that reality, and our experience of that reality has a structure. To this unremarkable observation of logic the Christian adds the audacious hope that all of this impersonal logic has something to do with the human person Jesus, a person who taught and lived love, peace, and service to others. This picture of God is radical in its departure from traditional theologies. Further articulating this theology would have effects on our understanding of almost every facet of Christian life and thought, including prayer, Sacrament, salvation, ecclesiology, and eschatology. These reflections on the readings of the Revised Common Lectionary are, in part, attempts to flesh out implications of this existential theology on my reading of Scripture.
Further Reading: This sketch of an existential theology relies heavily on the ontological framework of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Dionysus on a Bike 
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