His Own

“He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.”

“Having loved his own … he loved them to the end.”

If you really wanted to irritate a well-read Christian audience, you could probably preach a sermon that started by quoting both these verses from the gospel of John. Then you could delve into the Greek, noting that the same word [idios] is used for “his own” by the same author in the same book. Finally, you could finish with a flurry by pontificating about how the Lord Jesus loved “to the uttermost” the people who rejected him.

You could. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. You’d have a lineup of sixty people waiting to tell you that using the same Greek word doesn’t mean they are precisely the same people. The latter group is a subset of the first.

Two Very Different Senses

The nation that “did not receive him” was “his own” in the sense that the Lord Jesus was its Messiah, sent by God in answer to the hopes of Israel’s devout and tasked with the spiritual restoration of his fellow sons and daughters of Jacob. One glorious day in the not-too-distant future, he will reign over their descendants in final fulfillment of all the prophetic scriptures. Messiah came to every Israelite. They were his own, and nationally speaking at least, they did not recognize him. Officially speaking, they hated him, rejected him and hung him on a cross.

In stark contrast, the men whose feet he washed in that upper room were “his own” in the sense that they were given to the Son by the Father, and the only one of their number to be lost was the “son of destruction”, Judas. They were not the entire nation, but a subset of the nation. They received the Messiah their leaders rejected, embraced and loved him, and in many cases later followed him even to death.*

In the two familiar verses we have cited here, the contrast is between the nation of Israel and eleven disciples in an upper room. Both groups were his own, but in two very different senses. Clear? Totally, I’m sure.

The Error of Conflation

The error of conflating one group of Jews with another is so transparently obvious as to be laughable, and yet far too many Christians make it constantly. We have been writing recently about a small group among the Christian Nationalists that are obsessed with Jews, not merely noticing their errors — errors common to unregenerate humanity — but speaking of an entire nation as if they are all one entity with a singular, identifiable agenda; as if Jewish genetics are a thing to be mistrusted simply for what they are. For such thinkers, it’s hard to believe even Jews who convert to the Christian faith will be received with the enthusiasm accorded good Anglo-Saxon stock, or accepted into their prospective “Christian Nation” with full confidence in their loyalty. The stain goes too deep. Folks like this would read my comments about the disciples in the last paragraph and snort, “They weren’t Jews, they were Christians!” as if they could not possibly be both.

At the other extreme, we have a small, enthusiastic group of evangelicals who uncritically celebrate the victories of a secular, Christ-rejecting state as if it is currently the beneficiary of the favor and blessing of God.

Both views are caricatures, and even those who hold them must at some level realize they are not quite right. Some Jews are “his own” in one sense and some in another. A Jew in Christ is not a Jew practicing Judaism or secularism, and the “synagogue of Satan” is not “the remnant of Israel”.

The Same Ones Who Cheered

You have probably heard similar confusion about distinct groups of Jews coming from the platform or perhaps from your stereo speakers. Leon Patillo’s Star of the Morning has a verse that goes like this:

“People shouted, ‘Here comes the King!’
As you marched down the road to Jerusalem
There were tears in your eyes
The same ones who cheered yelled, ‘Crucify!’ ”

Charles Spurgeon taught the same thing, though he would not have said the Lord Jesus “marched” anywhere. He rode, as scripture teaches. Nevertheless, Spurgeon too was convinced the nation first embraced then turned on their Messiah. I’ve heard the same idea propounded so many times I have lost count. I’m not sure whether to put it down to binary thinking, presumptuous teachers, inattentive reading or conflating individual responses to Christ with the official national position. Nevertheless, it’s a very common Christian idea: that at the Triumphal Entry the rank and file of his nation received him, and that before Pilate all the very same people suddenly and inexplicably changed their minds and rejected him. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Fickle, fickle Jews.

To be fair, it’s certainly possible there was some overlap around the fringes of the two groups. Mobs tend to be mobs. If a bunch of people are cheering, other people with no real convictions will start doing it “just because”. If a bunch of people are screaming blue murder, others will quickly join them on very slim justification. There were probably Jews who cheered the Lord Jesus riding into Jerusalem without any deep spiritual investment, and there were probably Jews who called for his crucifixion without any great personal knowledge of his ministry or character, perhaps out of fear of being punished by the Romans for rebellion. A few of these may even have been the same people. That said, I am convinced the vast majority were not.

Why not? Well, let’s consider what the scripture has to say about it.

Dark and Daylight

The Triumphal Entry took place with the “whole city” stirred up, probably during late afternoon or early evening, and even children participated in large numbers. It ended at the temple in Jerusalem, the center of religious life, which could accommodate thousands. You could not possibly have missed the event even if you tried. On the other hand, the Lord’s final sentence before Pilate took place early in the morning, when most of the city was just getting out of bed. The authorities already had Jesus at Golgotha and on the cross by 9am, the “third hour”, as Mark has it, so the bulk of the proceedings against him took place under the cover of darkness.

All the gospel writers are candid about the reason Israel’s leadership had the Lord seized around 2am and went about convicting and sentencing him so secretively and in such a rush: they “feared the crowds” (Matthew), they “feared the people” (Mark), they “feared the people” (Luke), “there was a division among the people over him” (John). In this they were correct. The corporate guilt they brought on Israel by crucifying its Messiah provoked huge crowds of new converts to Christianity only a month and a half later, turning Jerusalem upside down. If the chief priests and elders had thought for a second that the majority of the city and their nation would stand behind them and chant for his death on cue, they would have tried the Lord according to the Law and in broad daylight. They didn’t. You may also recall that there was a fair bit of indignation and grumbling from the chief priests and scribes during the Triumphal Entry. The lines between supporters and enemies were already pretty clear at that point.

So then, the crowd in the Praetorium who cried for the Lord’s crucifixion between 7 and 8am surely represented only a fraction of those who celebrated the Triumphal Entry and a great many who did not, assuming there was much crossover at all. It is simply not reasonable to imagine the “whole city” jumped out of bed at 3am and ran down to Pilate’s bema to cheer on the nation’s most odious miscarriage of justice.

In the Beginning

Don’t get me wrong: the numbers of the Lord’s enemies were not small, and they included almost all the most powerful men in the nation. They were authoritatively positioned to speak with finality on behalf of the people they represented, and they did so, to Israel’s great disgrace. They stirred up the “men of Israel” Peter indicted at Pentecost and spread the guilt around as far and wide as they possibly could. God held the nation accountable because that’s how authority works: the greater the authority of the wicked, the more people they are positioned to hurt with their choices. Corporate guilt is no fun for anyone.

But the Lord had “his own” in Israel, and their numbers were not trivial. To say, “The Jews killed Jesus” may be technically accurate, but it entirely ignores the Jews who believed on him in secret, the Jews who worshiped him, the Jews who followed him to the cross mourning and lamenting, the Jews who grieved his murder and celebrated his resurrection. It ignores the countless Jews who suffered and died taking the message of the gospel to the world, from whom we received it, and whose writings form the foundation of our faith.

All these were “his own”, and they were there first.

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* Of course, in a spiritual sense, the phrase “his own” is not limited merely to the eleven non-betraying disciples. In fact, the Father has given others to the Son, all the sheep who are “his own”, Jew and Gentile, then and now. We too are “his own”, with all the wonder and glory that stem from that blessed privilege.