At the Feast of Booths

Now the Jews’ feast, the Feast of Booths, was near.

His brothers therefore said to him, “Depart from here and go into Judea, that your disciples also may see your works which you do. For no one does anything in secret while he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, reveal yourself to the world.” For even his brothers didn’t believe in him.

So Jesus said to them, “My time hasn’t come yet, but any time is right for you. The world can’t hate you, but it hates me, because I testify about it: what it does is evil. You go up to the feast. I’m not going up to this feast yet, because my time hasn’t fully come.”

When he had said this to them, he stayed on in Galilee.

At the feast the Jews were looking for him. “Where is he?” they asked.

Among the crowds, people talked about him in low voices. Some said, “He is a good man.” Others said, “That’s not true. He is leading the crowd astray.”

Yet no one spoke openly about him, because they were afraid of the Jews.

In the middle of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple and taught.

The Jews were amazed. “How can this man be so well read,” they said, “when nobody ever taught him?”

Jesus answered them, “The things I teach aren’t mine. They belong to him who sent me. Whoever wants to do his will is going to know whether this teaching is from God, or if I am speaking on my own. Someone who speaks on his own wants glory for himself. But the one who wants glory for him who sent him is true, and nothing in him is wrong. Didn’t Moses give you the law, and yet not one of you keeps it? Why do you want to kill me?”

“You have a demon!” the crowd answered. “Who wants to kill you?”

Jesus answered them, “I did one work, and all of you are amazed by it. Moses gave you circumcision. It didn’t begin with Moses, but with the ancestors. And on the Sabbath you circumcise a boy. If a boy is circumcised on the Sabbath to keep the law of Moses from being broken, are you angry with me for making a man completely healthy on the Sabbath? Don’t judge by how things look, but make a judgment that is right.”

Jesus was teaching in the temple, and he called out, “You know me, and where I’m from. Yet I haven’t come on my own. He who sent me is true, and he is someone you don’t know. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”

So they tried to take hold of him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.

But many people in the crowd believed in him. “When the Christ comes,” they said, “he won’t do more signs than those this man has done, will he?”

The Pharisees heard the crowd saying these things about him in low voices, and the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to arrest him.

Then Jesus said, “I’ll be with you a little while longer. After that, I’ll go to him who sent me. You’ll look for me and won’t find me. You can’t come where I am.”

The Jews said to one another, “Where is this man going that we won’t be able to find him? Will he go to our people who are scattered abroad among the Greeks, and teach the Greeks? What is he talking about when he says, ‘You’ll look for me, and won’t find me,’ and ‘You can’t come where I am’?”

John says that when Jesus said this, he meant the Spirit, which people who believed in him would receive. The Holy Spirit had not been given yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Many in the crowd heard these words and said, “This is truly the prophet.”

Others said, “This is the Christ.”

But some said, “What? Does the Christ come out of Galilee? Doesn’t the Scripture say the Christ comes from the family of David, and from Bethlehem, David’s village?”

So the crowd was split because of him. Some wanted to arrest him, yet no one laid hands on him.

“No man ever spoke like this man!” the officers answered.

The Pharisees answered them, “You haven’t been led astray too, have you? Have any of the rulers or any of the Pharisees believed in him? But these people in the crowd, who don’t know the law, are cursed.”

Nicodemus, the man who had come to Jesus by night, was one of them. He said to them, “Does our law judge a man before it has heard from him in person and found out what he does?”

They answered him, “Are you also from Galilee? Look into it, and you’ll see that no prophet has come out of Galilee.”

Very early in the morning he came back into the temple, and all the people came to him. He sat down and taught them.

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman to him. She had been caught in adultery, with a man she was not married to. They stood her there in the middle.

“Teacher,” they told him, “we found this woman in adultery, in the very act. Now in our law, Moses commanded us to stone such women to death. So what do you say about her?”

They said this to test him, so that they would have something to accuse him of. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with his finger.

But they kept on asking him, so he looked up and said to them, “Whoever among you is without sin, let him throw the first stone at her.”

Then he stooped down again and wrote on the ground with his finger.

When they heard this, their own consciences found them guilty, and they went out one by one, the oldest first, until the last of them had gone. Jesus was left alone with the woman, who was still there in the middle.

Jesus stood up and saw her. “Woman, where are your accusers?” he said. “Did no one condemn you?”

“No one, Lord,” she said.

“Neither do I condemn you,” Jesus said. “Go your way. From now on, sin no more.”