2
Accepting That You Are Fully Accepted
I am making the whole of creation new....It will come true....It is
already done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, both the Beginning
and the End.
—Revelation 21:5–6I tell you solemnly, before Abraham came to be, I AM.
—John 8:58In these two scripture references, who do you think is speaking? Is it Jesus of
Nazareth, or someone else? We’d have to conclude that whoever is talking here
is offering a grand and optimistic arc to all of history, and is not speaking simply
as the humble Galilean carpenter. “I am both the First and the Last,” the voice
says in Revelation 22:14, describing a coherent trajectory between the
beginning and the end of all things. The second quotation, from John’s Gospel,
is even more startling. If Jesus was the only one speaking here—calling himself
God while standing in Jerusalem’s flagship temple—the people present would’ve
had every good reason to stone him!
While I don’t believe Jesus ever doubted his real union with God, Jesus of
Nazareth in his lifetime did not normally talk in the divine “I AM” statements,
which are found seven times throughout John’s Gospel. In the Gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus almost always calls himself “the Son of the
Human,” or just “Everyman,” using this expression a total of eighty-seven
times.*1 But in John’s Gospel, dated somewhere between A.D. 90 and 110, the
voice of Christ steps forward to do almost all of the speaking. This helps make
sense of some statements that seem out of character coming from Jesus’s mouth,
like “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) or “Before Abraham ever