John 5:25–29

Context

This passage belongs to a long discourse in which Jesus explains his relationship to the Father after coming into conflict with the Jews for healing a sick man beside the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath (John 5:1–9). Earlier in the discourse Jesus says that the Son, like the Father, gives life and has been entrusted with judgment (5:21–22), and he declares that the one who believes "is passed from death unto life" (5:24). The present passage continues that line of thought, speaking first of what is happening now (v. 25) and then of what will happen in the future (vv. 28–29).

Interpretation

• Reading "now" and "coming" together: This reading distinguishes "and now is" in verse 25 from "the hour is coming" in verse 28. It takes "the dead" in verse 25 as those who are spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1) and "all that are in the graves" in verse 28 as those who are physically dead. This reading, which sees the new life received now through faith in the gospel and the bodily resurrection on the last day as a single movement, is widely accepted across denominations. Scholars sometimes describe it as the distinctive eschatology of the Gospel of John, in which an end already realized overlaps with an end not yet come.
• Augustine's reading: Augustine is generally understood to have divided the passage in The City of God, reading verse 25 as referring to the resurrection of the soul and verses 28–29 as referring to the resurrection of the body.
• Christological reading: Verses 26–27 state that the Son has life "in himself" and has been given authority to execute judgment. The "Son of man" in verse 27 is often read against the background of "one like the Son of man" in Daniel 7:13–14. Here the original Greek unusually uses the phrase "son of man" without the article. On this basis, some interpreters hold that the emphasis falls on Jesus judging humanity because he himself became human.

Debates and Issues

• Works and faith: Verse 29 divides people into "they that have done good" and "they that have done evil." The Reformed and Lutheran traditions, which emphasize justification by faith, read good works not as a condition of salvation but as the fruit of faith, citing verse 24 of the same chapter and John 6:29 in support. The Wesleyan tradition reads the passage in light of its emphasis on the sanctified life that follows justification by faith.
• One resurrection or two?: Those who hold to premillennialism place the millennial kingdom between the resurrection of life and the resurrection of damnation (Revelation 20:5). Amillennialists and postmillennialists take "the hour is coming" as a single hour and read the passage as describing a general resurrection in which the righteous and the wicked rise together to face the Last Judgment.
• The state after death: The Seventh-day Adventist Church cites the phrase "all that are in the graves" as one of the grounds for its position that the dead sleep unconscious until the resurrection. Most Protestant denominations, appealing to passages such as Philippians 1:23, hold that believers are with Christ immediately after death.
• Redaction theories: Some critical scholars, including Rudolf Bultmann, have argued that the future eschatology of verses 28–29 was added at a later stage. Many other scholars, however, regard verses 25 and 28 as a deliberate contrast intended by a single author.

Related Passages

• Daniel 12:2
• John 11:25–26
• Acts 24:15
• Revelation 20:12–13