Book of Common Prayer

Faith wins the victory

5 Everyone who believes that the Messiah is Jesus has been fathered by God. Everyone who loves the parent loves the child as well. ² That is how we know that we love the children of God, because we love God and do what he commands. ³ This is what loving God means: it means keeping his commandments. His commandments, what’s more, are no trouble, ⁴ because everything that is fathered by God conquers the world. This is the victory that conquers the world: our faith.

⁵ Who is the one who conquers the world? Surely the one who believes that Jesus is God’s son! ⁶ It was he who came by means of water and blood, Jesus the Messiah, not by water only but by the water and the blood. The spirit is the one who bears witness, because the spirit is the truth. ⁷ There are three that bear witness, you see, ⁸ the spirit, the water and the blood, and these three agree together. ⁹ If we have received human witness, God’s witness is greater. This is the witness of God, the testimony he has borne to his son. ¹⁰ All those who believe in the son of God have the witness in themselves, but anyone who does not believe God has made a liar of him, because they have not believed in the witness which God bore concerning his son. ¹¹ This is the witness: God has given us the life of the age to come, and this life is in his son. ¹² Anyone who has the son has life. Anyone who does not have the son of God does not have life.

⁴⁵ The result of all this was that several of the Judaeans who had come to Mary, and who had seen what he had done, believed in him. ⁴⁶ But some of them went off to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.

The plan of Caiaphas

⁴⁷ So the chief priests and the Pharisees called an assembly.

“What are we going to do?” they asked. “This man is performing lots of signs. ⁴⁸ If we let him go on like this, everyone is going to believe in him! Then the Romans will come and take away our holy place, and our nation!”

⁴⁹ But one of them, Caiaphas, the high priest that year, addressed them.

“You know nothing at all!” he said. ⁵⁰ “You haven’t worked it out! This is what’s best for you: let one man die for the people, rather than the whole nation being wiped out.”

⁵¹ He didn’t say this of his own accord. Since he was high priest that year, it was a prophecy. It meant that Jesus would die for the nation; ⁵² and not only for the nation, but to gather into one the scattered children of God. ⁵³ So from that day on they plotted how to kill him.

⁵⁴ So Jesus didn’t go around openly any longer among the Judaeans. He went away from there to the region by the desert, to a town called Ephraim. He stayed there with the disciples.