At the autumn feast, Jesus left the area of Judea to go to Galilee. Judea was the district where Jerusalem was, and Galilee was a district north of Samaria, and contained Nazareth, the town where Jesus had been raised after being born in Bethlehem and living in Egypt. Jesus’s brothers, who did not believe in him yet, told him to go back down to Jerusalem because he’d be more famous. 

Jesus said that it wasn’t his time yet, because he knew that the are religious leadership was trying to kill him. Rumors were flying about whether he was a good person or someone leading the people astray. 

Jesus finally travels south and starts teaching at the temple. The people are amazed that his teaching is so wise, even though he has not been officially educated. He says that he’s only speaking the words of God. He says those following God will recognize the truth. He also calls out the religious leaders for holding double standards. He says that they circumcised men on the Sabbath, yet when he was healing and forgiving people of their sins on the Sabbath, they called it illegal. 

Finally, Jesus stood up at the end of the holiday and told everyone that he was the source of living water. This mirrored some of the words about the promised savior in the Old Testament. Some people believed, some doubted and some just wanted to kill him. The priests sent officers to arrested Jesus, but he told them that where he was going they could not follow. That confused them into thinking he was talking about Greece, but he was really talking about dying and going to heaven. So the officers returned to the leadership without him. 

Within the religious leadership, there was both the priests and the Pharisees, legal experts, and they were at odds about what to do about Jesus. Nicodemus spoke up on his behalf, asking if they should judge a man before evaluating his actions. They turned on Nicodemus and asked him if he was from Galilee too, because they didn’t think prophets could come from there. 

This chapter really highlights people’s biases and double standards. Today, we still say we want the truth, but we also don’t want our own shortcomings to be exposed. It’s easy to think that people coming from a different place are somehow cut from a worse cloth. We need to pay attention to the alarm bells that are going off and not just unplug them because they annoy us.