Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus came to shed light upon God, man, and God’s plan of salvation (John 1:4–9). As John says, “This is the verdict: light has come into the world . . . whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God” (John 3:19, 21). Jesus himself said to the crowds in Jerusalem, “I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness” (John 12:46; also John 8:12; John 9:5, etc.).

1. Expose Misunderstanding and Disobedience

A central part of who Jesus is and therefore what we are to believe is found in Jesus’s teaching about what he came to do. He came to do a number of things.

Jesus clearly came to reveal misunderstanding and disobedience among the Jewish people and their leaders. One interesting way to see this is to examine the three Sabbaths mentioned in the book of John. Jesus regularly attended synagogue on the Sabbath, and sometimes he took his turn as an adult male by reading from the scroll. But beyond that, he exposed misunderstanding and disobedience by acting contrary to what his religious peers required for Sabbath observance.
In John 5:18, the Jews charged Jesus with making himself equal with God. But did you also notice the other charge in the line above that: “breaking the Sabbath”? What prompted this charge? Jesus had seen a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years lying on his mat and said to him, “‘Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.’ At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked” (John 5:8–9a). The story continues: “The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat’” (John 5:9b-10). Really, it was Jesus they were after: “So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jews persecuted him” (John 5:16). Indeed, the Jews were good at remembering the smaller laws and reminding others of those laws, but they had forgotten why the law had been given in the first place. Jesus called further attention to their misuse of the law when he said,

I did one miracle, and you are all astonished. Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs), you circumcise a child on the Sabbath. Now if a child can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing the whole man on the Sabbath? (John 7:21–23)

The second Sabbath is mentioned in chapter 9, where a man born blind receives his sight from Jesus:

Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.”
Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” (John 9:14–16)

Again, the Pharisees missed the point of the Sabbath. I think Jesus deliberately picked the Sabbath as an opportunity to expose their hypocrisy and jolt them out of their self-righteousness. Jesus did not come to help anyone keep up the pretence of holiness and love; he came to bring the real thing.

John’s third mention of the Sabbath especially demonstrates what a sham the people’s understanding of the day had become. In chapter 19 he writes,

Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. (John 19:31)

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