John 10:35 Meaning If He Called Them Gods

Those men carried the title only because God's word reached them. A judge's ruling was handed down as God's own verdict, so the men who administered that word were named for the One whose word they carried. Nothing in their conduct put the name there, and the psalm behind the title also condemns them.

Broken translates a word for untying. Not one line of Scripture can be untied, including its least quoted corners. A forgotten phrase about crooked judges carries as much force as a famous one, because the same God spoke both.

God himself gave that title to Israel's judges. This answers a charge of blasphemy, which means claiming for oneself what belongs to God alone: a name God already used of men who only heard his word cannot be an outrage when used by the one the Father sent.

Scripture holds together to its last word, so the Church studies her hardest lines instead of trimming them. And the tradition hears in that title a truth about grace: God shares his own life with people, making them adopted sons and daughters, sharers by gift in what he is by nature.

Human beings were made to share God's own life, and Scripture is willing to use the highest word for what happens to a person whom God's word reaches. The sharing is a gift and never a promotion: fire makes an iron bar glow and burn like fire, and the bar is still iron.

Salvation is therefore larger than being forgiven and sent away clean. God became man so that man could be filled with God, and the saints are the proof that ordinary flesh can hold that without being destroyed. Since the written word holds together and cannot be pulled apart, this high calling cannot be quietly downgraded into something more manageable.