Now why did John not say in John 9:4 that it was a high day like he did in John 19:31? Actually, there is a very obvious reason, that obvious reason being that anybody who was unfamiliar with Judaism, (and there are pretty strong thoughts that John, in a way, wrote the book of John for Gentiles), would not have had a great deal of knowledge of the Hebrew calendar, and would have to be told that that particular day was a high day. They might know about the weekly Sabbath, but they might not know at all about the Holy Day Sabbath. So in order to be clear, God inspired John in John 19:31 to make sure that everybody understood that that day, which was the day after Passover, was a high Holy Day. We have no problem at all with that because we know about the Holy Days.
Now what day of the week did that Passover fall on? It fell on a Wednesday. So the day in John 19:31 was a high Holy Day. It was the 15th of Nisan. It was Thursday. Thursday was not the kind of day you would expect to be a Sabbath unless you really knew about the holy days, and you could say, "Yeah, that's right. It was a high holy day." If a Jew would read that, he would understand it, but if a Greek would read it, he would not understand, and so John put parentheses around that phrase in John 19:31—"(that Sabbath was a high day)"—to draw attention to the fact that we are talking about something that they probably would not know. In John 9, he did not have to do that because that day was a weekly Sabbath. It already was a holy day. That is just very simple to understand.
What we are heading for is this. This verse proves three things once we have calendar calculations that are available to us for these particular times of the year. (1) This will show that the seventh and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles cannot be the eighth day. (2) It is going to prove that Christ was crucified in AD 31, and (3), it also proves that the postponement rules were in effect at the time of Christ. All three of these together prove that we are using the correct calendar today in our time.
He died then. Verse 31 is helpful.
Passover, the 14th, was the Preparation Day for what? For the 15th day, which of course is the first day of Unleavened Bread, and the first day of Unleavened Bread is a holy day. It is a Sabbath.
It is interesting that John then inserts, parenthetically, "for that Sabbath was a high day." Now why do you think he put that in there? He put it in there so that anybody reading through here would know that the next day, though it was a Sabbath, was not a weekly Sabbath. Everybody got that?
Passover, the 14th, was the Preparation Day for what? For the 15th day, which of course is the first day of Unleavened Bread, and the first day of Unleavened Bread is a holy day. It is a Sabbath.
It is interesting that John then inserts, parenthetically, "for that Sabbath was a high day." Now why do you think he put that in there? He put it in there so that anybody reading through here would know that the next day, though it was a Sabbath, was not a weekly Sabbath. Everybody got that?
