The Gospel of John is for Israel

John A. T. Robinson’s commentary on “the children of God who are scattered abroad” in John 11:52:

As in the case of ‘the Greeks’, the reference is almost universally taken to be to the Gentiles. But this is quite arbitrary. There is nothing in the Gospel to suggest it, and every reason, from the wealth of Old Testament parallels to identify them with those of God’s people, the Jews, at present in dispersion. In the prophetic words of her own high priest, the purpose of Jesus’ death, as Israel’s Messiah, is to bring about the final ingathering of which the prophets so constantly spoke. And it is when Diaspora Judaism, in the persons of the Greeks at Passover, comes seeking him, that Jesus knows ‘the hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified’ (12.23). Hitherto he has been confined to ‘his own’ to whom he came; but once the seed falls into the ground and dies it will bear much fruit (12.24).

The supreme purpose of the laying down of Jesus’ life is that all Israel should be one flock under its one shepherd (10.15f.). And once more this pastoral imagery in chapter 10 is clearly modelled upon passages in Ezekiel (especially 34 and 37.21–8) and Jeremiah (23.1–8; 31.1–10) whose whole theme is the ingathering of the scattered people of Israel. The ‘other sheep, that are not of this fold’, whom also Jesus must bring in (10.16) are not the Gentiles—again there is nothing to suggest this—but the Jews of the Dispersion. And the purpose, that ‘there shall be one flock, one shepherd’, is reflected again in the repeated prayer of chapter 17 ‘that they may all be one’, the chapter above all which interprets the purpose of Jesus’ going to the Father. Here once more we have the same distinction as that between ‘this fold’ and the ‘other sheep’, the ‘nation’ and ‘the children of God who are scattered abroad’. The prayer is not ‘for these only’, that is, for those already faithful to Jesus in Palestine, but ‘for those also who shall believe in me through their word’, that is (in terms of the same distinction again from chapter 20), for those who believe without having seen (20.29), for whom clearly the Gospel is being written. The prayer ‘that they may all be one’ is, on Jesus’ lips, not a prayer for broken Christendom but for scattered and disrupted Judaism, viewed as the true Israel of God.

Cited from John A. T. Robinson, “The Destination and Purpose of St John’s Gospel,” in Twelve New Testament Studies (London: SCM Press, 1962), 120-21.