"32 The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest him. 33 Jesus then said, “I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me.34 You will seek me and you will not find me. Where I am you cannot come.”35 The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? 36 What does he mean by saying, ‘You will seek me and you will not find me’, and, ‘Where I am you cannot come’?”"
John 7:32-36
In the context of the continuing conflict of opinion concerning Jesus, in which the temple guard were sent to arrest Him, we have our Lord's statement about His coming death and resurrection (33, 34) which was completely misunderstood by the Jews. In this connection it is interesting to note that we have in 35 yet another instance of the same kind of literal misunderstanding of Jesus's words that John has repeatedly recorded for us. When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about being born again, Nicodemus literalised the thought (3:4); when the woman of Samaria heard of the living water, and said 'Give me this water’, she was still thinking in terms of the well of Jacob; when the Jews said, 'Evermore give us this bread' (6:34) they were thinking in material terms. And here, they were also thinking thus, and assumed that when He talked of going away He was using geographical terms, and meant that He was perhaps going off as a missionary to the dispersion and preach to the Gentiles. Their puzzlement must have been great; and it serves to emphasise still more dramatically John's central contention that in the coming of Christ there came a conflict between light and darkness which only the illumining Spirit of God could ever solve. Hence, as we see in tomorrow's reading, the reference to that Spirit (39).