Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Easter, May 11, 2022

John 12:44-50

Jesus cried out and said, “Whoever believes in me believes not only in me but also in the one who sent me, and whoever sees me sees the one who sent me. I came into the world as light, so that everyone who believes in me might not remain in darkness. And if anyone hears my words and does not observe them, I do not condemn him, for I did not come to condemn the world but to save the world. Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words has something to judge him: the word that I spoke, it will condemn him on the last day, because I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. So what I say, I say as the Father told me.”

I want to begin today’s reflection by showing how your prayers for the conversion of the world indeed have a great effect.  Most of the time we pray for this cause and see no results, but without prayer, there are no results.  Tuesday morning, after I finished Mass, I got a call to hear a confession at the hospital.  Priests do this kind of work all the time.  There was nothing in the call that sounded out of the ordinary.  When I got to the room, I found a man being treated for a cancer that had been caught early in its spread.  But the man explained that he had left the Church forty years ago.  He was angry at God for the death in combat of a very close friend.  He had spent the intervening years as a determined materialist, convinced that science had all the answers.  He spoke against religion.  But  at three in the morning on Tuesday he had a profound experience of God’s love that so moved him that he knew he needed to call a priest as soon as he could.  I think that conversions are one of the proofs of the existence of God.  Please keep praying!  We have many more souls to save!

“Jesus cried out and said, ‘Whoever believes in me believes not only in me but also in the one who sent me.’ ”  The Lord is speaking here during the one of the first days of Holy Week.  People who come to Jerusalem for the Passover flock to him because they have heard of his raising Lazarus from the dead.  The Lord addresses them, telling them that when he is “lifted up” from the earth, he, the Son of Man, will draw all things to himself.  The crowd understood “lifted up” as a common euphemism for crucifixion and so they asked: “We have heard out of the Law that Christ abides for ever. And do you say: The Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this ‘Son of Man’?” (John 12, 34).  The people believed from texts such as Isaiah 9, 6-7 that when the Messiah came, he would remain forever: “For a Child is born to us, and a Son is given to us, and the government is upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace. His rule shall be great, and there shall be no end of peace: he shall sit upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom; to establish it and strengthen it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth and for ever.”  However, the Lord would fulfill this prophecy in heaven for the just at the end of the world.  The words of today’s Gospel reading follow from this point.

“Whoever believes in me believes not only in me but also in the one who sent me, and whoever sees me sees the one who sent me.”  The Lord continues to insist that the Son of Man is not the Messiah concerning which the Pharisees taught with their faulty and ultimately unauthorized interpretation of the Scriptures.  He is the Son of God, sent by the Father into the world.  The Son is in such unity with the Father that he who sees him, the Son, sees the Father.  Furthermore, “I came into the world as light, so that everyone who believes in me might not remain in darkness.”  The theme of light and darkness appears in such contemporary texts as in certain Dead Sea Scrolls.  The “light” in this sense meant justice, peace, and the reign of God.  The Lord adapts the term to his purpose.  He comes not as a child of the light or it’s messenger, but as the Light itself.  He himself is the Kingdom of God.  The “darkness” was ignorance and evil: “But the children of the kingdom [of the world] shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8, 12).  We have lived in the darkness of ignorance and evil, but that we might not remain there, the Light has come down from heaven.

“And if anyone hears my words and does not observe them, I do not condemn him, for I did not come to condemn the world but to save the world.”  The Lord comes this first time to redeem the world, but when he comes again it will be to judge the living and the dead, st which judgment the wicked will be condemned.  We note here that the Lord specifies: “If anyone hears my words and does not observe them”.  A person suffers condemnation because he rejects the words of the Lord.  The one who does not know them and so cannot reject them will be judged differently: “That servant, who knew the will of his lord and prepared not himself and did not according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not and did things worthy of stripes shall be beaten with few stripes” (Luke 12, 47-48).

“Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words has something to judge him: the word that I spoke, it will condemn him on the last day.”  The Lord teaches the Jews that his coming does not signal the end of the world, but that the end shall take place at some different time.  The judgment will take place then: it is not immediate.

“The Father who sent me commanded me what to say and speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. So what I say, I say as the Father told me.”  The Lord insists again that to obey his commandments is to obey the Father.  The Lord teaches the commandments rightly and not according to the way of the Pharisees or the other sects.