Friday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 14, 2024

John 7, 1-2; 10; 25-30

Jesus moved about within Galilee; he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him. But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near.

But when his brothers had gone up to the feast, he himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret.

Some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem said, “Is he not the one they are trying to kill? And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him. Could the authorities have realized that he is the Christ? But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.” So Jesus cried out in the temple area as he was teaching and said, “You know me and also know where I am from.  Yet I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.” So they tried to arrest him, but no one laid a hand upon him, because his hour had not yet come.

In reproducing the text for today’s Gospel Reading I have skipped lines to indicate the elisions in the full text.  

“But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.”  While at least the chief priests and scribes could tell King Herod that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem (cf. Matthew 2, 5), this knowledge does not seem to have reached very many of the Jews.  It would seem that ordinary folks thought that he would just appear, fully drown, perhaps in literal fulfillment of Malachi 3, 1: “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.”  But their idea puts into words an experience that many have in their spiritual life, when some word or deed of the Lord Jesus suddenly makes sense to us, or we gain some profound understanding of it, maybe even when we had not been thinking of it.  It seems to come from nowhere and take us by surprise.

Jesus knows the confusion of the Jews on this occasion and he addressed it: “You know me and also know where I am from.”  He urges them to challenge their preconceptions here: in fact, they do not know him or where he is from.  How often we think we know something or someone and it turns out that we do not.  We even do this with the Lord Jesus, though we know that he is God, and no one can know God: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11, 23).  We should admit that we will always be learning about our Lord.  “Yet I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true.”  Jesus says two things here: that he did not come on his own but was sent, and that the one who sent him — and whom he thus represents — is “true”, which can also be translated as “real” or “genuine”, meaning God the Father, the Creator and sustainer of all things, the foundation of all being.  We can also translate this as “the True One”.  Jesus calls himself “the truth” (cf. John 14, 6), which the True One speaks: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1, 1).  Jesus says that the Jews “do not know” the True One for Jesus was sent to reveal him as his Father and himself as the one whom his Father sent.  To deny the Son is to deny the Fatherhood of God.  That is, God is the natural Father only of his only-begotten Son.  He becomes our Father through adoption, and this adoption only is accomplished through becoming members of the Son through Baptism.  If Jesus is not the Son of God, no one is a child of God.  We are all merely his creatures.

“I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”  Jesus is “from” God in that he is begotten by him.  He knows the Father as no one else could ever know him.  And as the one who knows him in this way, the Father sends his Son into the world to reveal himself as the Father of the Son, the Son by whom we are saved.

Jesus most passionately wants us to know who he is, to the extent that we can know him.  He wants us to know not only the truth about him but he wants us to know him intimately, in prayer.  And it is in this knowing that we will find everlasting happiness.