Thursday, April 2, 2020, in the Fifth Week of Lent

I hope you are all safe and healthy!  We priests of Blessed Sacrament Parish are praying for you and remembering you in our Holy Masses!  

John 8:51-59

Jesus said to the Jews:

“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” So the Jews said to him, “Now we are sure that you are possessed. Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, ‘Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? Or the prophets, who died? Who do you make yourself out to be?” Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing; but it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’ You do not know him, but I know him. And if I should say that I do not know him, I would be like you a liar. But I do know him and I keep his word. Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad.” So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.” So they picked up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid and went out of the temple area.

These words of Jesus began a few lines earlier, with v. 31 of this chapter: “Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed him” (at the beginning of yesterday’s Gospel reading).  Jesus seems deliberately provocative towards these believers, putting himself on the same level as the Father.  Even though a number of these believers, probably most of them, had witnessed Jesus healing first the lame man, then the blind man and finally raising Lazarus from the dead, still they would have seen this as a very reckless claim.  Jesus was demanding from them an act of faith that only Peter had dared make among his followers.  As in many of his parables, he seems to be saying impossible things, to make statements that cannot be reconciled with the teaching of the Mosaic law or even with common sense.  How could a Samaritan possibly be a neighbor to a Jew?  Why would a father welcome back and honor a son who had brought shame and financial loss upon him?  How could a man claim to be the equal of the Father?  And at the end of his words, Jesus again uses the Hebrew name that God had given himself as he spoke to Moses from the burning bush, and he applies it to himself.  Perhaps these hearers had not been present earlier when Jesus had done this in the reading this past Tuesday.  John makes it plain that this occasion is distinct from that one.  But at any rate, these Jews hear him and understand what he is doing, and they are outraged to the point of wanting to kill Jesus.  Whatever they had believed about him, they no longer do.

We might ask why Jesus would do this.  Why not encourage rather than antagonize them?  One answer is that it matters to Jesus what his believers believe about him.  Belief in him as a prophet or a as a wise man is not sufficient.  Nor is it enough to believe in him as a generous man with the gift of healing.  He insists that we must believe in him as divine, both because it is just for us to do so, and because this belief brings salvation for us.  He would rather have people reject him altogether than for them to believe him to be merely one teacher among others, or one healer among many.

John also shows the first readers of his Gospel why “his own people did not receive him” (John 1, 11).  The Gentiles who were learning about Jesus would have wanted to know why they should believe in Jesus when his own countrymen and even the members of his home town did not.  John shows that it was because of their lack of faith, their unwillingness to accept divine revelation, as Peter had and Thomas would.  John’s intention here ties in very movingly with the words he quotes which Jesus speaks to Thomas, who has just expressed his belief in his divinity: “Because you have seen me, Thomas, you have believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed” (John 20, 29).

And this is also us, if we believe that Jesus is God and fervently act as his subjects in carrying out his simple commandments of love.

Today is the feast day of St. Francis of Paola, an Italian hermit renowned for his miracles, who died in France in 1507.  Let us pray the traditional prayer to him:

O God, the greatness of the humble, Who raised blessed Francis, Your Confessor, to the glory of Your Saints, grant, we beseech You, that, by his merits and our imitation of his life, we may happily attain the rewards promised to the humble. Through Jesus Christ, your  Son our Lord, Who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.