Saturday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 16, 2024

John 7, 40-53

Some in the crowd who heard these words of Jesus said, “This is truly the Prophet.” Others said, “This is the Christ.” But others said, “The Christ will not come from Galilee, will he? Does not Scripture say that the Christ will be of David’s family and come from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?” So a division occurred in the crowd because of him. Some of them even wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him. So the guards went to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, “Why did you not bring him?” The guards answered, “Never before has anyone spoken like this man.” So the Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, which does not know the Law, is accursed.” Nicodemus, one of their members who had come to him earlier, said to them, “Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him and finds out what he is doing?” They answered and said to him, “You are not from Galilee also, are you? Look and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.”  Then each went to his own house.

St. John reports on the confusion that raged around the question of the Lord’s identity.  St. Matthew does this through recounting how Jesus himself asked his Apostles the question, “Whom do men say that the Son of man is?” (Matthew 16, 13), with the Apostles answering, “Some John the Baptist, and other some Elias, and others Jeremias, or one of the prophets.”  The debate in Jerusalem, as John tells it, centers around the question, first, of whether Jesus was the Prophet foretold by Moses, or “the Christ”, the Anointed.  But how could he be the Christ since the Christ was supposed to be born in Bethlehem, at least according to the interpretation of the Prophets by the Pharisees.  The problem is compounded for them by the fact that Jesus does not identify himself as “the Christ”, “the Messiah”.  Instead, he speaks of himself as “the Son”, or as “the Son of Man”.  

What the people of Jerusalem are really asking is whether Jesus is the one whom the Pharisees taught would overthrow the Roman rule.  This is what the Christ would do.  The Prophet would point out the Christ when he came.  The fact that they overlooked John the Baptist pointing to Jesus and calling him The Lamb of God reveals what we today would call a secular mindset.  They thought only in terms of their political plight as vassals of Rome.  Their forebears had treated the Prophets in the same way.  Jeremiah had warned them to reject their idols and return to the worship of God or they would be punished; but all the people heard was Jeremiah telling them to surrender to the Babylonians.

“The Christ will not come from Galilee, will he?”  They do not consider what the Lord’s miracles said about him anymore than what John the Baptist had said.  They do not even think to ask Jesus himself, who does not volunteer the information lest it play into the hands of those looking for a military savior.

Even today people try to fit Jesus into their categories.  Some try to make of him a prophet of social justice or of any fashionable cause.  Others see him as a political rebel.  And there are those who attempt to co-opt him into their preferred religion or philosophical system.  Foreign to these ways of thinking is the idea of loving him.  But this is what he most wants us to do, to love him with all our heart so that we might have, here, a joy which no one can take away (cf. John 16, 22) that will prepare us for the love and the joy of heaven.  It is by knowing truly that we love him more and more.