Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Easter, May 13, 2025

John 10, 22-30

The feast of the Dedication was taking place in Jerusalem. It was winter. And Jesus walked about in the temple area on the Portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered them, “I told you and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me. But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

St. John is gratifyingly exact in providing details of the setting of our Lord’s preaching and miracles.  The precise knowledge of Jerusalem and its Temple argue for his Gospel being written for the Jewish Christian community in the years before the fall of the city to the Romans in 70 A.D.  For instance,  in the Gospel Reading for today’s Mass, he mentions the Portico of Solomon.  There would have been no need for mentioning the portico if John was writing long after it had been destroyed, especially if his audience had never seen it.  But John writes of it in such a way that the curious reader could have gone to the site and seen it for himself.  

“The feast of the Dedication.”  That is, Hanukkah, which usually is celebrated in December.  This feast celebrates the reconsecration of the Temple after it was recaptured by Jewish forces from the Greeks in 164 B.C.  “Jesus walked about in the temple area on the Portico of Solomon.”  The Portico was a covered walkway, supported by stone columns, on the east side of the Temple wall.  According to 1 Kings 6, 3, the original portico built under Solomon was 45 feet long and 15 feet wide.  “The Jews gathered around him.”  A crowd already surrounded Jesus and presently members of the Sanhedrin joined them and began to shout: “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”  They do this either in order to draw him out so that they might find something to accuse him of, or because they genuinely wanted to believe — or, at least, to know — who he thought himself to be.  The Lord Jesus had carefully avoided the term Christ / Messiah (“the Anointed One”) because of its political and military implications, though he was indeed the Anointed of the Lord.  Instead, he called himself “the Son of Man” or “the Son of God”.  The authorities, though, were waiting for the exact word “Messiah”.

“I told you and you do not believe.”  That is, I told you who I am and you do not believe me.  “The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me.”  The Lord pointed to his miracles on several occasions as proof that he had come from God, and that he was in union with the Father.  As Nicodemus had admitted earlier, “Rabbi, we know that you are come a teacher from God; for no man can do these signs which you do, unless God be with him” (John 3, 2).  “But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep.”  Because of their open hostility from the beginning, their repeated coming to him in bad faith, and their plotting to kill him, they had hardened themselves against any grace God might have sent them and so they did not believe in him and they did not belong to him.

“My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”  These are the ones who  have received the gift of faith, which they show through their following of him.  “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.”  These Greek verb is in the present tense, which expresses continuity: I am giving them eternal life.  He gives them eternal life through the revelation of his teachings and through grace.  All who follow Christ are in a continual state of receiving eternal life from him until they depart from those world, at which time it is given to them definitively.  They are receiving it in this world through the grace of the Sacraments and through graces received in prayer and from studying the Gospels.

“No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.”  No one can take them from my hand because the Almighty Father has given them to me, and I am in union with the Father.  The Lord clarifies this declaration by saying, “The Father and I are one.”  This union with the Father is shown to us through an image from the Book of Revelation: 

God the Father is described as sitting upon a throne, with “the Lamb, which is in the midst of the throne” (Revelation 7, 17).  The Father and the Son are portrayed as sitting on the same throne, equal in power and majesty.  This was a stupendous claim for anyone to make, but the works testified to the divine approbation of the Son’s teachings.