Friday, March 27

Scripture for the Day:     After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jewish leaders were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish festival of Booths was near. But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret.    Now some of the people of Jerusalem were saying, ‘Is not this the man whom they are trying to kill? And here he is, speaking openly, but they say nothing to him! Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Messiah? Yet we know where this man is from; but when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.’ Then Jesus cried out as he was teaching in the temple, ‘You know me, and you know where I am from.  I have not come on my own. But the one who sent me is true, and you do not know him. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.’ Then they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come. – John 7:1-2,10, 25-30

Reflection – Debra Slade 

I sometimes recall the song by Joan Osborne which says: “What if God was one of us?” It is most often in Lent that I reflect on the man Jesus, and what it was for him to be both fully human and fully divine.  Jesus, the Christ, was one of us for a short period of time, and in doing so, experienced all of the emotions, the feelings that we have as well. In the Gospel reading, the people doubt that the Jesus they meet in the temple is the Messiah because they know where he is from. Jesus acknowledges that they do know that part of him which is like them, the familiar, knowable, human part.  But he also tells them that there is another part – the divine part which is not known by them.   

What makes the stories of Jesus so compelling is the tension between these two parts of him – the knowable and the unknowable. In the Gospel of John, the human fate – death, and the God purpose – resurrection and  salvation, are spoken of by Jesus before they occur, as the given.  He was not arrested in the temple “because his hour had not yet come.”  We start off Lent with Ash Wednesday remembering “we are dust and to dust we shall return.”   Our human fate, like Jesus’ is certain. Not dying is not an option.  But with that knowledge, we can, and should, practice seeing every day, every hour, every minute as a gift; our life as a gift from God.