April 4, 2025 – Friday of the 4th Week of Lent

Sg 2, 1a.12-22; Jn 7,1-2.10.14.25-30

 

H O M I L Y

Jesus neither refuses death nor desires it. He knows that according to His Father's will, there is a time for everything. There will be a time for him to be arrested, judged, maltreated and finally put to death. That time had not come yet, and therefore nobody can lay his hand on him, even when he dares to go to the Temple on the Feast of the Tents and preach.

By this time he knows that he is going to die; but he also knows that it is in Jerusalem that the Messiah must be put to death. Therefore he does not travel to Jerusalem for the great Feast with his brothers, most probably because the Jews who want to kill him have prepared ambushes along the road. He should not be killed away from Jerusalem. He goes to Jerusalem, but he arrives there in secret and it is when he is in the Temple area that he begins to teach.

His teaching is different than what it uses to be. Normally he speaks mostly of his Father, and very rarely about Himself. Here, knowing that he is going to die, he clearly professes that he is the Messiah, the beloved of the Father, sent by Him. Never has he made his mission so clear. He has been sent. He knows the Father who has sent him. And the dimension of "knowing" becomes more important than ever. Those who know him, that is, those who accept who he really is, know the Father. Those who don't accept him and his mission, and who therefore don't know him, don't know the Father either.

Just as in the reading we had from the Book of Wisdom, those who don't know him are blind, "for their wickedness blinded them". "They know not the hidden counsels of God." -- Let us ask for the grace to know the hidden counsels of God, so that we may really know Jesus and, by knowing Him, know the Father who has sent him to bring us Redemption.