A reading from the holy Gospel according to John
So Jesus cried out in the temple area as he was teaching and said, “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”
In today’s Gospel according to John, Jesus can’t keep his divine identity secret. Although Jesus seeks to travel covertly to the Jewish feast of Tabernacles because there were some in Jerusalem who were trying to kill him, once there he hears what some of the people are saying about him. “Is he not the one they are trying to kill? And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him.” They go on to say about Jesus: “Could the authorities have realized that he is the Christ? But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.” Jesus then cries out in the temple area as he is teaching: “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.” They try to arrest Jesus, but John tells us “no one laid a hand upon him, because his hour had not yet come.”
God, help me learn how you move and act through my life each day. As Saint Paul says, in you “we live and move and have our being.” The people of Jerusalem knew your Son yet did not know you or where he came from. Their expectation was that the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from. God, you work in ways that confound human understanding. What the people of Jerusalem assumed—that no one would know where the Messiah is from—blinded them to the coming of Christ. You walked and moved among your people, yet many did not see it. In my own preoccupation with the way things usually work, I completely miss the works you accomplish every day. In each day made up of a multitude of experiences, you alone in the mystery of your being are true.
“Be still and know that I am God.” Give me the grace, Lord, to know you through your works today and always.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.