Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Lectionary: 248

Jesus moved about within Galilee;
he did not wish to travel in Judea,
because the Jews were trying to kill him....
But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near.
But when his brothers had gone up to the feast,
he himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret.

The repetition of the word but in today's gospel signals the reader and congregation that today's passage from the Gospel of John has been heavily edited. In fact, between them, twenty-one verses have been removed; and the broken narrative shows. 

This seventh chapter describes the conflict that the Lord and his words generated in Galilee and Judea. His own family ("brothers") did not believe in him, while the crowds of the Holy City wondered what to make of him. He spoke with wisdom and authority and yet seemed uneducated. Unlike someone who rises through the ranks from obscurity to notoriety, the Nazarene with a Galilean accent suddenly appeared in the temple and the crowds flocked to him despite their confusion. 

But if he spoke with such assurance, had the religious and civil authorities approved him and his teaching? They must have, because there he was. But the authorities were as confused as the crowd! 

"Could the authorities have realized that he is the Christ? But we know where he is from!"

Actually, they don't know where he is from. And their ignorance is culpable because he has come from God, and God's people know him. And that is the key to the Fourth Gospel. 

Jesus is still a crisis; he demands a decisive, life-altering response. Half-measures, provisos, and "yes buts..." serve neither the Lord nor his indecisive listeners. Jesus knows where he was from; there can be no doubt in our minds or hearts. 

Lent presents us with the same immediate demand and leads us toward the same decision. We step forward with conviction or fall into the misery of uncertainty, desolation, sin, and death. Each disciple takes up the cross or flees from Calvary. Spectators lose interest, and skeptics disappear. They don't matter to the Lord or themselves. That is their choice. 

Most of all, man is in need of a sense of the unconditional. Otherwise, he will perish. "Without relating himself to the unconditional," Kierkegaard says, "man cannot in the deepest sense be said to live... that is it may be said he continues to live, but spiritlessly."  

Kierkegaard... felt that man's gravest danger lurked in the loss of his sense of the unconditional, the absolute. We conduct our lives according to conditionals, compromises, and concessions, all relatives.

In faith an individual commits everything to the Absoluteness of God. But the Absolute is cruel; it demands all.

         Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1995, page 112)