Daily Mass Gospel Reflection - God Sent

[MurphsLaw]

FOURTH WEEK OF LENT

JOHN 7:1-2, 10, 25-30

Friends, the Gospel for today centers around a theme that we can never speak of enough: the divinity of Jesus.
There has been a disturbing tendency in recent years—you can see it clearly in Eckhart Tolle’s bestselling book The Power of Now—
to turn Jesus into an inspiring spiritual teacher, like the Buddha or the Sufi mystics.

But if that’s all he is, the heck with him. The Gospels are never content with such a reductive description.
Though they present Jesus quite clearly as a teacher, they know that he is infinitely more than that.
They affirm that something else is at stake in him and in our relation to him.

In our Gospel today, Jesus plainly declares his relationship with his Father: “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.”

[MurphsLaw]

+++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.

Some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem said,
“Is he not the one they are trying to kill?
And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him.
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.”
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.”
So they tried to arrest him,
but no one laid a hand upon him,
because his hour had not yet come.+++