March 15th Lenten Reflection

John 7:1–2,10,25–30

After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews 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.

“You Know Me!”

A reflection by The Rev. Brian K. Gross

Jesus has gone to the festival of Booths which is the last festival of the year and falls at the time after the harvest. It is a time when the people would build booths or structures of four walls and a roof of palm branches. They would spend seven days in these temporary shelters as a reminder that when their ancestors were in the wilderness God provided them shelter. It is a celebration of the shelter and of the harvest and food of plenty for all that is also provided by God. It is interesting that in this place and at this time of celebrating what God has provided for them some of the people react to Jesus in disbelief that he was sent by God. They celebrate God’s loving gifts of food and shelter but cannot conceive that a person that looks like them could also be sent from God. They perceive that since they know where he came from he couldn’t possibly be the Messiah because a Messiah would appear from some unknown place. The thinking that a Messiah would not appear to be ordinary like one of them reminds me of the song lyrics by Joan Osborne which say “What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us, Just a stranger on the bus. Jesus cries out to them that they do know who he is and where he comes from. He comes from God. They celebrate the things that God had provided them in the past of which they did not see and here is the Son of God standing before their very eyes who they cannot see.

I wonder in this past week or this past month, how many times God has been right in front of our very eyes and yet we did not see. We, as Christians, believe in the God incarnate. Not only in the past through Jesus but also in the present through all creation around us. In the people around us. The more we put God in a mystical realm or only in the miraculous the more we miss God’s presence in the ordinary. Let us not look for God on the tops of mountains but in the stranger on the bus and know that the extraordinary presence of God is in the ordinary of our world.