But after his brothers had gone to the festival, he also went up, not publicly but in secret.
Some of the people of Jerusalem said, “Is this not the man they want to kill? And here he
is speaking freely, and they don’t say a word to him? Can it be, that the rulers know that this
is really the Christ? Yet we know where this man comes from; but when the Christ appears,
no one will know where he comes from.” So Jesus announced in a loud voice in the temple
court where he was teaching, “You say that you know me and know where I come from!
I have not come of myself; I was sent by the One who is true, and you don’t know him.
I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.” They would have arrested him, but no
one laid hands on him because his time had not yet come.
Reflect
“To know is to believe.” In John’s Gospel, the word to “know” is always juxtaposed with
the idea of “believing.” To know is to believe while to be ignorant is to be unbelieving.
Today’s Gospel tells of Jesus who knows the Father because he came from the Father
and sent by the Father to save the world. Some of the people in Jerusalem could not
believe Jesus because they remained ignorant of Jesus. Jesus tried to reach out to
them by making them aware of God’s presence in the world, serving as light so that the
Father might be revealed. But some people preferred darkness to light because they
neither wanted their ignorance of God to be exposed nor did they want to reach out to
Jesus, the light, who reveals the Father. The desire of every disciple of Jesus is to grow
in the knowledge of him. But how shall we grow in our knowledge of Jesus? We always
begin by reading the Bible while being reminded of the words of St. Jerome: “Ignorance
of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
© Copyright Bible Diary 2024