Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent

“He Has Sent Me”

Today, the Church’s liturgy moves into chapter 7 of John’s Gospel and we shall follow John’s gospel from today until Palm Sunday as it moves rapidly and forcefully to the Lord’s passion. Coming as it does after the great sixth chapter of John, John’s Eucharistic account, as it were, when many of Jesus’ disciples abandoned him, chapter 7 begins the Lord’s great arguments with the Pharisees. Several times they will attempt to arrest him and even stone him in the chapters to follow but, as his “hour has not yet come,” Jesus will elude them until Judas’ betrayal at the Last Supper when “the Son of Man is glorified!”.

The Gospel passage today from John 7:1-30 is not completely read during liturgy, but the Jewish people are shown to be greatly divided over whether Jesus is truly the Messiah. At the end of chapter 7, which we will hear tomorrow, even the temple guards have trouble denying Jesus’ powerful words and cannot arrest him.

This great battle with the Pharisees and their stubbornness of unbelief is on full display here. He will plead with them to stop judging by appearances and judge rightly. He will tell them plainly that he is from God who sent him and who he knows well, though they do not. Finally, on the last and greatest day of the festival (that he has at first secretly gone to the temple to attend), he cries out to the whole crowd (though this verse is not included in our readings this week), “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

Unlike those who heard him that day in the temple, we of faith know these words of his to be true. Yet have we taken them fully to heart? Have we come to him to drink of these living waters, so that we, “will never thirst again. Indeed, the water I will give will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” as he told the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:14.
What do we thirst for? What are we longing for? Do we truly believe that Jesus will give us these promised waters of life if we ask for and seek them? As Lent draws near to Holy Week and the Lord’s passion and all that Jesus did for us so that we could be set free, “Free to worship him without fear, holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our lives” (Lk 1:74-75), let us pray that our eyes be fully opened to see the Light of the World. It was hidden in plain sight before the Pharisees and the people of Jerusalem and they could not find it. As the great feast of Christ’s resurrection nears, let us pray that we will drink of these living waters to the fullest so that we may fully share in life in its abundance that Jesus came to offer us so graciously in himself and that the Father has been so pleased to simply give us.