Friday, Fourth Week of Lent
In today’s gospel reading, people say of Jesus, ‘We all know where he comes from’. They knew that he came from Nazareth. Yet, in a deeper sense, they did not know where Jesus came from. As Jesus goes on to say in that reading, ‘There is one who sent me and I really come from him, and you do not know him’. They did not know that Jesus really came from God. Jesus was not only the son of the carpenter from Nazareth. He was also the Son of God from heaven. Because he had been with God before he was born and had come from God, he knew God in a way no one else knew God. Jesus’ knowledge of God was born of love; it was the fruit of a deep communion of love between himself and God his Father. So deep was this communion that Jesus will go on to say in this gospel that those who see him see God the Father. The people who confidently claimed to know where Jesus was from did not really know him at all. They had failed to appreciate his full and true identity. There was so much more to Jesus than they knew. There is always so much know to the Lord than we presently know. The life of faith is always a journey of discovery when it comes to Jesus, now risen Lord. The Lord is the good Shepherd who knows each one of us because he loves each one of us. He invites us to know him as he knows us, to love him as he loves us. This life long journey of coming to know the Lord is one we can only travel with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us to the complete truth, to Jesus who is the truth. It is the Holy Spirit who helps us to know the Lord with our hearts and our minds, until we enter that eternal day when we will finally know the Lord as fully as he knows us.