Living for whose glory?

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 7: 1-2, 10, 25-30) sees Jesus apparently deciding not to go to Jerusalem for the feast of Tabernacles, but then to go in private. While He is there, He has a discussion with the people who wonder whether He is the Christ. Jesus responds to their concerns, saying that while they know Him, they do not know why He has come. In the end, even though the authorities wanted to arrest him, no one touched him because His hour had not yet come. If you struggle to connect with today's gospel, do not be surprised. The editors of the lectionary were rather too heavy-handed and took out some of its key ingredients. But let us set that aside to focus rather on what happens in this seventh chapter of the gospel of Saint John.

In the edited version of the gospel, we cannot see why Jesus apparently decided not to go to Jerusalem. But in the full version, His reasoning is very clear: My time is not yet here […] the world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil. I think it was Fulton Sheen who first identified the religion of “nice”, the diplomatic fiction that because Jesus tells us not to judge, we are, therefore, under an obligation to think that everybody has good intentions. But the obligation not to judge concerns our view of a person's internal guilt or innocence before Almighty God. It is not an obligation to be naïve, or even worse, to behave as if every person we meet is not in fact a battlefield in one way or another. Even people who are apparently mature in all sorts of ways may have any number of private struggles that we are not the witness of. In a similar way, no matter the good elements in other denominations or religions, diminishment or denial of the truth is necessarily diminishment or denial of Christ who is the truth. It’s time to get over the ball and chain of naïve niceness, and to stop missing the wood for the trees.

But now we see the force of Jesus’ logic. There will be a time for Him to face the hatred of His persecutors, those who hate Him, but He intends to calculate carefully when that encounter comes. Discretion is the better part of valour. Fools rush in. We should not underestimate the disease of ill-will that broods more or less in the heart of every human being under the yoke of original sin. Why is Jesus hated? Simply because He threatens to stand between the world and what it desires. If we are in the divine will, then we are at peace, even if every war comes to our doorstep. If we are not in the divine will, if our wills are not reconciled with the ways of the Eternal Father, then we are not a peace, even if we cannot move for our friendships and peace treaties with the rest of the world. Fake peace and fake love are the sordid disguises of human self-deceit.

One question people ask about this chapter in the gospel of Saint John is whether Jesus lied. For He says that He will not go up to the festival because His time has not yet come, but then He goes. Jesus clearly intends to go, so why does He tell them He will not go? Some say this is an instance of Jesus making what moralists call a mental reservation; it is not a lie but a way of disguising what He is about to do from those who have no right to know. It is perfectly legitimate to do this with those who are persecuting us. As for changing His mind, why should Jesus avoid appearing to have changed His mind when He did not avoid the other burdens and limitations of the human condition?

There is one final mystery in the last section of the gospel which concerns why Jesus insists that He has not come of His own accord: He who sent me is true, and Him you do not know. I know Him and I come from Him and He sent me. It is not obvious on the face of it why this was such an important thing to say. Clearly, it caused consternation, for the gospel concludes by observing that the authorities were seeking to arrest Jesus. But what is the deeper reason for Jesus insisting that He has been sent, that He has a mission?

For that, we must go back to an earlier section of the chapter when Jesus brings before the crowd’s attention the point of conflict that lies in the heart of every human being. There, he says:

Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but He who seeks the glory of the one who sent Him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about Him.

The deeper reality of our lives is that everything is a gift, most especially our very being. We do not speak on our own. We do not live on our own or for ourselves. We have been sent from God and we are called to return to God. This is the meaning of our lives. A life that is fulfilled is one that is shaped by God's call and by God's sufficiency; true fulfilment cannot come from the things of this world, no matter how wonderful they are. The only true self-fulfilment is to find in God our purpose and our being and to enjoy all His gifts only insofar as they are a reflection of His love: whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory. If this is so, is it not the case that everyone who acts on their own, i.e. who acts to seek purely their own purposes and ends is committed only to themselves? The seductive language of self-realisation is actually a hymn to our own self frustration and loss.

In a way, realising this is the very purpose of the season of Lent: to hear again the words of the Lord spoken by the prophet Joel:

Yet even now, says the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.

With all our heart… not leaving shards of it buried in the things of this world. In hearing this call, we make ourselves men and women of truth, like Jesus in this gospel scene. We conform ourselves to His mission and in some ways share in it because, as we know, we are called to live so that Jesus might live in us.

O Mary, teach us always to say yes to the Lord in every moment of our lives. O Mary, teach us always to speak and act not for our own personal glory but for the glory of the one who calls us.