Today’s Scripture Readings

Gospel Reading

NRSV

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.

Seeing is important in Scripture, but so too is knowing. For the Bible, the prime difference between God and the human being is that God knows everything and the human being doesn’t. The human being’s prime task, therefore, is to grow in knowledge without ever thinking we will attain the fullness of knowledge which belongs to God alone. And we can only grow in knowledge if we listen to God who wants to share his knowledge with us.

The murderers say of the righteous man: “He professes to have knowledge of God” (Wisdom 2:13); and that knowledge is at the heart of true righteousness. But the Book of Wisdom says of the murderers: “They did not know the secret purposes of God” (Wisdom 2:12, 22). That kind of ignorance is where their troubles start. They think they know, but they know nothing.

Those who try to arrest Jesus think they know him, but they know nothing of who he really is. He is the one who knows, and he knows them through and through, just as he knows us far better than we know ourselves. Jesus also appears as the one who’s as much in control as he is in the know. His opponents think they’re in control, but they’re not: Jesus is. He will decide when the time has come for his arrest and execution.