Friday, Fifth Week of Lent

In the gospel reading, Jesus’ opponents wanted to stone Jesus to death because, in their words addressed to him, ‘you are only a man and you claim to be God’. As Christians we recognize the truth of that statement. Jesus was a man; he was fully human in every sense. Yet, he was also God in that God was being uniquely revealed in and through the humanity of Jesus. No other human being revealed God as fully as Jesus did. When we listen to Jesus, when we look upon his ‘many good works’, in the language of the gospel reading, we are looking upon God. Jesus brings God to us through his ministry of word and deed, through his death and his resurrection. He not only brings God to us; he also brings us to God. He certainly promises to bring us to God at the end of our earthly lives. In the setting of the last supper, he declares that he will come to us at the end of our lives and take us to the many roomed house of God his Father in heaven, so that where he, Jesus, is, we may be also. However, he also brings us to God throughout our earthly lives. He is constantly drawing us to himself in love and in drawing us to himself, he is drawing us to God his Father and ours, because, as he says in the gospel reading ‘the Father is in me and I am in the Father’. His work of drawing us to God, of giving us a share in his own intimate relationship with God, is his greatest good work. What he asks of us is that we allow ourselves to be drawn, that we be open to the drawing power of his love, so that he can bring us to God during our earthly lives and beyond our earthly life.