Jesus Is God And The Crowd Doesn't Like That Truth Series

Friday of the Fifth Week in Lent 2025

Today’s Gospel reading from St. John continues the narrative we heard yesterday from an earlier chapter. You may recall that incident. Jesus declared that Abraham rejoiced to see the day of Jesus. Almost certainly that means the birth of Isaac and perhaps even isaac’s maturity and becoming a father. Those realities were fulfillment of the promise God made to Abraham to be father of a huge nation, and ultimately of a Messiah who would redeem them all, Jesus. To be clear, when the Jews objected that Jesus wasn’t even fifty, and could not have known the patriarch, Jesus replied, “Before Abraham existed, I AM!” He really was making Himself equal to God, wasn’t He? So in that earlier incident, the Jews intended to stone Him.

Now they are trying to stone Him to death again. Jesus has identified Himself as the Good Shepherd. The Father has given sheep/followers to Him, and to keep them safe, the Father is the guarantor that nobody will be able to take these disciples from Jesus, His Son. Jesus has just declared that the Father and He are one, one in intention and one in mind and heart. The Jerusalem crowd that Jesus has been preaching to heard His words as blasphemy, and that offense carried the death penalty.

But Jesus was not going to let them convict Him of sin. He quotes the eighty-second psalm: "Is it not written in your law, `I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came (and scripture cannot be broken), do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, `You are blaspheming,' because I said, `I am the Son of God'?” There’s some irony in this psalm, which is an appeal to God for judgement when human judges are committing injustice and showing partiality to wicked plaintiffs.

The psalmist demands that these judges “rescue the weak and needy” and deliver them “from the hand of the wicked.” He says of these unjust judges, “they have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness.” After the almost sarcastic statement “you are gods. . .” we see divine judgement issued: “nevertheless you shall die like men and fall like any prince (leader).” Clearly, Jesus, innocent as He was and is, must be found to be far more Godlike than those corrupt idiots.

We can imagine that in a similar situation, the author of our responsorial psalm today moaned, “In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.”

In fact, those words could have been uttered by the prophet Jeremiah almost six hundred years before Jesus. He ministered to the Israelites at a time when they were being assailed by Babylonians and led by corrupt elitists. The false prophets and Temple crowd who surrounded Jeremiah, and even his friends, were constantly denouncing him to the king. He was even thrown into a muddy cistern for a time. But he knew the presence of the Lord, his God, so he predicted the overthrow of his persecutors. In the last words of today’s reading, he commits his cause to his God and even praises God for delivering him from death.

There’s a lesson in these Scriptures for everyone. Everyone gets into tough situations during life, and I think even atheists mutter prayers for help when there seems to be no way out of the difficulties. But when we do this, do we ever think like Jeremiah to give praise and thanks to God in advance for our deliverance? God will act; God will answer prayers. Those divine responses may not be the ones we would like, but they will be directed toward good ends.

Today we commemorate Saint Stanislaus, who is the patron saint of Poland, where he was bishop. Like Jeremiah (and Jesus, of course) he stood firm for the poor and for moral principles in the face of opposition. That opposition came from the Polish king, Boleslaw, whose lust and cruelty Stanislaus boldly opposed in public, by excommunication. For his courageous witness, Stanislaus was martyred by the hand of the king. But the whole incident confirmed Poland in the Christian faith, and his example was appealed to again and again, especially in the times of Nazi and Soviet oppression. May God give all of us that strength of will and purpose for His eternal glory. Amen.