"Jesus Loves Me, This I Know"

“Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end."

Jesus knew that His hour had come. This should not come as a startling revelation to anyone who has read the first four books of the New Testament. Jesus always knew what time it was.

THE HOUR HAD COME

It should just be what we call a ‘given’, that the wisdom that fills the infallible, inerrant, immutable Word of God would be demonstrated unfailingly in God’s perfect Son – the Word, become flesh.

So when we remember that the son of King David wrote in Ecclesiates that there is a time for everything and a time appointed for every event under heaven, it should be no stretch for us that God incarnate would be perfectly in tune with that divine timetable and that He would be Divinely aware from day to day, hour to hour, whether it was time for one thing and whether it was not yet time for another.

And this understanding is demonstrated in the Gospel record of the life of Jesus.

Although there was not a mention of time itself there, in the 2nd chapter of Luke’s gospel which is the only boyhood event of Jesus’ life recorded for us, we find that after the journey to Jerusalem for the Passover Jesus stays behind and his parents only discover after a day’s journey toward home that He is not with them.

When they find Him after much frantic and anxiety-filled searching, Jesus asks them why they sought Him everywhere, and wonders that they did not know He had to be about His Father’s business.

So in this early glimpse of Jesus, and even as a 12 year old boy, we have confirmed to us that He was aware of the time. He had come to the world to do His Father’s will, and the time to do the Father’s will was always. Therefore He was able to say as an adult in John 8:29, “I always do the things that are pleasing to Him”.

But He also had the awareness of a more specific calandar; a schedule, if you will, of the Divinely appointed task He was to accomplish during His sojourn here.

At the wedding in Cana (Jn 2:4) when His mother told Him that the family had run out of wine for the celebration, the response Jesus gave her was “Woman, what do I have to do with you? My hour has not yet come”.

Don’t you just wonder if Mary walked away thinking, “Gee… all I said was they ran out of wine…”

Anyway, what Jesus meant by the reference to His hour not having yet come, was that there was a time set for Him to go public with His ministry and the fulfillment of the things the prophets had said about Him, and that hour had not come.

When did it come? After His baptism by John in the Jordan. After His subsequent 40 days and nights in the wilderness and His return out of the wilderness. That’s when this ‘hour’ began that He spoke to His mother about at Cana.

Yet, out of compassion, He in His sovereignty as God superceded the entire process of fermentation and aging and all that goes into the making of a good wine, and provided the party with the best wine of all.

“I will have compassion upon whom I will, and mercy upon whom I will”.

In His discourse with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (Jn 4:21,23) Jesus demonstrated His knowledge of the future in telling her that the hour was coming when true worshipers would worship in spirit and in truth as opposed to any physical locations set aside for that purpose. In other words, He was teaching that true worship was not physical and geographical, but spiritual and from the heart.

Someone somwhere has pointed out that no true worship ever happens on earth. What he meant by that is that true worship is in spirit and it is between the spirit of man and the Spirit of Christ. Some of the things we do in the flesh are demonstrations of worship – we are even commanded to do them – such as the taking of communion and the act of going down into the waters of baptism. But even those things are empty and hypocritical if they do not issue from worship that is in spirit and in truth.

Let me just toss in here for your later contemplations, that most of the stuff we do, thinking we’re worshiping, is self-serving emotional nonsense. We should pause often to reevaluate the things we have allowed to be absorbed and implemented in the culture of the organization we call church.