Not So Important Where The Messiah Came From Series

Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent 2025

As St. Paul and others spread the joyous and demanding Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the Roman world, and even beyond, they read from the Scriptures. But the story of Jesus was available orally. The Gospels in writing were not set down on papyrus right after Pentecost. For what we now call the New Testament, our forefathers in the first century had Paul’s letters, which they copied and distributed to other churches as they could. There were also letters from John and Peter and Jude and James, and one anonymous letter to the Hebrews. The Scriptures were those Jesus read from, which we call the Old Testament, for the Jewish Christians in the Holy Land. Outside that area, where the common language was Greek, they read from and studied the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, whose origin had its own fascinating story you should all read some day.

Our OT reading today is from the Septuagint, and as it was read you get a sense why our ancestors valued this Book of Wisdom. Words like “He professes to have knowledge of God and calls himself a child of the Lord” sound like the protests of the Pharisees against Our Lord Jesus. He wasn’t boasting when He told them God is His Father. St. Matthew was careful to record these words as the taunts Jesus heard on the cross: “Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected." And we can hear Jesus proclaiming His murderers should be forgiven, because they knew not what they were doing as we hear: “Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hope for the wages of holiness, nor discern the prize for blameless souls.”

In two weeks we will be celebrating the three days that shook the world, and the Friday we call “Good” because it led to our redemption. The psalmist could have been standing with John and Mary at the cross when he sang: “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but the LORD delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” We mourn our sins over the next two weeks and thank God for turning our defeat into ultimate victory.

Our narrative of the progress of Jesus to His death continues today, but we read today not about His final journey to Jerusalem, but an earlier one at the Feast of Booths, or Tabernacles. Already there was a plot to get rid of Jesus, and it was known among the population. They were confused, because the authorities did not arrest Him—not yet at least. Some of the people reasoned that the people in charge must have suspected Jesus was indeed the Messiah. The only reason they did not see Christ’s signs and believe in Him as Messiah was that they knew He came from Galilee, and in their oral tradition, nobody was supposed to know the Messiah’s origins. In Jesus’s defense, He told His listeners that the most important question is not where did Messiah come from, but from Whom did He come. That, of course, has one answer. Christ came and still comes from the Father, God the Almighty, and He comes to save us from our sins and liberate us from our moral weakness. Blessed be He forever, Amen.