Today is April 11, Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent.
At today’s Mass, we hear: “We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy. You, a man, are making yourself God” (Jn 10:33).
The Jewish leaders are fine with the good things that Jesus does, but Jesus is crossing the line with who he claims to be. He says that he is God, a threat to their own ideas of who God should be. The Jewish leaders’ reaction to Jesus’s claim to divinity highlights the radicality of the central truth we believe as Christians: Jesus Christ is God.
No other religion claims such a truth for a man. To say that the Creator enters his creation, that the eternal being enters time, that the supreme being takes on finite human flesh, that God becomes man is insanity — if you’re thinking as humans do. But God does not think as men do: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Is 8:5). God chose to become one of us, show his love for us on the cross and rise triumphant from the tomb.
Jesus’ divinity
If we are wrong about this, our faith is in vain. The Resurrection is the proof that Jesus is who he claims to be. As Paul writes, “If Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, your faith” (I Cor 15:14). If we are not saved, we are still dead in our sins. The human condition, weakened by our primeval rebellion with God, cannot save itself. It demands a savior. Thanks be to God that Jesus is God, proven to us by his resurrection on Easter morning.
Jesus claims to be divine, for so he is. He will prove this to us again next Sunday. We pray in these final days of Lent for an increase of faith in his divinity. Our hope for salvation is founded in the divinity of Jesus Christ, for if he is not God, we are still dead in sin and are the most pitiable of people of all.
Let us pray,
Pardon the offenses of your peoples, we pray, O Lord, and in your goodness set us free from the bonds of the sins we have committed in our weakness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
