His Hour

  

“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. During supper, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments, and taking a towel, He girded Himself.” (John 13:1 – 4).

 

In Cana of Galilee, at the inception of His public ministry, we read, “When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to Him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what does that have to do with us? My hour has not yet come.’” (John 2:3 – 4).

 

In John 7:30 and 8:20 we see two times when the religious leaders wanted to seize Jesus because of His teaching, and yet they couldn’t do so “because His hour had not yet come.”

 

But then, during Holy Week, Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be gloried…Now My soul has become troubled, and what shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour?’ But for this purpose I came to this hour.” (John 12:23 – 27 passim).

 

Then in John 17:1, Jesus says to the Father, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You.”

 

The image of “hour” is woven throughout the Gospel of John (see also 4:21 – 23; 5:25 – 28; 16:32). There is “hour” directly related to Jesus, and “hour” related to mankind and His People. In John 2:3 – 4 the image is introduced, but we are told that the hour hasn’t come, but then in 12:23 – 27 what we have anticipated has arrived, His hour has come, it has finally come; it may not have come in the fashion that was anticipated, but it has indeed come with eternal irrevocability.

 

In much the same way in John 2:19 – 22, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” anticipates John chapters 12 – 21, the Crucifixion and Resurrection. In other words, John 2:19 – 22 gives us an image of what John 2:4, the coming of the “hour,” will look like. We may not realize this the first time we read John Chapter 2, but this is how John is structuring his Gospel of Jesus.

 

There is a sense in which John is once again pulling us back into Genesis Chapter One with his emphasis on “hour”. While John’s first words, “In the beginning was the Word,” connect us with, “In the beginning God created,” (Genesis 1:1), in an obvious way, what we may forget is Genesis 1:14:

 

“Then God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years…’”

 

In other words, life is not to be lived randomly, but rather in accordance with God’s timing and seasons – both in terms of chronology and in terms of “the right time,” the appointed hour. For example, in Galatians 4:4 we read, “But when the fulness of time came, God sent forth His Son…”

 

However else we might read Genesis Chapter One, it is meant to primarily reveal Jesus Christ and His work within us and His self-disclosure to mankind. Thus Paul writes, “For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (Gal. 4:6).

 

And then we have, “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” (Rom. 1:20).

 

So when we read Genesis 1:14, about “signs and for seasons and for days and years” we are called not to actually look at the physical solar system and beyond, but rather to look through the solar system and beyond, to look through the visible heavens into the invisible.

 

Our fixation on the visible blinds us to Jesus Christ. Is it an accident that in the same passage where Paul refers to a deeper meaning in Genesis One that he also writes, “…we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18).

 

Let me put this another way with another example, many professing Christians are intrigued by Noah and the Flood and the Ark. But, fixation on the physical Ark and Flood and person of Noah without “seeing” that Christ is our Ark, that there is a flood of evil and judgment around us, that Christ is our Noah, that we are called to fashion our congregations into not cruise ships but rather ships that withstand storms and which are places of refuge for others – if we cannot “see” through the visible into the invisible, if we cannot see ourselves has having a Great Commission to be His Ark of salvation for others – then simply believing in a physical account of the Flood actually leaves us high and dry. Fixating on the visible without seeing through the visible into the invisible leaves us in the company of those who search the Scriptures thinking that in them they have eternal life…and yet miss Jesus Christ (John 5:39).

 

O dear friends, Jesus reveals Himself through the entire Old Testament, not just through a text here and there (Luke 24:27, 44 – 45; 1 Cor. 10:11; Col. 2:16 – 17; and also consider the way Jesus and the Apostles saw and taught the OT! Are we not to follow in their footsteps?) “The substance is of Christ”! (Col. 2:17).

 

We will return to “knowing that His hour had come” in our next reflection in this series.