The Hour Has Come

 

“Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You” (John 17:1).

 

The Upper Room begins with, “Jesus, knowing that His hour had come” (13:1). The first section of the Upper Room begins with “hour,” and the concluding section also begins with “hour.” The heavenly clockworks have a movement that resides in the depths of God, we may sense it at times, we may respond to it (and let us pray that we do), but only God knows how the hours will unfold and knows their timing.

 

“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Matt. 24:36). (I consider “nor the Son” to be an Incarnational mystery and temporal in nature, in line with the kenosis of Philippians 2:6ff. However we understand this, Jesus and the Father are One and Jesus is fully God.)

 

The Scriptures give us patterns and trajectories, they are not written to satisfy our curiosity, they are written to reveal Jesus Christ and bring us into koinonia with the Trinity and with one another.

 

John introduces us to the theme of “hour” at the wedding in Cana, “Woman, what does that have to do with us? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). This “hour” appears to be the hour in which Jesus is to begin working His signs of attestation and revelation which we see unfolding in John. Therefore John writes, “This beginning of His signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him” (2:11).

 

In 7:30 we read, “So they were seeking to seize Him; and no man laid his hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.” This “hour” appears to refer to His betrayal, trial, and crucifixion. I write “appears” because there may be other facets and I want to leave room for them.

 

Similarly, John writes in 8:20, “No one seized Him, because His hour had not yet come.”

 

However, the hands of Divine time change when we arrive in Jerusalem for Holy Week, and in John 12 Jesus says:

 

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. If anyone serves Me he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.

 

“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. Father, glorify Your name.”

 

“Then a voice came out of heaven: ‘I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.’” (John 12:23 – 28).

 

John 12:20 – 50 is a prelude, of course, to the Upper Room. As we ponder the above section (12:23 - 28) of this extended passage, we see a penumbra of the Upper Room.

 

Jesus speaks of His hour having come, He speaks of His death and resurrection, He says that we must lose our lives and follow Him, He tells us that we will be where He is and that if we serve Him that the Father will honor us. We see all of these elements in depth in the Upper Room. Following Him encompasses self-denial, obedience, loving as He loves, laying down our lives for others, suffering persecution, living in Divine oneness with our brothers and sisters; being where Jesus is (as I hope we are seeing and will continue to see) means being with the Father in Divine koinonia, both now and forever.  

 

We have seen these things in chapters 13 – 16, and we will continue to see them in the Holy of Holies of Chapter 17.

 

Our purpose in coming into the world is to glorify God. We fulfill this purpose only in Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ we experience the Cross, suffering, rejection, and resurrection. As with Jesus, we must, in Him, learn what it is to fall into the ground and die, so that others may live (2 Cor. 4:12). Jesus extends the Father’s calling to Him to all of us. “As the Father sent me, I also send you” (John 20:21).

 

We may ponder the crucifixion hours upon hours, but we must move beyond pondering and into living it out in Christ – lip service must be translated into life, the Cross must be lived. We must live in the Cross and the Cross of Christ must live in us. As we have seen in the Upper Room, Jesus says that if we follow Him we will suffer – but we will also live, O my how we will live!

 

Jesus knew when the hour had come. He knew that He had come into the world for that hour. There was an hour for Jesus to begin showing His glory and teaching and doing His signs of attestation, then there was an hour for Him to fall into the earth and die, so that you and I might live in newness of life in Him.

 

In John’s Gospel, we have an hour that begins at 2:1, and another hour that begins at 12:23.

 

As we see in 12:28 and 17:1, the purpose of the “hour” is to glorify the Father and the Son. This, my friends, is the purpose of our lives, this is why we have come into the world, to glorify God and to enter into that glory with one another – the glory that Jesus bestows on us (John 17:22).

 

O that we would see who Christ is in us, and who we are in Christ!

 

What do the hours of God look like in your life?

 

Do you sense Divine clockwork in your life? Are you living in an awareness of Psalm 139?

 

Do we know the hours of our lives?

 

There is another dimension to “hour” in the Gospel of John, and we will return to that in the next reflection the Lord willing. Can you see what that dimension is? Can you locate it in John’s Gospel?