Daily Devotion for Tuesday 10th June 2025

St John 8: 21 – 30

Again Jesus said to them, ‘I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.’  Then the Jews said, ‘Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means by saying, “Where I am going, you cannot come”?’  He said to them, ‘You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.  I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he.’  They said to him, ‘Who are you?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Why do I speak to you at all?  I have much to say about you and much to condemn; but the one who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.’  They did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father.  So Jesus said, ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he,  and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me.  And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him.’  As he was saying these things, many believed in him.

Reflection

There is much that is unfamiliar to us in John’s Gospel – this passage being one I suspect – as we don’t read it in the three year cycle of Sunday readings.  Instead pieces of the Gospel are interspersed at differing points in the year so we get some edited highlights.  It’s clear that this passage wasn’t one that found favour with the Lectionary’s editors as it seems so unfamiliar.  Jesus is being difficult speaking in riddles and being rather rude “Who are you?…Why do I speak to you at all?”  He’d not have won a post in the diplomatic corps!  

Yet maybe diplomacy isn’t always the right approach.  Maybe the Church needs to do more of what the Americans call “speaking truth to power”.  In the, fictional, American political drama The West Wing, President Bartlett, on a good day, wanted people to tell him the truth, to stand up to him, and tell him when he was wrong.  On a bad day, of course, he found this difficult.  One of the many things I admired about Pope Francis was his willingness to speak the truth even when that made him unpopular – he was particularly good at telling the Church things that made it uncomfortable – famously chiding that Jesus is knocking on the Church’s door demanding to be let out and engage in mission.  He wrote to the American bishops telling them, in no uncertain terms, to care for the migrant in the face of Mr Trump’s vicious assaults upon them.  Mr Trump, like so many in our contemporary society, didn’t want to listen.  We can imagine Pope Francis saying “Why do I speak to you at all?”

Yet we are called, like Jesus, to tell the truth – first to ourselves and then to the world.  Pray that both we and they will listen.

Prayer

Difficult God,
tell us the truth about ourselves.
Truth-telling God,
help us to tell the truth to our world.
Discipling God,
help us to truthfully follow where You lead.
Amen.